Zoo Time

by Howard Jacobson

  As for Wilhelmina and my father, they had relinquished the business and they hadn’t. No matter how many times they sailed away, they always sailed back again, partly to check whether I’d run it into the ground, or run off with the staff, partly because they missed the razzamatazz – the whizzing off to Paris, the London parties, the sound of champagne corks popping in Chester.

  Little Gid’s fictionalised folks, I fancied, would be less concerned about him. He would have more of a flair for fashion than I ever had. And he would actually enjoy running a shop. There are such human beings. They take pleasure in what’s called ‘meeting people’. They enjoy making a sale, cashing up, reordering, doing the books – commerce, accountancy, money as and for itself. My brother Jeffrey – Jeffrey Darling – was such a person. He drove a BMW sports coupé through the lanes of Cheshire, the snow-white cuffs of his shirt protruding from his Gucci jacket, humming happily to himself. He dreamed clothes. I haven’t invented that. He told me once that he dreamed beautiful clothes. ‘And what are your nightmares about?’ I asked him. ‘Hideous clothes.’

  The last time we talked there was a chance he would soon have his own TV series. Or at least one half of a TV series. The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse – a tale of two fashion retailers, one in Manchester, one in Wilmslow, and the differing demands their customers made of them. It didn’t seem to have much meat on its bones televisually to me, but what did I know about television? And if it didn’t eventuate, it didn’t eventuate. Jeffrey Sweetheart was cool about it.

  So Little Gid, were I ever to put flesh on his bones, would have a bit of Jeffrey in him, visually and in relation to the joys of retailing, at least. His head would not be in the clouds. He would hear when people spoke to him. He would remember to reply. He would not be so transfixed by words – on labels, on a passing vehicle, in a newspaper that had been brought into the shop – that he would forget he’d left someone in the dressing room waiting to try on the same garment in another size. He would not, in short, be a writer. Which meant it was always possible I’d be able to stitch him up a happy ending here on earth, whatever Francis’s advice to the contrary – that’s if nothing terrible happened on account of his fucking his mother-in-law, which I couldn’t at this early stage of the narrative guarantee.

  13

  Viscera

  It’s a curse, the writing impulse, if it gets you early, and if it doesn’t get you early it isn’t a writing impulse. Don’t listen to anyone who tells you they discovered they had literary talent late on. Either they’re lying about the chronology, or the talent they are talking about they don’t have. The impulse to write is an impulse to alter the conditions of your childhood. Not to falsify them, but to make the world other than the hellhole it looks to you when you’re young. Show me a happy child and I can imagine all manner of future occupations for him – in sport, in politics, in fashion retailing – but none of them in literature. Novels are born out of misery, which is why the best ones aren’t miserable, no matter that misery is a seller. The fact that the novel has been written is evidence that the misery has been overcome.

  Misery of the succumbed-to sort you can get in life.

  So I began with the highest of ideals. I would make the world a better place than it was, if not to live in then to read about.

  By better I didn’t mean more wholesome. I meant full of the rudery we were too scared of in Wilmslow. It could be that I’m talking only about myself. Full of the rudery, in that case, that I was scared of. If I could master rudery, I thought, I’d master life.

  And death.

  I pinned photographs of writers considered beyond the pale of polite society to my bedroom wall. Jean-Paul Sartre, William S. Burroughs, Henry Miller, Leonard Cohen, Brendan Behan, Dylan Thomas, Norman Mailer. All devilish, existential blasphemers in their way, all men in pain, like me, though I was but a boy in pain.

  Henry Miller topped the list. He splashed filth about like a graffiti artist in words. But he was a philosopher of sorts as well. He’d splash filth about then cogitate over what he’d done. Fourteen was young to be reading Henry Miller and I doubt I understood it all. I certainly wasn’t always able to picture what he was doing with the women. But you can tell when a writer dares you to say he’s gone too far – too far? so you know what’s far enough? – and I applauded the enterprise. I’d go too far, I promised myself, when my turn came.

