Zoo Time

by Howard Jacobson

  Not offensive enough? Me!

  Same old same old? Wait until I bought Poppy roses, told her I couldn’t get her out of my mind, swore to her that I’d adored her from the moment I first saw her.

  Wait until I slid her dress off – unless, unless that was to drop back into the conventional. Yes. Wait until I slid her dress off then slid it back on again telling her I respected her too much.

  She was sixty-six and out of bounds. I’d show them fucking transgression!

  And I had a better idea than Afghanistan as backdrop, or the Afterlife as postscript. Australia. Where things had happened that shouldn’t. Tell it the way it was, Guy. Telling it the way it was was dirty.

  10

  Are There Monkeys in Monkey Mia?

  It had been in Australia that I’d first tried it on with Poppy. The same Adelaide Writers Festival trip on which I’d unbuttoned Philippa in a vineyard. Did I mention that Philippa was a New Zealander? A lecturer – hence her interest in me as a living practitioner – in Unglish Luht. It had taken me a while to know what she was talking about. Even when she told me she wanted to suck my pruck I wasn’t entirely sure. It was Philippa, anyway, who’d heated me up for Poppy. That’s often the way of it with sex, if you’re a man: it’s like dominoes – with the first act of venery every objection to the others collapses. Once you’ve been bad with A there’s nothing to stop you being bad all the way down to Z. And a wife’s mother is Z plus plus.

  Poppy had accepted Vanessa’s invitation to spend time with us in Australia. She hadn’t fancied Adelaide. She couldn’t picture it. It sounded flat, she said. She liked the sound of Western Australia better and wanted us to join her there. So we flew to Perth and spent a week together in a hotel overlooking the Swan River while Poppy recovered from her jet lag. The heat suited them. In their sun hats and striped blazers, they looked like sisters, a pair of bold English adventuresses who’d somehow wandered off from Henley, but who, now they were here, wherever here was, feared nothing but any man dividing them. They linked arms, showed their faces to the sun in an identical manner – the same squint, the same submission to sensation – shopped for similar garments and gasped for tea simultaneously, at precisely 4.13 p.m., as though joined by a single throat. There is still something colonial about Perth; following behind them, carrying their parcels and enjoying the synchronised sway of their hips, I felt like their ‘boy’.

  I loved watching them from this respectful distance. I felt affectionately towards them as a pair. Mothers and daughters appeal to men of my sentimentalising erotic bent. Once, observing them staring across the Swan River to South Perth, I recalled Norman Mailer – another of the great sperm-chuckers of yesteryear – likening his wife and Jackie Kennedy talking at Hyannis Port, the site of the summer White House, to ‘Two attractive witches by the water’s edge’.

  ‘Witches’ caught my two. Or at least it caught me, a man ensorcelled.

  Then, suddenly, Vanessa announced that we were hiring a camper van and driving to Broome. Poppy’s wish, and Poppy’s wishes were to be indulged.

  She’d read about Broome – about the pearl fishing, the great swathe of iron-flat beach on which you could ride a camel, the mangrove swamps with osprey flying over, the giant goannas lolloping down the main street with their tongues flicking, the unrelenting heat. We could have flown straight to Broome and been on that camel the same afternoon, but Vanessa too had wishes which, post-Philippa, I was in no position to challenge. Vanessa wanted to see the outback. There’d been rain and the desert was alive with wild flowers. When Vanessa said ‘wild flower’, Poppy’s face became one; just as, when Poppy said ‘wildlife’, Vanessa’s nostrils dilated. They fired what was feral in each other, without due regard to the effect it had on me.

  I had no desire to do this journey. I had come to Australia to wave my literary distinction around, to be seen, to be applauded, to be appreciated, fulsomely and unambiguously, by the likes of readers such as Philippa; I hadn’t come to vanish into the obscurity of the bush, no matter how alive with wild flowers. The driving worried me too. I had never thrown a car around the lanes of Cheshire the way my brother Jeffrey did. I drove in a stately, somewhat elderly manner, always afraid that the girth of my car exceeded the width of the road. How I’d handle a camper van big enough to afford privacy to three people, I wasn’t at all sure, but Vanessa, always more the man of the family than I was, said she’d look after the getting us there. All I had to do was sit quietly, not write or talk about writing – not so much as take a note: work was verboten now I’d had my festival – and navigate. The navigation would be easy: facing the Indian Ocean you threw a right out of Perth and after three days you reached Broome.

