Zoo Time

by Howard Jacobson

  But that had to be a different Sandy Ferber. Under Merton, Scylla and Charybdis Press had specialised in novels that ran to six or seven hundred pages, each densely printed and packed with verbal incident. The one time Merton quarrelled with my work it was because the amount of dialogue in it made for too many white spaces on the page. Sandy Ferber, a great champion of white in art, was not the man for such a list.

  I postponed Wilmslow. Vanessa was disappointed. She was hoping to have the house to herself not to write her novel in.

  And to my surprise, Jeffrey was disappointed too. It was too long since I’d been home, he told me on the phone. A man should see his family. I didn’t agree with him but apologised for how long it had been. I’d reorganise, I told him. ‘Good,’ he said.

  In the meantime I googled Sandy Ferbers but failed to find one with a publishing history that made him a suitable successor to Merton or indeed a suitable publisher for me. I decided I’d misheard Margaret. She must have said Sandor Ferber, or even Salman Ferber, a favourite of the parent company in Sweden drafted in from somewhere else, Hungary or the Indian subcontinent, it didn’t matter where since books were in a healthier state everywhere else than they were here. Whoever he was and wherever he came from I looked forward to a new relationship.

  Although Margaret had specified the boardroom, which could seat thirty at a pinch, I assumed lunch was going to be just him and me. What he would have wanted to meet me for, in such a hurry, I hadn’t bothered to enquire. These days a new publisher could be in place for years before a writer met him, if he ever met him at all; but I was not without my significance on the Scylla and Charybdis list; I gave it a measure of muscularity which it would otherwise have lacked. Perhaps he wanted to male-bond with me, Hungarianly, over that. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers . . .

  I turned up ten minutes early, anyway, in à deux spirits, having mugged up on the Hungarian novel and, to be on the safe side, Indian prose literature in general, and was at once surrounded by drinks waiters. A half an hour later thirty of us were taking our seats. All Scylla and Charybdis authors. Sandy Ferber was at the head of the table. Not Sandor or Salman – Sandy. The Sandy. He said hello to each of us by name without consulting a crib sheet.

  ‘Hello, Sandy,’ I said back, the words freezing in my throat before I could quite form them.

  He had that effect. He chilled the room. It wasn’t the cold wind of puritanism that blew off him, it was more an icy voluptuousness, as though he had just come from sleeping with the undead. He was that rare thing in publishing, a male anorexic. Relying on all my old skills learned at Wilhelmina’s I measured him. A thirty-two-inch chest, I calculated. A twenty-six-inch waist. A twelve-inch neck. And there was still room inside what he was wearing for another man the same size.

  Allowing for that, he was elegant. In a black suit, of course, and a priestly white shirt buttoned at the neck but worn without a tie.

  His face moved independently of the words he spoke. Welcoming us all as the gods of articulation past and reminding us of the successes we had enjoyed over the years at Scylla and Charybdis, his eyes drooped with sorrow while his mouth fell away in what looked like uncontrollable fury. He would have smiled, I thought, but his face wouldn’t let him.

  ‘What a strange man this is,’ I whispered to BoBo De Souza, the current holder of the Romantic Novelists’ Association Pure Passion Award, who was sitting next to me. ‘Here he is in charge of the meeting and yet everything he says comes out as though he has been passed over.’

  ‘He has no lips,’ she said. ‘That’s why. His face is capable only of opening or closing.’

  I looked at him again. She was right. His mouth had not been finished. It was as though unsealed. I congratulated her on her observancy.

  ‘Well, I’ve had the opportunity to study him at close quarters,’ she whispered. ‘I wrote a monograph for him once, in the days before Romance claimed me.’

  ‘Is that a euphemism?’

  ‘For fucking him, you mean? No. Though as it happens I have fucked him as well.’

  ‘Sandy Ferber fucks?’

  ‘Non-stop.’

  ‘I’m not sure I need to know that.’

  ‘I don’t mean with me. I mean he goes from woman to woman. That kind of non-stop.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Ask him.’

  ‘No, why do women let him near? Aren’t they afraid they’ll freeze in his arms? Does he have arms?’

