Zoo Time

by Howard Jacobson

  Thinking about it now, I remember how my mother used to take Jeffrey and me to Manchester on the train to buy bits and pieces for the boutique – the plunder lines, she called them – non-designer scarves and stockings, sunglasses, impulse-purchase jewellery (not too expensive) for a single revolving stand that stood by the wooden till, now an electronic cash and PIN point. She always used the same porter when we returned to Piccadilly Station with boxes to take back on the train, a great burly bear of a man with round arms and red cheeks who never failed to give us sweets or comment favourably on what my mother was wearing. One evening when we’d stayed late in Manchester for a Chinese meal I saw him at a nearby table wearing lipstick and a wig. The other men he was with – railway porters or drivers, I decided, on account of their all-round muscularity and oiliness – were dressed as women too. He waved. He was wearing gloves such as you see in faded photographs of waitresses serving tea in Harrogate in the 1920s, fingerless and with lace around the wrists. The men at his table laughed as he made dainty movements with his fat porter’s fingers. I wasn’t sure whether to wave back. I wasn’t sure I got the joke. When I looked a second time I realised he was dressed pretty much like my mother, particularly in the matter of the shortness of the skirt. Seeing my confusion, she explained that Derek – I hadn’t realised she was on first-name terms with him – was experimenting with his identity. ‘Are they all experimenting with their identity?’ I asked. My mother said of course not, the others were just friends helping Derek through a crisis, but even at the time I suspected she was wrong – half the working-class men in Manchester were experimenting with their identity, and using wigs and lipstick in their hypotheses.

  I wasn’t tempted myself but Jeffrey Cuddly Wuddly, as he was then, might have been. It’s possible he didn’t in fact sit forward at the table and look intently into space when my mother used the word ‘identity’, but then again it’s possible he did. You know quite early on, I suspect, whether any of this is going to appeal. Jeffrey saw something of himself in a railway man in a short skirt; where I, even before I knew what any of them were, caught my reflection only in scoundrels, perjurers, lechers and novelists.

  It was late afternoon when I got to the shop. Jeffrey was in earnest conversation with a woman I thought I recognised from the newspapers. A bit still in the face for a footballer’s wife, unless she’d come straight from Botox. And too old when I looked a second time. I guessed she was nearer Poppy’s age than Vanessa’s, but with that air of not knowing what you’re for any more that you see on models no longer young but which I’d never seen on Poppy. Poppy knew what she was for. Inflaming me.

  Jeffrey signalled to me to entertain myself for a few minutes. There were places in the world where a man who ran a provincial boutique would have been proud to introduce an important customer to his distinguished writer brother, but Wilmslow wasn’t one of them. What I was hoping was that she’d recognise me and abash Jeffrey by saying she’d read everything I’d written, loved every word, and demand he introduce us. A hope that only goes to show there’s a shlock novelist in all of us.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ he said, kissing me, after she’d left. He kissed me strangely, dodging my face as though frightened to get too close, unless he was frightened that I’d be frightened. He told me about the woman he’d been talking to. I was right. A model past her best. ‘Beautiful still,’ Jeffrey went on, ‘though she’s had a bit of work done.’

  ‘Bit of work? Jeffrey, she looks as though she’s been in taxidermy for the last decade. Can she smile?’

  ‘Nothing to smile about,’ he said. ‘Her husband’s just walked out on her.’

  ‘It happens,’ I said.

  ‘Not when you’ve got a brain tumour.’

  There was a slim chance Jeffrey had made that up to discountenance me – it was the sort of thing he did – but he looked furious with me for my unthinking flippancy and I couldn’t risk challenging him.

  I blew out my cheeks. ‘Sheesh,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Yes, sheesh,’ he repeated.

  ‘Well, you’re looking well, anyway,’ I said, after a decent interval. Though that too appeared to anger him.

  He was taller and slimmer than me, a drainpipe man ambiguously foppish in an Alexander McQueen jacket with metallic lapels worn over a striped T-shirt and ripped jeans. Was he dressed up or dressed down? The secret to his style was that one never knew. He wore the lightest of mascara, so light I might have imagined it. His hair flopped about even more than mine did. At the moment of his kissing me he had flicked it out of his eyes so that it caressed my cheek like a whip made of feathers. The flick had petulance in it. Could be difficult if crossed, the gesture said. Then the kiss of the feathery whip.