  Poppy sat in the back seat, reading. A miracle to me that anyone could read in a moving vehicle without going down with a migraine – Vanessa had to stop the van every time I needed to turn a page of the map – but even more of a miracle was the fact that Poppy was reading at all. She had always pretended that she didn’t read, especially fiction, but suddenly she was eating the stuff. And what she ate – let alone the speed at which she ate it – struck me as in reverse ratio to the needs and interests of a woman her age.

  ‘Aren’t you a bit old for books with lipstick-pink covers?’ I asked her, while Vanessa was filling up with diesel.

  ‘Old!’

  It was good I had annoyed her. In love – in unnatural love, anyway – annoyance is the prelude to indiscretion.

  ‘Old as in mature. Old compared to the characters in the books you’re reading.’

  ‘How do you know the ages of the characters in the books I’m reading?’

  ‘I can tell by the jackets.’

  ‘Never judge a book by its cover, you should know that.’

  ‘But that’s exactly how you judge. I’ve watched the way you choose them.’ (Good to tell her I’d been watching her.) ‘You only choose the ones with lipstick-pink covers.’

  She rapped me across the knuckles with her reading matter, as though it were a fan. ‘Not everyone is an Einstein,’ she said.

  I looked her boldly in the eye. ‘And not everyone is an Eisenhower,’ I said.

  The strange thing was that Vanessa was able to talk to her mother knowledgeably about these books though I knew to a certainty that Vanessa hadn’t read them. So where did her information come from? Was it in the ether? Did that explain why some books – almost all of them for women – suddenly swept the world? A thousand miles from the nearest bookshop, without radio or newspapers, out of contact with gossip or opinion, Vanessa and Poppy were able to discuss the latest blockbuster. No wonder telepathic heroines were popular. Between women a telepathy of crass fictional taste existed. I saw it with my own eyes.

  I didn’t raise the subject with them. Whenever Vanessa was at the wheel of the camper I did as she had told me and clammed up. The quiet was welcome to me, too. I was able to sit and think about the writers I’d met in Adelaide, literary heavyweights some of them, in the taciturn vein of international novelists, not wanting to waste their words on mere conversation. The biggest hitter of them all, a huge Dutchman who wrote elegantly slender novellas for which he’d won a Nobel Prize and was said to be put out that he hadn’t won a second, had been flown to the festival first class and housed at great expense only to announce, an hour before his gig, that he didn’t talk in public. So he sat on the stage of Adelaide Town Hall with his belly hanging between his knees, and his audience sat in their seats with their hands clasped on their laps, and so the hour would have passed, with each staring at the other in silence, had someone not thought of showing slides of the bridges of Amsterdam. When it was over they gave him a standing ovation.

  Rumour had it that no visiting writer to Adelaide had ever sold more books. The less a novelist said about his work, apparently, the more the public wanted to read him.

  ‘A lesson it would do you no harm to learn,’ Vanessa said at the time.

  About halfway to Broome, Poppy saw a sign to Monkey Mi
a and wanted to make the detour. ‘It’s a bit more than a detour,’ I warned her. ‘If I’m reading the map right it’s over four hundred kilometres once we leave the highway.’

  ‘You won’t be reading the map right,’ Vanessa said. ‘Turn it the other way round. Four hundred kilometres off the highway is Indonesia.’

  ‘Trust me,’ I said.

  Poppy recalled reading that they had dolphins at Monkey Mia. You could swim with them and stroke their bellies. She thought that some of them stroked yours.

  ‘What with – their flippers?’ I wondered.

  Vanessa thought I was being sarcastic to her mother. She couldn’t have been more wrong. I was off on some anthropomorphic fantasy. I am a dolphin.

  ‘Then we’re going,’ she said.