  ‘He’s a challenge, Guy. You want to see if you can be the one to thaw him out.’

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘Ask him. But I found him exciting, in a cadaverous, lipless sort of way.’

  ‘I have to say you haven’t made it sound exciting,’ I said.

  ‘That’s because you’re a man. You don’t know what an aphrodisiac power is to a woman.’

  ‘You aren’t telling me you find Sandy Ferber powerful?’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with what I find him. He just is.’

  ‘Powerful? Sandy Ferber?’

  ‘Immensely. He ran the art world for a decade. Now he’s ready for literature.’

  ‘He’s just closed a bookshop.’

  ‘Precisely.’

  The reason Ferber had brought us together was to talk about exciting new developments in digital technology. When he said ‘exciting new developments’ I thought he was going to howl. When he said ‘digital technology’ he looked at everybody in turn as though he knew which one of us had raped his sister. He wanted us to think about the challenges that lay before us. The future of fiction was not in the traditional form; other platforms – that was the very word he used: ‘platforms’ – were waiting to be exploited. To name but one – the story app. Reading no longer meant going to bed with a book you were ashamed to admit you couldn’t finish. Reading was now as little or as much, as frequent or as rare, wherever you did or didn’t want it, at the desk or on the move. We had a historic opportunity to rescue reading from the word. In a year he wanted to have a thousand story apps ready to go for the mobile-phone market. Bus-stop reading, he called it. Unbooks that could be started and finished while phone users were waiting for someone to call them back, or for the traffic lights to change, or for the waiter to arrive with the bill. In short, to plug those small social hiatuses of life on the run.

  What was said next I have no idea. I fell into a black hole. How long I was down there I don’t know. It was BoBo De Souza who returned me to the land of the living dead by asking what I was doing to myself.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  She pointed to the empty less-is-less notepad in front of me. It was covered in moustache hairs.

  ‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ I said, touching what was left of my moustache with my fingers.

  ‘Don’t be sorry for me,’ she said. ‘Be sorry for you.’

  ‘I’m sorry for all of us,’ I told her.

  ‘Oh, I’m OK,’ she said. ‘Or I will be if you let me borrow your moustache.’

  ‘Help yourself,’ I said, pushing the notepad full of hairs in her direction. ‘In fact, you can keep it.’

  ‘I don’t mean the actual moustache. I mean the idea of pulling it out. It’s a habit I’d like to give to one of my characters. It beats twirling.’

  ‘Does that mean he’s a bounder?’

  ‘No. A sad sack.’

  She pinched my arm.

  Which I took to mean that she liked me but didn’t find me aphrodisiacal.

  Sandy Ferber was still alluding to the small social hiatuses of life on the run.

  ‘I think he means you,’ I whispered.

  At that moment he looked directly at me. ‘And I want you, my friends and colleagues,’ he concluded to applause, ‘to be the ones to plug them.’

  He essayed a smile, but given the collapse of his mouth, he could have been addressing his executioners.

  24

  The Bosom of the Family

  The next day I caught the tilting, sick-making Pendolino and jou
rneyed to the Heart of Darkness that was Wilmslow.

  Sun shining. Streams purling. Cattle dozing under trees. No talent for natural description! Me?

  I’m not sure why I made such a meal of it, given how little time it took to get there. Vanessa and her mother still went up regularly, sometimes on the merest whim, though to do what precisely I still hadn’t found out. But for me it was a jouney back to more than a previous place, it was a journey back to a previous person. I felt reclaimed, as though Wilmslow knew my secrets and had the power to keep me or to let me go. It was that shop. Had I been my truer self pinning up dresses at Wilhelmina’s? Did my soul belong to the cashpoint, as Jeffrey Gorgeous had taken to calling the till, rather than the page? Shopkeepers never quite live down their lineage. Mrs Thatcher was always a grocer’s daughter. Was I, in the eyes of other writers, always the boy from the boutique?

  And then there was family which Jeffrey said I was neglecting. Not like him to say a thing like that. Not like him to say anything. ‘Gorgeous, darling, suck my dick, vroom, vroom,’ was Jeffrey’s idea of conversation.

