Zoo Time

by Howard Jacobson

  Although under normal circumstances she would not be parted from her mother, Vanessa couldn’t face having her sleeping in the van with us that night. Drunk, Poppy snored. Not a loud snore but loud enough to spoil the outback experience for her daughter. We were in a complex of lodges and cabins, bars, cafés, restaurants; we parked the van where we could avail ourselves of the most modern conveniences known to camping – had we asked, they’d have piped red wine into us through our taps – but we were still half a thousand kilometres from the highway, on a promontory protruding like a nose from the coastline of Western Australia far into the Indian Ocean. We were a long way from anywhere. Vanessa had come here to get away. From me, from my writing, from her own writing, from the morbidities of London where, even before Merton took his life and our favourite independent bookshop closed its doors, the prognosis for civilisation had been made and was declared terminal. It would be good to hear the silence, she said. Or the sound of life that wasn’t human life. I wasn’t sure what she expected to hear. The waves? The pelican opening and closing his beak, click-clack? The night-time cries of dolphins? She didn’t know what she wanted to hear, only what she didn’t. Number one was her mother snoring. Number two was me on any subject.

  So we moved her mother into a lodge. She was awake by this time and wanting dinner. ‘Sleep,’ Vanessa said. Her words had an uncanny effect on Poppy. If Vanessa said sleep, she slept. Ten minutes after seeing her in, ascertaining where the switches were and how the air conditioning worked, she was flat out on the bed, snoring.

  ‘See,’ Vanessa said.

  On me too her words worked hypnotically. I saw.

  We ate dinner at wooden tables looking out into Shark Bay. The air was warm and silky. The sea barely moved. ‘It smells like baby out here,’ I said.

  ‘Like a baby?’

  ‘No, not like a baby. Like baby. The essence of newborn baby that you get when you smell its head.’

  ‘Christ, I hope you’re not thinking of writing that down.’

  I was, but didn’t dare to now.

  ‘I’ll tell you what I can smell,’ Vanessa said. ‘Dolphin.’

  ‘What does dolphin smell like?’

  ‘Breathe in. Can you smell it now?’

  ‘Yes,’ I lied. In fact, what Vanessa could smell was the barbecued barracuda at the next couple’s table. Unless it was their baby.

  Every now and then Vanessa gestured to the sea and said, ‘Look!’

  I looked but couldn’t see anything.

  ‘There! Do you see?’

  Dolphins.

  For my money what she saw could as easily have been monkeys. From this distance and in this light any oil-slick grey dolphin rolling over and waiting to be tickled in Shark Bay would not have been visible. But Vanessa was in marvelling mode. She looked up at the stars. She inhaled the night. You can tell from the night when you’re far from anywhere, and this was a night a million miles from everything. And then a shooting star shot by, just for us.

  ‘Christ, Guido,’ she said, taking my hand, ‘isn’t it something?’

  ‘It’s something all right,’ I said.

  We kissed. Not bad after all those years of marriage, still kissing. Kissing was a skill we’d retained. She’d long stopped smoking but whenever I kissed her I remembered the tobacco taste of our first embraces. It was possible that I continued to kiss her passionately in order to seek out that very memory. Call it a Proustian kiss, then. Amplitudinous and digressive. And of course weighed down with the melancholy of time.

  Was she kissing me for the same reason? Who could say? I’d never understood why she’d kissed me in the first place. She hadn’t appeared to like me. She disagreed with most of my opinions, didn’t think I had it in me to be a novelist – on the grounds that I didn’t understand her and was therefore unlikely to understand anyone else – refused on principle to wear the clothes I wanted her to wear, and regretted the disparity in our height. Could she have kissed me to stop me kissing her mother? Or to stop her mother kissing me? It had occurred to me over the years that she’d married me telepathically, by proxy or in answer to some sort of uncanny mother-daughter transference of affection, or simply to afford vicarious pleasure to Poppy. For that theory to have worked I’d have needed evidence that Poppy had wanted me for herself, only our age difference a barrier, but I had no evidence of the sort. If anything, she’d been as uninterested in me as her daughter – even the night she agreed to go drinking with me in Knutsford – and didn’t change her attitude in any marked way, as Vanessa definitely did, when Quinton O’Malley rescued Who Gives a Monkey’s? from the reject pile, sold it to Merton Flak who hailed it as a masterpiece and I became a shooting star myself.