  ‘It’ll take all day to get there,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Ah,’ Poppy said. ‘Then let’s not.’

  ‘No, let’s,’ Vanessa insisted. ‘It’s your holiday.’

  So she swung left off the highway and drove and drove.

  ‘Beautiful country, don’t you think?’ I remarked after a couple of hours of silence. ‘Pristine. You’d think you were the first people ever to come here if it wasn’t for the road. Even the dirt looks clean and virginal. I feel like Adam.’

  ‘Adam didn’t have a camper van,’ Vanessa said. ‘And you agreed you wouldn’t do any writing on this trip. Especially not natural description, which I thought we’d agreed you should leave to others.’

  Poppy was sympathetic to me. Perhaps to show there were no hard feelings after our falling-out over book covers. ‘I think that’s cruel of you, Vanessa,’ she said. ‘I know what Guy means. The dirt does look virginal.’

  Something about the way she pronounced me. Something about her breath on the back of my neck, warm with the letters of my name. Something about virginal. Did she feel like Eve?

  ‘Do you think there are monkeys at Monkey Mia?’ she asked about an hour after that.

  ‘Doubt it,’ I said. ‘Just dolphins.’

  ‘Don’t say monkey to him,’ Vanessa said. ‘Don’t start him off.’

  ‘Why, is he an expert on monkeys?’

  ‘He’s an expert on how his career went wrong.’

  ‘I didn’t think your career had gone wrong,’ Poppy said to me.

  ‘Precisely,’ Vanessa said.

  An hour after that, Poppy unscrewed the cap of her brandy flask. It was six o’clock and wherever she was in the world at six o’clock she had to have a drink. Wilmslow, Chipping Norton, Primrose Hill, Monkey Mia – six o’clock was drinkies time.

  ‘Anyone?’

  ‘No thank you, Mother,’ Vanessa said, ‘I’m driving, in case you didn’t notice.’ Her mother’s drinking infuriated her. Six o’clock the first drink. Six thirty drunk. It was the only weakness which the one had that the other didn’t. The six o’clock tipple followed by the six thirty falling over.

  My own mother was the same. Though Poppy was considerably younger, our mothers inhabited the same social sphere and got drunk at exactly the same hour and speed. Allowing for the international time difference, she too would have been falling about pickled in Wilmslow right now. As my father would have been finding ways of keeping her upright. I had never liked my father much, but his attentiveness to my mother had always impressed me. On one occasion, in my presence, he actually tied her with his belt to a lamp post in the middle of Chester while he went to get the car.

  I couldn’t have been more than seven or eight years old at the time. ‘Come kiss your mother,’ my mother said, and when I went to kiss her she hissed furiously in my ear, ‘Now free me!’

  Did such memories contribute to the passion I had formed for Poppy?

  Who can say? But I did accept a brandy, which she handed me with not altogether steady, painted fingers in the same silver cup – it was the cap of the flask – from which she’d been drinking. Thus, in a manner of speaking, did our lips touch.

  ‘Are there monkeys at Monkey Mia?’ she asked. And went on asking it, with increasing frequency, the more brandy she drank, until she fell asleep within sight of our destination.

  It was the first thing she said when she opened her eyes and found herself in the campsite. ‘Is this Monkey Mia? Are there monkeys here?’

  11

  Comedian

  Was he subtly joking, the giant Dutchman who refused to address his enraptured audience of readers in Adelaide Town Hall? Was his hour of silence in fact an act of the most vertiginous volubility, a Dadaist gesture calculated to put to shame the legions of more obviously garrulous authors like me who trooped their wares – running a gag here, throwing in a comic anecdote there – from one festival to another?

  I thought about him a great deal on the road to Broome, as a way, partly, of taking my mind off Poppy whose presence in the hot intimacy of a camper van, in which the three of us curled up to sleep at night separated only by a flimsy curtain, was a severe trial to me. But he troubled me on his own account, in the time I had to think about him, while Poppy and Vanessa crooned in unison over every flower the newly watered desert threw up, because he called into question the whole enterprise of the travelling showman novelist. No, he’d said – except that he hadn’t said anything – no, he would not play the comedian.