  I’d been introduced to these writers by a temporary schoolteacher, Archie Clayburgh, a sort of parody Englishman who wore a monocle to teach in and drove to school in an Austin A40, wearing goggles. He was an author in his own right, a contributor to Playboy and Penthouse and Forum, though to our chagrin we discovered that only after he’d left the school. Not impossibly, the headmaster discovered it before us and that was why Archie Clayburgh left the school. Piers Wain, the teacher Archie Clayburgh temporarily replaced, had been badly teased by us before his nervous breakdown, on account of the gentleness of his manner and the strange way he had of pronouncing the name Brontë, caused partly by his not being able to handle the letter r, and partly by his reading the diaeresis as an injunction never to allow the word to end. That his career and character were defined by this queer pronunciation only shows how often he invoked it, the novels of Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bwontaiaiai being his life’s passion and more or less the only works of fiction he encouraged us to read. If we listened to Piers Wain the English novel began in 1847 with the publication of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, flourished in 1848 with the publication of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and died in 1853 with the publication of Villette.

  ‘Novels for girls with migraines,’ was how Archie Clayburgh dismissed them when we told him what we’d read with Mr Wain.

  He brought a giant hourglass into his lessons and upturned it when he began speaking. If no one laughed before the sand ran out, or if no one showed that he’d been shocked or sickened to his stomach – either by retching, fainting, or asking to be excused – he would acknowledge he had failed as a teacher and hand in his notice. His favourite word was ‘visceral’. ‘You don’t just read with your heads, boys,’ he’d tell us, ‘you read viscerally, with your bowels.’ And if we hadn’t laughed before, we’d laugh at that.

  Archie Clayburgh knew he couldn’t get us to read more than selections of his favourite retch-making writers in class, but he made sure they were available in the school library, though they were locked away behind glass doors and we had to sign to take them out.

  When Mr Wain returned, Tropic of Capricorn and Beautiful Losers vanished from the library and we all went back to getting headaches when we read.

  But with me, at least, Archie Clayburgh succeeded in his aim. I read raucously from then on. Words no longer made me wince with their intrinsic excruciation. Words now frolicked lewdly before my eyes.

  My father, a small man with feeble eyesight and no hair, not even where his eyebrows should have been, wasn’t sure what he thought of my having writers on my wall. ‘Who’s this?’ he’d ask, on one of his rare visits to my room – it always felt as though he’d got lost in his own house and only stumbled on me by chance. Invariably his squint rested on what was then a famous photograph of the novelist James Baldwin. I think my father wondered what I was doing with a portrait of a black man in my bedroom, and I think he spotted something else not quite right about Baldwin, namely that he was a homosexual, and he must have asked himself whether his being on my wall meant that I was a homosexual too.

  It occurred to me that if I gave him Henry Miller or Leonard Cohen to read he wouldn’t fear for me on that score, but he wasn’t a reading man. He wasn’t an anything man, my father. He existed to be at my mother’s service, much like a dog, and that was that. She called and he went running. When I pictured them having sex, which was all the time when I had a Henry Miller on the go, I couldn’t get beyond the image of his sniffing her. But they had me and Jeffrey Dearest so he must have done more than sniff her, twice at least.

  As a matter of d
isinterested enquiry, could this picture of him sniffing have been behind the sniffing I thought of getting Gideon to do when he walked out on to the stage? Was there, after all, though I prided myself on freedom from all filial feeling whatsoever, some buried Oedipal sexual disgust in me?

  I thought about it and then thought not.

  My mother was as much a mystery to me, from the progenitive point of view, as my father. It was impossible to believe I had issued in any normal way from either of them. She had what the people of Wilmslow characterised as oomph. Not just get-up-and-go but an overdeveloped instinct for emphasis and play. She dominated every conversation, whether in the house, in the shop, in the street, at a restaurant or indeed at any social gathering, throwing her arms about, pulling faces, rolling her smokeless artificial cigarette between her lips – she went to sleep chewing on that cigarette – and laughing wildly. And this before the six o’clock drink. She was, of course, immaculately turned out at all times, favouring little suits, usually Chanel, with short jackets and tiny barrel skirts, frequently worn with a matching French beret from which a small point of steel protruded like a radio mast. Was she a transmitter for some faraway planet? That would have been as good a guess as any. Certainly she wore sufficient metal, around her wrists and even stitched into her gloves like chain mail, to make magnetic contact with an alien people hundreds of thousands of light years away.