  Did he kiss-flick his women like that? Did he kiss-flick his men?

  He always told me about his women, describing them in embarrassing detail, enumerating the things they did to him – it was always what they did to him – but I wondered whether he made them up, not to disguise his true interests but to help me see there were alternatives to Vanessa. It was an unspoken family fiction that I regretted my marriage to Vanessa and would escape her if I could. Though our father was a hobbled dormouse – or at least had been until dementia freed him into intermittent licentiousness – we entertained the fancy (by ‘we’ I mean my mother, Jeffrey and me) that Ablemen men were macho bastards who took no shit from anyone, least of all a woman. That I took shit from Vanessa needed some explaining and I wasn’t going to explain it with reference to the feelings I had for Poppy. Not in Wilmslow. So I let them think I was simultaneously afraid of Vee and deeply sorry for her for being married to me. Which left them to suppose I could be won away eventually by stories of women no less beautiful than her, no less statuesque than her, but a hell of a lot more accommodating.

  As though such a combination of virtues could anywhere have existed . . .

  Jeffrey had found a new pub he liked on Alderley Edge, though what he really liked was powering down the lanes of Cheshire in a car that was built to rip up a racetrack with me next to him evincing terror.

  ‘Problems with your exhaust?’ I wondered.

  ‘It’s meant to sound like that.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Ha, ha!’ he said. It wasn’t laughter. He actually said the words. Separately. A ‘Ha’ followed by a ‘ha!’

  ‘Is that an answer?’

  ‘Was yours a question?’

  He was unable to believe I didn’t covet his car.

  He told me how quickly he could get from zero miles an hour to a hundred and fifty.

  ‘Don’t give a shit, Jeffrey,’ I said.

  He told me something about the steering.

  ‘Give even less of a shit, Jeffrey.’

  He shook his head and said ‘Ha, ha!’ again.

  ‘Next you’ll be telling me you don’t know what we’re in,’ he said.

  ‘Let me tell you something, Jeffrey – I don’t know what we’re in.’

  ‘Is this a writer’s thing?’

  ‘What we’re in? Well, no writer I know has anything like this.’

  ‘No, is pretending not to care about cars something writers do?’

  ‘I do care about cars. I care they don’t crash when I’m in them.’

  He lowered the roof with a button and hit the accelerator. The wind blew wonderfully through his hair, mine remained plastered down by fear.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, tapping me on the thigh, ‘isn’t this wonderful? Admit it, it’s fucking lovely.’

  Even when Jeffrey didn’t say ‘admit it’, the command was implicit in all our conversations. In Jeffrey’s view I was in denial. Denial about my marriage to Vanessa, women, cars, the success Jeffrey had made of the business, fashion, Wilmslow, money – in short everything I had and wished I didn’t, and everything that Jeffrey had that I wished I did. ‘Admit it’ meant admit you want to be me. That I was the person I wanted to be, doing the thing I wanted to be doing, was not something my brother cou
ld conceive.

  As it happened, though no thanks to his intelligence, his scepticism was well founded. I might not have wanted to be Jeffrey but I hadn’t particularly relished being me for the last four or five years. This was not my era. The times were out of joint etc. I was permanently constipated. I had a criminal record with Oxfam. They were giving me too many stars on Amazon – no one wanted to read someone as good as that. Even Poppy – who I definitely did want – would have been an easier proposition had I been someone else. Not her daughter’s husband, say. Though you have to ask how much, in that case, I would have wanted her.

  None of which, of course, was I willing to admit to Jeffrey Cutie Pie.

  A funny thing about this getting me to ‘admit it’. Jeffrey wasn’t the only one. Vanessa’s working assumption was that I lied about everything and would never be well – free of constipation, free of solipsism, free of self – until I came completely clean. Bruce Elseley was trying to get me to admit I was plagiarising him. My agent wanted me to admit I was secretly a thriller writer. Sandy Ferber wanted me to admit I couldn’t wait to be the god of the thirty-second app. Mishnah Grunewald had wanted me to admit I was in denial about being Jewish. And there was someone else – the royal novelist and biographer Lisa Godalming who wanted me to admit I was a closet reader of the soap histories of Tudor monarchs she pounded out for Radio 4 listeners and only pretended not to give a monkey’s whether Richard the Twenty-Seventh could or could not sire an heir while reforming Parliament and remaining a Catholic.