  It was also possible that Vanessa had loved me deeply but unconventionally, and I had not been unconventional enough to appreciate it. Except that I had stayed in love with her, no matter how great the provocation and temptation not to, and if that wasn’t appreciation what was it?

  Our Monkey Mia kiss, however it was to be interpreted, came to an end when a motor yacht with lights blazing and loud music blaring hove out of the night and dropped anchor right in front of us, exactly where Vanessa swore she’d seen the dolphins doing cartwheels.

  ‘All we need!’ she said, as though this was the last in a series of intolerable vexations. That was Vanessa – the smallest irritation drove out all memory that she’d ever enjoyed a moment’s happiness in her life.

  I suggested we move tables but there was no escaping the glare or the racket.

  Vanessa’s father, in the brief time she’d known him, had been a sailing man and she’d inherited from him a hatred of anything that needed an engine to propel it through the water. You had a sail, or you rowed, the rest was parvenu grossness. Just before we left London, Garth Rhodes-Rhind, a crossover fantasy writer – which meant he moved implausible characters from another world and time into an implausibly rendered present, or vice versa as the fantasy took him – had thrown a bragging party in Docklands on a motor launch. ‘Launch on a Launch’, the invitation read. The boat, of which he was said to have bought a major share with the sale of the world rights in a novel about a thirteenth-century alchemist with a striking profile and second sight who’d blundered into contemporary Clerkenwell where alchemy was/is all the rage, was a crude pink floating brothel of a vessel which, at least for this one night, he called Lulu after the publicity girl for whom he threw over his wife on the strength of royalties from the previous crossover fantasy about a Clerkenwell banker with a striking profile and early-onset Alzheimer’s who’d gone back in time to a thirteenth-century monastery on the summit of Mont Ventoux. There were security men on the boat to stop the wife gatecrashing the party. ‘Don’t you ever think of doing this,’ Vanessa had said to me, squinting viciously through her flute of Lulu-tinted champagne.

  ‘Running off with the publicity girl or preventing you from attending the bash?’

  She shook her head, a gesture which comprehended everything she loathed about the venue. ‘Don’t be smart with me, Guido,’ she said. ‘You know what I’m saying.’

  ‘Vee, what sign have I ever given you that I would like a motorboat? I can’t swim. It makes me seasick to have a bath.’

  ‘Wait till you earn what Garth Rhodes-Rhind earns.’

  I rode with the punch. ‘I won’t be buying a boat.’

  We left it at that, though I sensed she went in fear of what I would buy should I suddenly start earning big, whether I wanted a motor launch or not. A fear that caused its own friction, not only because I resented her thinking there was a vulgar plutocrat hiding out in me, but because we both knew that Garth Rhodes-Rhind’s earnings from urban fantasy were beyond a writer whose genre was the Wilmslow dissolute, no matter that there were some who viewed that as urban fantasy on my part.

  Thus, either way, I felt a failure to her, and indeed to myself. Not least as I had known and helped – well, met and spoken to – Garth Rhodes-Rhind when he was penniless and had encour
aged him to believe he could amount to something – though not very much – if he persisted, never for moment believing that he would.

  Disheartened by the noise of the motor yacht, we went to bed in the van. In the morning we decided we’d have breakfast in the same restaurant rather than the van so that Poppy could enjoy the view she’d missed out on the night before. She was well rested and looked rather lovely in a safari dress with lots of pockets that complemented Vanessa’s. A miracle they could do that without consulting each other, not just choose to wear identical dresses in different colours, but put their hair up similarly, and both wear Roman sandals.

  They looked like the mistresses of big-game hunters. In the pockets of their dresses they carried their lovers’ bullets.

  The owner of the motorboat was out on deck, wearing a powder-blue sailor suit and giving orders. Provisions were being ferried aboard. Crates of champagne and baskets of lobsters, I assumed. In between taking receipt of these, he’d walk up and down, examining the boat, tugging at ropes, checking the paintwork and shaking his head in anger when he found a scratch. This was what you did if you owned a motor yacht – housework, only at sea.