  Alternatively, her drawing power existed solely to pull people into the shop, and once they were inside it was highly unlikely they would ever get out again until they’d spent a minimum of a thousand pounds on a scarf.

  She was a chain-smoker before chain-smoking went out of style and dripped ash without apology onto the shoes of her customers, onto the clothes they bought, into the change she gave them. Latterly, she smoked an electronic cigarette which hung perilously from her lower lip and glowed like a second set of antennae.

  Her attitude to my having writers on my wall was that I was in understandable rebellion against the boisterous materialism of which I was the beneficiary and would eventually grow out of it. That I went to the University of the Fenlands was a source of pride to her, as I was the first person in the family to go to a university anywhere, but she would have been no less pleased to see me enrolled at Wilmslow Business College, an ambition she saw realised in Jeffrey.

  Such were the intimate characters of the mild-mannered novel that was my life, and I bring them forward not in any way to disparage them but in order to explain why that novel had to be rewritten viscerally by me.

  But I hadn’t written a word of any sort I’d have dared show a living soul before Vanessa Green and Poppy Eisenhower turned up uninvited. If Archie Clayburgh was the tinder, they were the lighted match.

  They came again to the shop, their hair aflame, about a fortnight after their first visit, this time as customers. Vanessa bought Bruce Oldfield trousers, in all likelihood to annoy me. Trousers were a terrible waste, given her legs, and these were too full, giving her the look of a clown, but my mother had taught me to exploit a customer’s tastes, however appalling. ‘You never dislike what they like,’ she told me. ‘You don’t set up a conflict in their minds by suggesting something you think looks better. That just allows them to shy from the choice and buy nothing. Tell them they look nice in what they think they look nice in and then get them to buy two of it.’

  Poppy bought two silk shirts by Donna Karan. One was very nearly see-through and it was all I could do not to enquire about the circumstances in which she planned to wear it. Certainly none I could imagine in Knutsford or its environs.

  They bought their clothes separately, Poppy Eisenhower signing a cheque, which I accepted though it exceeded the limit guaranteed by her cheque card, Vanessa paying by credit card. She had not, I noted, changed her name to Eisenhower. She remained Vanessa Green. Their having different surnames added to their intrigue, but added, I thought, to her mother’s intrigue more.

  They were disappointed my mother was still away, but by this time I had put them in touch with each other so that I’d be free to think about other things in her company. By ‘her’ company I mean Poppy’s. Even at that stage I was interested in her – not I think more interested than I was in Vanessa, but interested to the same degree. The problem with Gideon as a character was that if he wasn’t a writer – and I knew Francis was right about that at least: that I couldn’t make him a writer – then I didn’t see how he’d be up to the subtleties of sinfulness which I, as a writer of rudery in-waiting, a writer to my soul no matter that I’d submitted nothing for publication, brewed up whenever I looked at the two women. You had to be a writer to invite the trouble, you had to be a writer to be prepared to put your life into a sort of suspense while the story of what would happen had its way with you. As a non-writer, as someone like my brother Jeffrey, say, Little Gidding would follow his heart not his curiosity, would make a decision calculated on what promised to make him happy. Whereas I didn’t give a fig for happiness. I was after bigger, dirtier fish.