  Suck my dick, I always thought, was for my benefit. I was no more homophobic than arachnophobic, which doesn’t mean I wanted to tread on a homosexual, but I didn’t get the same-sex thing, the proof of which is my supposing that suck my dick is something you say only to a woman. The truth is I didn’t know what Jeffrey got up to, only that he got up to a lot of it.

  I’d never much cared for him. It would be too easy to say that that was because my mother had, but my mother had. She was always picking him up when he fell, which meant he fell a lot. Once he fell down in a dead swoon after I’d rabbit-chopped him for tearing a page out of one of my school books. For a good ten minutes I thought he was dead. ‘You could have killed him,’ my mother said.

  Could have, but didn’t.

  That night she took him into her bed.

  He fell into dead swoons as a matter of course after that, and it was always assumed that I was the cause. Sometimes he would open one eye as he lay there, and wink at me. How a person faking his own death managed to turn so white I never found out. But he did it so well that even as he lay winking at me I feared I had killed him, no matter that I hadn’t raised a hand to him. I was a threat to him, he succeeded in getting me to believe, simply by virtue of existing. He succeeded in getting my mother to believe the same. ‘Get out of my sight,’ she’d say, kneeling by his bloodless corpse.

  God said something similar to Cain.

  Whether my father liked him any more than he liked me I couldn’t have said. In the end he was too transfixed by my mother to notice either of us.

  My parents were still, in a manner of speaking, alive, both advancing into mutual dementia, sharing a small suite of airy rooms with yellow walls and orange carpets in expensively attended accommodation just a stone’s throw from Wilhelmina’s, which was thriving under Jeffrey Honeybunch’s control. He had camped the shop up in line with the northern half of the country’s current cultural love affair with homosexuals. The footballers’ wives adored him, but then they were a species of honorary homosexuals themselves. In spirit he was doing no more than taking the shop back to its heyday when my mother had been the pantomime dame of Wilmslow. Its strictly masculinist period under me was now nothing but a forgotten interregnum – a passage between queens.

  Was that why my mother had loved Jeffrey more? Because he was like a daughter to her?

  A catty observation, I accept, but that was my problem with Jeffrey: he rubbed off on me.

  I called on the Dementievas, as Jeffrey and I called them, before visiting him in the shop. He had suggested this when I told him I was coming up, presumably to wrong-foot me. I had always intended to visit them but now it looked as though I was only calling on them on his say-so. The bad son getting a lesson in filiality from the good. Although calling them the Dementievas had been his faggoty idea.

  I found them doing a jigsaw of Chester Castle. The last time I’d visited them they were doing a jigsaw of Chester Castle. The likely explanation was that they no sooner finished it and called for a new one than they were given the old one back and either didn’t notice or didn’t mind. It wasn’t so preposterous: half the readers in the country no sooner finished one book than they started another identical in all but the tiniest and most irrelevant details, and they didn’t have senility as an excuse. Would the day come when one book would last a person a lifetime? Get to the end and then, as the Americans say, start over. Over and over and over.

  My mother recognised me, my father didn’t. Last time it had been the other way round, so not everything had solidified into madness.

  She was still glamorous, give or take a few dozen stains, in a mauve Chanel suit, the skirt a little woven tube that showed her tiny legs like those of the lucky tarantula on Poppy’s warm Monkey Mia pillow. She wore her matching beret too, at its old rakish slant, though its antenna was bent and looked, frankly, no longer capable of receiving signals.

  ‘What brings you?’ she asked, looking over my shoulder.

  ‘You do,’ I said, trying to find her lips to kiss.

  Where had they gone, her lips? The very question BoBo De Souza must have asked whenever it was that she and Sandy had made the frozen beast.

  But my mother had an excuse Ferber didn’t. A few years earlier she’d had an operation to make her look like an Italian porn star but had so hated the flytrap mouth the surgeons gave her she’d had the operation reversed. Now she had no mouth.

  ‘Hey,’ my father said, ‘who do you think you’re kissing, Mr Wise Guy?’