  He appeared to be a man in his forties, overcooked by the sun, so that while he cut a youthful figure you could tell, even from a distance, that close up he’d be prematurely aged. Ill-tempered, too, in the way of the idle rich. Be careful, as they say, what you wish for, and he’d wished for a boat whose appearance and well-being now took up every minute of his time.

  He had a phone in each hand and another on his belt. All three were ringing.

  Vanessa and Poppy drank their tea and laughed at him as he made his round of minute housewifely investigations.

  ‘God, aren’t men neurotic!’ Poppy said.

  ‘OCD if ever I saw it.’

  This was designed for me to hear. I suffered from an extreme form of obsessive compulsive disorder whenever I had a book on the go. I believed I would no sooner write a sentence than I would lose it, either to the four winds if I was writing outside, or to the ill will of a computer when I was at my desk. So I made multiple backups of everything I wrote, writing on paper what I’d typed into a machine, saving on a multitude of external hard drives what I was not prepared to trust to the internal memory of my computer. In the days of carbon paper I’d hide a minimum of four copies of every page I’d typed and leave a note in a sealed envelope for Vanessa, telling her where to find them in the event of my death. Later, I did the same with flash drives of which I kept about a dozen active, depositing them in the pockets of jackets I didn’t wear, Sellotaping them to the backs of paintings, concealing them in Vanessa’s underwear drawer, hanging them from loops of string behind our bedhead. And the whereabouts of these were logged in a folder marked for Vanessa’s attention. If I die, this is where my work is to be found.

  When Who Gives a Monkey’s? was published Vanessa presented me with a soft Italian briefcase embossed with gold lettering. Not my initials – GA – but OCD.

  She thought she had married a madman, but if I was mad to suppose that writing was an open invitation to death to seize me, then every other writer was as mad as I was. You no sooner join two words together than you fear your life will soon be over, not because writing wears out the heart but because the act itself, with its wild gamble on futurity, is so presumptuous. Time does not wait for a writer to polish his periods. Even to start a sentence is to send out a challenge to the gods. ‘I will live beyond my physical existence, my words will put me among the immortals.’

  Comes back the booming answer, ‘Oh no they won’t!’

  Was it because she had failed to start a book she was never going to finish that Vanessa failed to understand the necessary morbidity of writing? She hadn’t, brick by brick, built her overweening Babel. She sketched an idea and went to bed. She tried a line of dialogue and tore her hair. Nothing followed. She didn’t do joined-up sentences. So the gods would let her live. She didn’t threaten them.

  We spent the morning at Monkey Mia playing with the dolphins. On the beach at first, waiting for them to roll out of the sea and cavort with us under the eye of the pelican. Then later in a little rowing boat which they buffeted mischievously, disappearing under us as the fancy took them, cuffing our oars, sometimes making as though they wanted to come aboard, eyeing us sideways like parrots on a pirate’s shoulder.

  ‘Oh, Mother, Mother, look!’ Vanessa cried.

  ‘Aren’t they darlings,’ Poppy cried in return.

  I couldn’t have said what posed the greater risk to our stability, the frolicsomeness of the dolphins or the eurhythmic throbbings of Vanessa and her mother, through whom a single vibrating chord of sympathy with God’s creatures seemed to pass.

  Myself I found them scary. Vanessa and her mother and the dolphins. By what right had we declared dolphins magnanimous in all weathers, not the remotest danger to us, when we knew that no creature under the sun could be relied upon never to turn nasty – to one another, never mind to us? It demeaned them, in my view, attributing to them nothing but benign intention, interpreting those strange snouty grimaces as smiles of fondness for Homo sapiens. One of these days, I thought, as I sat rigid in the little rowing boat, one of these days the terrible truth about what dolphins really think of us will come out. I was glad when we were back on dry land. But Vanessa and Poppy wanted never to leave. Our plan to drive off that afternoon was abandoned. We would stay another night, sleeping off the excitement before meeting again, in what was now our usual place, for dinner.

  Poppy was already tipsy.

  ‘So where are the monkeys?’ she asked.

  ‘Do you think it’s drink or do you think it could be early-onset dementia?’ Vanessa whispered to me.

  ‘It’s excitement,’ I said. ‘It’s been a long day, after a long drive.’