  Dadaist gesture or not, his silence changed the game. He was a writer. He wrote. And if those who queued to look at him called themselves readers, then let them read. The rest was nothing.

  Whereas our message – those who talked as though a prohibition against speaking had just been lifted – what was that? Behold, beyond the page, what entertainers we were.

  But there was no beyond the page. Beyond the page was no business of our readers. And if we made beyond the page our business, no wonder that the page was no longer being turned.

  A plain logic demanded that we ask ourselves this question: if we wanted to play the comedian why didn’t we just call ourselves comedians and dispense with the vestigial bookishness? We were finished, anyway. Comedians had taken over. The best of the stand-ups worked from scripts that might as well have been short satiric novels; they saw as novelists saw, they enjoyed the rhythm of the language, they deployed exaggeration and bathos as we did, they excoriated, they surprised, they caught laughter on the wing, in the moment it threatened to tumble into terror. They were predictable and complacent and self-righteous, too, but then who wasn’t? What is more, they had a slavish following. Where had all the readers gone? Wasn’t it obvious? They were watching stand-up comedy.

  Had Vanessa not warned me against discussing my career while she was driving I’d have told her I was getting out. No, not out of the van, Vee, out of literature. And where would I go? The stage, the stage . . .

  Take my mother-in-law . . .

  In the event, I just sat and navigated. The miles went by; every now and then Vanessa stopped the van so that the two women could get out and pluck a desert pea, or fix their binoculars on a wedge-tailed eagle who felt about the prospect of sinking his teeth into their browning flesh pretty much as I felt, and once we had to pause to catch our breath after nearly running into a troop of tarty emus with hair cropped like Vanessa and Poppy. They teetered across the road and looked back at us with contemptuous expressions, not in anger that we’d almost killed them but as though they were out on a hen night and we, the stags, had just thrown them a pathetic chat-up line. Fuck you, they said in Emu. And faced with such natural wonders I never did figure out a way to change my career.

  Now, a year or so later, with my name mud in Chipping Norton, with fellow writers and publishers dropping like flies, with bookshops closing up and down the country, and agents hiding from their clients, here I was tearing at the skin behind my ears and still wondering. In that time, stand-up had bloomed like wild flowers in the Great Sandy Desert. Who were the unacknowledged legislators of the world? Not poets or novelists. Comedians. Who took tea at 10 Downing Street? Not poets or novelists. Comedians. Their jeering was the jeering of the age. The
y were the age. Well, it was too late now for me to make a change. I no longer had the cojones. Maybe I’d never had the cojones. All very well to talk about it as an option, but what if one became a writer out of timidity, as a way of being a performer without having to perform? Were comedians just novelists with balls? Granted a bolder personality, would D. H. Lawrence have been W. C. Fields?

  Funny might be ruling the world but, as far as the novel went, it was a dead letter. You can’t have funny where you have sacred, and someone somewhere had left the windows of the novel open for sacred to spirit itself in on broken wings. And what was the sacred, anyway, but the cloak the funereal threw over their turgidity? Eugene Bawstone – the literary editor and sacristan who had greeted my first novel (Who Gives a?) with a two-word review: ‘Not me!’ – a man whose shy, depressed demeanour and Bambi-eyed good looks had earned him the nickname ‘the Princess Di of English Letters’ (though I can avouch that there was nothing promiscuous about his reading), was rumoured to have written to each of his reviewers by hand, telling them they were no longer to use the words funny, riotous or Rabelaisian when writing for him. The quality he looked for in literature being ‘weightlessness’, he had never found a novel funny, riotous or Rabelaisian in his life (and that included anything by Rabelais) and assumed his reviewers were either lying or showing off when they claimed they had.

  ‘Have you ever wondered,’ I once asked him at a party, ‘whether the fault doesn’t lie in you?’

  I now realise, though I didn’t know it at the time, that I must have been drunk. Drunk and riotous.

  He raised his sad eyes prettily to me. Was he going to confide the details of his personal unhappiness, I wondered. Or was he going to slip his hands down the front of my trousers?