  My mother shrugged. ‘He’s turned possessive,’ she said. She put a finger up to her temple and made a whirring motion, just as Vanessa had when informing me that she didn’t have to write to write.

  ‘I’m just admiring your wife,’ I told my father.

  ‘Wife! Who told you she’s my wife?’

  It was a fair question. ‘It’s just something I know,’ I said.

  ‘Well, you know wrong. I had a wife. This isn’t her.’

  It was like talking to Othello.

  ‘He thinks I’m his mistress,’ my mother whispered. ‘He thinks he’s left me for me.’

  ‘Well, I’m just admiring her whoever she is,’ I told him.

  It didn’t upset me that he was demented. Here was the advantage of never having liked your parents, or never having known them entirely sane.

  ‘Look at those legs,’ he said. I could hear the saliva sluicing through his teeth.

  ‘They’re good,’ I said.

  ‘Good? They’re magnificent. My ex-wife had legs like those, but not quite so magnificent. Hers banged together in the middle. These are the bee’s knees.’

  ‘Do you take this as an insult to you?’ I asked my mother. ‘Or a compliment?’

  ‘Neither. I just take it that he’s cuckoo.’

  ‘You really don’t mind?’

  ‘He’s company. He’s actually better company cuckoo than he was –’ She couldn’t find the word for what he was.

  ‘What are you two whispering about?’ he asked.

  ‘He was agreeing with you,’ my mother said.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About me.’

  He pushed his face in my direction, trying to focus on me. An idea seemed to dawn on him. ‘Do you want her?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Why, what’s wrong with her?’

  ‘Nothing’s wrong with her. She’s fantastic. I just feel I should leave her to you.’

  ‘We could have her together,’ he said. ‘She wouldn’t mind that.’

  He winked a half-blind bloodshot eye at my mother and then turned again to me. ‘Do you know what a spit-roast is?’

  ‘All right, Gordon,’ my mother said. ‘That’s enough.’

  Through the dementia clouds my mother’s words had their old effect. At once the life went out of him. ‘Go back to your jigsaw,’ she ordered him. ‘You’re doing the moat, remember. Just the s
traight pieces to start with.’

  He did as he was told. It was the first time in my life I had ever felt sorry for him. Maybe I was feeling sorry for me at the same time, not because I’d missed out on spit-roasting my mother, but on account of the defeated wickedness we shared. It was so hard to be a black-hearted libidinous old devil any more. So hard to be scurrilous with grace. So hard to be a man, full stop.

  Dementia was the only opportunity left, and even this they took away from us.

  Now that poor constipated Little Gidding was a goner, I wondered about replacing him with my father. A new sort of hero for our clapped-out times – an old, mad, male fool, more Othello than Lear, who no longer knew who his wife was and so had taken her as his mistress, happy to share either with his son, except he was too crazed to know who his son was. How’s that for visceral, Mr Clayburgh? That’s if my father had any viscera left.

  That’s if any of us did.

  He was back at his jigsaw, sorting out the straight pieces with bits of moat on them. (Me in forty years? Me in twenty?) My mother was watching over him, to be sure he was doing it right, but also because she was wanting me to go now so she could get back to it herself.

  ‘But you’re all right?’ I asked her.

  She gave me one of her big, expressive Wilmslow shrugs. I remembered her saying, the last time I visited her, that she wished she were Jewish like everybody else in the business. ‘But, Ma, you are Jewish,’ I’d told her. ‘Am I?’ ‘Yes, we all are.’ She’d thought about it. ‘Well, that’s all right then,’ she’d said.

  But something had changed. ‘What did you just ask me?’ she said.

  ‘I asked if you were all right.’

  ‘All right! What’s to be all right about?’

  I couldn’t think of anything to suggest.

  So what was Jeffrey? Was he gay or was he just playing at it? North of Nantwich, these days, there was no knowing who was or wasn’t gay. Maybe it had always been like that and I had been too busy doing the other thing to notice. Perhaps that was why Quinton O’Malley had pressed me with such urgency to stay up north, in the hope I’d discover what was really going on and spill the beans.