  ‘Admit it,’ she said when we last met at a party, ‘underneath those sheets you’re beavering away.’

  ‘Yes, but not at your prose, Lisa.’

  That wasn’t gratuitousness. We’d been lovers briefly and so could be rude to each other with affection. And besides, she didn’t believe me.

  She blew me kisses when she left the party and promised to send me her latest.

  It arrived early the next morning by courier. It was inscribed

  For

  My dear Guy,

  Enjoy –

  Your secret’s safe with me

  Not something you want your wife to find. But that wasn’t the only reason I put it through the shredder. I didn’t want posterity to come upon such a book on my shelves and take its author’s assumption as a fact. No, I was not in denial. No, I was not beavering away at Lisa Godalming under my sheets. No, I did not have a secret hankering to read shit.

  25

  Terminus

  ‘Admit it –’ Jeffrey said, as we pulled into the pub forecourt in time to see the sun go down.

  I stopped him there. ‘Fuck off, Jeffrey,’ I said.

  He wouldn’t let me buy the drinks. They had interesting vodkas here and I didn’t know my way around them. Something else I was bound to be in denial about: how little, compared to my brother, I knew about drink. We’d had this out. ‘I’m a wine man,’ I’d told him. ‘If you want to test your wits with me when it comes to wine –’

  ‘Wits! You see? That’s you all over. I’m having a drink, you’re taking an intelligence test. And by the way, by drink we mean vodka up here. Wine’s so out. Such a depressant – ugh.’

  ‘I’ve read about the vodka rage,’ I said. ‘I’ve read you drink it through your eyes. That sounds more of a depressant than red wine to me. Doesn’t it depress your sight?’

  ‘You talking about eyeballing? Yeah. But that’s students.’

  ‘Not you?’

  ‘Are you asking me if I’ve eyeballed? Of course, once or twice. Haven’t you?’

  ‘Why would I?’

  ‘You’re a writer? Aren’t you supposed to experience stuff ?’

  ‘Not that kind of stuff. Jesus, Jeffrey, through your eyes? You’re a human being. Aren’t you supposed to treat yourself like one?’

  ‘I don’t do it any more. Not much. Not all the time. Just occasionally. These things come and go quickly up here.’

  ‘So does your eyesight. But what’s this crap about up here? We’re in Alderley Edge not Cutting Edge, Jeffrey. Up here is the end of the fucking world.’

  ‘Just because you’ve left?’

  ‘No – I left because it’s the end of the fucking world.’

  ‘If you knew who lived here you wouldn’t say that.’

  ‘Who lives here?’

  He reeled off names, ersatz, quasi Latin American names of the Ryanair jet set, the people who emailed you offers of Viagra and penis extensions – Felisha, Tamela, Shemika, Alysha, Shera, Teisha, Shakira . . .

  ‘Are these Spanish waitresses?’

  ‘Ha, ha! Don’t pretend you don’t know.’

  ‘I honestly have never heard of them.’

  ‘Shows how out of touch you are. Do you know how many top photographers and interior designers live in Cheshire?’

  ‘Tell me.’

  He made his hands flap like butterflies. ‘You’re in Happeningsville,’ he said. And as though to prove it he rose from the table, went over to the bar, and returned with a plate of cold meze for each of us. Meze! Now call Cheshire the end of the fucking world!

  ‘So who’s fucking you right now, Jeffrey?’ I asked him when he handed me my plate. ‘Someone from Wilmslow? Someone I know? Someone whose mother I know?’

  ‘Ha, ha!’ he said. Ha. Ha!

  ‘Is she a joke?’

  ‘You wouldn’t say she was a joke if you saw her.’

  ‘What are her distinguishing characteristics?’