  I did the conventional thing at first. I asked Vanessa out. But even this needed to be a rigmarole. Not a rigmarole of mere plot, a rigmarole of dangerous duplicity. Poppy had given me their contact details to pass on to my mother, so I knew where they lived. On the pretext that I thought they’d left a pair of gloves in the shop, I drove out to Knutsford and knocked on their door. They lived, of course, in a cottage. Mossy-roofed. A bird of some description sang in a bare tree in their garden. Winter flowers of some description grew in a wooden trough. Enough with the nature writing. It must have been about seven o’clock. When I knocked on their door I heard shouting. I thought one of them was saying to the other, ‘Not in your underwear you don’t,’ but that could have been a transference from my own demented hoping.

  Eventually I heard a rapping on an upstairs window and looked up. Vanessa was twitching the curtains as though signalling to an invading force in the North Sea. I waved. She mouthed something bad-tempered at me which I couldn’t understand. I held up the gloves. She looked astonished. She told me later she thought I’d driven over with the gloves to see if either of the women wanted to buy them or, if both of them did, to offer them a single glove each. Which, when you think about it, was essentially the mission I was on, whether I knew it at the time or not. Unless I saw the women as the gloves, my fingers . . . But that was going too far, too soon.

  He’s keen, was what Vanessa told me she thought. Meaning keen to make a sale.

  She came downstairs and opened the door just wide enough to pass a pound note through. Her red hair was uncombed and she emanated cigarette. It was an emanation I liked on women. All the models at the fashion shows had more nicotine in their bodies than protein. Some were scarcely more than walking cigarettes. They’d come off the catwalk, undress and light up. It would get so smoky backstage that they had to stand by the fire exits or hang out of the windows in their tiny pants, choking. One night in Milan I took out a yet-to-be famous model, Minerva, whom I’d met at an after-collection party. That was one of the perks of Wilhelmina’s. You didn’t get to the best parties but you got to the second tier where you could talk to models who were second tier themselves, but beautiful enough for you if you lived in Wilmslow. Minerva ate steamed broccoli and tobacco. She moved her head like a giraffe’s, as though sniffing out whatever grew on the tops of trees. Throughout the most expensive meal I’d ever bought – I remember calculating that I could have ordered dinner for eight in Wilmslow for the price of each floret of broccoli – Minerva coughed in my face. I breathed her in as though she were a rare flower. Had she had her mother with her doing likewise I might well have fallen fatally for them both.

  ‘Yes?’ Vanessa asked.

  I put my face as close to her smoky mouth as I dared.

  Something told me to give up the glove idea. ‘Just passing,’ I said. ‘I wondered if you were up for a drink.’

  ‘Here?’

  I never knew what she meant. On her lips even the simplest words
became an enigma. Here? What did here mean? On the doorstep? In the street? In Knutsford, in Cheshire, in England, in Europe, in the universe?

  My mouth must have fallen open. ‘I can’t let you in,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t expect you to let me in,’ I said. ‘I meant a drink outside.’

  She was having the same trouble with me. ‘Outside?’ In their garden, on the street, in the gutter?

  ‘A pub. A bar.’

  ‘I don’t go to pubs or bars.’

  ‘I don’t either,’ I said. ‘A meal?’

  ‘I’ve eaten.’

  ‘A burger? Fish and chips?’

  ‘That’s food. I’ve just said I’ve eaten.’

  Gideon in his comedic phase might have scratched his head and said, ‘How about a fuck in that case?’ but I was no comedian. I was twenty-four and writing the novel of what was happening in my head.

  It’s true that Henry Miller might also have asked her for a fuck. In fact Henry Miller might well have asked to see her cunt, but I wasn’t yet Henry Miller either, more was the pity.

  In the event, what I did would probably have shocked Henry Miller, Leonard Cohen and Norman Mailer rolled together. I asked, since she didn’t want to come out herself, whether perhaps her mother did.

  I expected her to query ‘did’. ‘Did what?’

  Did want a fuck, I decided against saying.

  14

  OCD

  It was a shame we didn’t make it to Monkey Mia until dark. It meant that we missed out on being scrutinised by the pelican who guarded the beach. Before you could get to what else Monkey Mia had to offer, you had to pass the pelican. And if he didn’t like you you could kiss goodbye to the dolphins, never mind the monkeys.