  ‘And it’s been a long life,’ Vanessa said. I knew what came next. If she went silly she hoped someone would knock her on the head and finish her off. Was it time to be thinking of doing that to her mother? It half crossed my mind that she meant it, that she’d brought Poppy all this way in order to tip her into Shark Bay where the dolphins could eat her and return her to the diurnal round of nature. Who’d know it wasn’t an accident?

  But she’d had her chance to do that earlier in the day and she hadn’t taken it. Anyone seeing them together in the boat could have mistaken them for lovers, Vita Sackville-West and Violet Trefusis, only more red and Rubenesque, their faces touching, their fingers on each other’s shoulders, consumed together by the wonder of it all.

  Poppy looked sumptuous, tipsy or not. In the heat, her dress clung to her thighs. Breast for breast there was nothing to choose between Vanessa and her mother – full and soft as a goose-down pillow, both of them (though Poppy’s rose and showed a little higher), and unfair, shocking, even deranging, on women otherwise so slender – but for all the difference in their ages, Poppy won it when it came to thighs. Who can ever say what it is that makes that part of a woman suddenly more than a man can bear to look at? Underneath the dress her flesh was not the flesh of a young woman. I had seen her in a bathing costume and knew that her skin had lost its youthful spring. It was mottled now, ever so slightly stretched and pitted, a victim of over-prominent veins and cellulite. And yet the strain of her thighs against the thinness of the material that held it taut, that rounded slope that is never seen on a man’s body, no matter how beautiful, the fullness of her without the fatness of her, as though a fruit could ripen for a second time, or as though one of the Monkey Mia dolphins was rolling over inside her dress – I had no defences against the beauty of it. And the tipsiness – well the tipsiness only added to her wild allure.

  What I did, I did because I couldn’t not do. Call it obsessive compulsive disorder. On the pretext of some natural excitement – don’t ask me to name it: the appearance of a hitherto unseen planet, a sweet aroma of chilli oil and frangipani blown in on a current of warm air from an undiscovered continent, a hundred dolphins
leaping balletically, as though choreographed by Neptune, from the pellucid waters of the bay – I extended my arms, clapped my hands, and under cover of the table brought one down on the living quiver of Poppy’s flesh, just inches from her pelvis, but not so high up that my gesture could be interpreted as lewd. We deal in millimetres when it comes to taking liberties, and guided by the deep unconscious of filial regard, I was nanomillimetre-perfect.

  15

  I Am a Cello

  In the beginning . . .

  The night Poppy accepted my invitation to taste the delights of Knutsford with me, since her daughter wouldn’t, was remarkable more for the fact of her acceptance than anything else. And that could have been attributed simply to boredom. Knutsford, for Christ’s sake! Settling in Knutsford when you had hair like that.

  After we’d talked about my mother I’d hoped she would quiz me about my writing practice, no matter that I hadn’t written anything. Where I got my ideas from. What time I started. When I knew I’d finished. The sorts of questions they would ask me years later in Chipping Norton before telling me that no matter how I knew I’d finished, they knew when they had, which was the minute they started. But this was before the days of book groups, and Poppy would not have been a book-group woman anyway.

  It’s hard to credit intelligence to the non-bookish when books are the only measure of worth you have. I almost forgave my own mother the preposterousness of her personality on the grounds that she devoured airport novels when she wasn’t shouting in the street, no matter that what she devoured was shopping and fucking told from the other side of the counter – selling and fucking. It astonished me that she was able to find so many soft-porn novels about the retail trade. Did she have them written especially for her, I wondered. She sat up in bed with a scarf tied round her head, her mouth open, her electric cigarette hanging from her lips, turning pages as though she was in a competition to be the first to finish. I don’t share the general respect shown to the mechanical act of turning pages. But at least she was ingesting words, and an ingested word might stick halfway down the gullet and shock the reader into reflection. Whereas Poppy, though an intelligent and in some ways far more cultured woman than my mother, was, in this period of her life at least, book-dead. I’d dreaded, when we first began to sit down and talk in the parlour of the White Bear, that she would fail the Tolkien test in record time. I’d said what fun it was to be sitting where Signor Brunoni might have performed his magic, and when she showed she didn’t know who I was talking about I told her. Travelling magician, character in Cranford, by Mrs Gaskell. And why might he have performed his magic here? she wondered. I stared at her. Because we were in Cranford, this was it, Knutsford–Cranford, surely she . . .