  Before he could tell me, an Asian boy with a temple dancer’s body and hair as floppy as Jeffrey’s came over from the bar and kissed him on the mouth. He was wearing a Savile Row striped suit with a public-school scarf thrown around his throat. Something made me think of Billy Bunter’s chum, Hurree Jamset Ram Singh, the Nabob of Bhanipur. Once again Jeffrey did not introduce us. We nodded to each other awkwardly.

  ‘The confusedness is terrific,’ I said to Jeffrey after the Nabob had left us.

  Jeffrey did not pick up the allusion. He was not a reader. Maybe drinking vodka through your eyes was another explanation of why no one read any more: you opened a book and you saw not words but vodka.

  ‘I couldn’t remember his name, that’s why I didn’t –’ he explained.

  ‘Shakira? Tamisho?’

  ‘He cuts my hair.’

  ‘Jeffrey,’ I said. ‘Tell me something . . .’

  He knew what I was going to ask him.

  ‘Do I go both ways? Yes.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to ask you that.’

  ‘What were you going to ask me?’

  ‘How much it costs to get a good haircut these days.’

  I expected him to say ‘Ha, ha!’ but it appeared he had stopped finding me amusing.

  ‘It’s just that Vanessa does mine,’ I said, ‘and I think it’s time I put myself in the hands of a professional.’

  ‘I agree with you,’ he said, looking at my hair. ‘I always wanted to ask you if Vanessa cut it.’

  ‘You can tell it’s not professional?’

  ‘You can tell it’s been cut by someone who doesn’t like you.’

  ‘You can tell that from a cut?’

  ‘I can tell it from your unhappiness, Guy.’

  ‘Ha, ha!’ I said. ‘Who’s unhappy?’

  Denial again.

  ‘Suit yourself,’ he said.

  I leaned forward and held him by his wrist. It was slender and hairless. Did he shave his wrists? I wondered. Was the hair on his head the only hair on his body? Men were shaving their chests and their backs, their legs, their balls, their anuses. In Happeningsville Wilmslow, God knows where else. Did Shakira run his razor along Jeffrey’s perineum?

  ‘If you’re sorry you told me you go both ways,’ I said, ‘don’t be. I am not in the least judgemental. If anything I’m fascinated. I can’t imagine it.’

  ‘What is it you can’t imagine?’

  Shakira running his razor along your perineum, was one answer. Putting your dick inside a man was, frankly,
another. But I didn’t see that we could go that far back into Jeffrey’s psychology, or indeed into mine. And I accept that whatever it is you can’t imagine is a mark against you, not for.

  ‘This bi business,’ I said. ‘This wanting both. Isn’t a sexual choice by its nature an act of separation – this not that, her not her, and even more, though by the same logic, her not him?’

  ‘But who’s asking you to make a sexual choice?’

  ‘Isn’t that just what we do when we pick a mate – we reject the others? Isn’t it discrimination that gives desire its savour?’

  ‘Christ! Is that from one of your books?’

  Have I said that I’m a mind-reader? I could read Jeffrey’s mind, anyway. ‘Then no wonder they don’t sell,’ he was thinking.

  ‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’ll put it bluntly. When I fuck a woman I am, among other things, very definitely and deliberately not fucking a man.’

  ‘What about another woman?’

  I took too long to answer. Behind Vanessa, sitting astride me and calling me Guido, loomed the shadow of her mother standing like a heron on one leg.

  ‘There you are,’ Jeffrey went on.

  ‘There I am what?’

  ‘There you are silently admitting to yourself that sex is not exclusive. If I’m sucking off a man while a woman’s sucking off me, who gets precedence? Which is me doing to the one what I am very definitely and deliberately not doing to the other?’

  I had no answer to this, in so far as I understood it, that wasn’t prissy. What about love? I wanted to say. What about decency and self-respect, for fuck’s sake? Deep down in the sewerage of my morality I even heard the Bible rumbling about ‘abomination’.

  Visceral, I told myself, think viscerally.

  ‘So do you have no preference at all?’ I asked.

  ‘When it comes to?’

  ‘Oh – oh – I don’t know – oh – say blow jobs.’

  I expected him to say, ‘It’s so over, up here, so yesterday, the blow job.’