Zoo Time

by Howard Jacobson

  But he answered me with candid directness. ‘I prefer getting them.’

  ‘No, I mean preference as to who you get them from.’

  ‘Man or woman?’

  ‘Man or woman.’

  ‘Depends on the man or woman, Guy. These things don’t divide on gender lines.’

  The right-on prick! How had he done it? How – with his dick in one person’s mouth and his own lips around someone else’s – had he seized the moral high ground?

  I changed the subject. Asked him whether his television series was still on track. He looked uninterested. They were talking, he told me. Asked him about the shop. Phenomenal. He looked melancholy about it.

  In return he asked me about my writing, but didn’t listen to my answers. He gave the air of not wanting to humiliate me.

  And then, without any warning, he began to cry.

  ‘Jeffrey,’ I said, offering to put a brotherly arm around him. ‘Jeffrey, what’s the matter?’

  He ran the sleeve of his lovely jacket across his nose. ‘I lied to you earlier,’ he said.

  ‘That’s OK.’

  ‘Don’t say that’s OK. You don’t know what I lied to you about. It’s not OK. You remember the woman I was talking to in the shop when you arrived? Pamala Vickery? I told you her husband had walked out on her and she’d been diagnosed with a brain tumour.’

  Ha, ha, so I was right. ‘Yes, I did wonder,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, you did wonder, did you?’

  ‘Jeffrey, it’s OK. Truly.’

  ‘Truly?’

  ‘Truly.’

  He wiped his nose again and then made a fist of the hand he’d wiped it with. I leaned back, fearing he was going to hit me.

  He didn’t. But what he said was worse than any blow. ‘Fuck you, Guy,’ he all but spat at me. ‘Fuck you!’

  I put my hand in front of my face.

  He pulled it away. ‘Let me tell you something truly,’ he went on, ‘you know-all cunt. There are things you don’t know. And there are things that you can’t tell me are OK.’

  ‘OK,’ I said.

  ‘It isn’t. Nothing’s OK. Get that into your head – nothing is OK.’

  I grew anxious. The last person who had said that nothing was OK was Merton.

  ‘If that’s how it looks to you, Jeffrey –’

  ‘Looks to me! Christ, Guy, I might as well be talking to Dad. It’s not Pamala that’s got a brain tumour, right?’

  I waited, not wanting to know what I knew was coming. ‘Oh, Jeffrey,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t “Oh, Jeffrey” me. I haven’t finished. I’m the reason Pamala’s husband has walked out on her.’

  ‘So she can look after you?’

  ‘So she can live with me – what’s left of me.’

  ‘Are you playing at this?’

  ‘Why would I play?’

  ‘Oh, Jeffrey,’ I said again.

  ‘You don’t have to be sorry for me. I’ve had fun.’

  ‘I know you have.’

  ‘You know nothing. I’ve had fun with everybody.’

  He looked at me with a curious insistence. ‘Everybody,’ he repeated.

  ‘You’ve told me – men and women. What you do is your business. But, honestly, how bad is it?’

  ‘You’ve not understood. By everybody I mean everybody.’

  And then I did understand. I read it through the vapours of vodka swirling about his eyeballs. By everybody he meant Vanessa.

  So that was what she did in Wilmslow. My brother.

  ‘Are you telling me you’ve been sleeping with Vanessa?’

  ‘I’ve always liked Vanessa.’

  ‘That’s not an answer to my question.’

  ‘I read an interview you gave to the Wilmslow Reporter once –’

  ‘You wouldn’t have been able to understand it. You don’t read.’

  ‘I read this. You said you liked writing about wild guys. Well, you’re no wild guy. The wild guy in your marriage is Vanessa.’

  ‘Which justifies you sleeping with her.’

  ‘I’m winding you up.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you’re a sanctimonious prick.’

  ‘And I haven’t got a brain tumour?’

  ‘That too. And because you’ve never listened to a word I say. You aren’t listening now. I said everybody. Not just Vanessa. Fucking everybody.’

  His look was so wild I wondered if he’d been having an affair with Wilhelmina Dementieva. But no, no, not even Jeffrey Sweetheart fucked his mother.

  But that thought triggered another. Not his mother, Vanessa’s mother.

  Goats and monkeys!

  ‘Poppy!’ I had tried to make it a question but it came out an expostulation.

  He smirked at me. ‘Unless I’m winding you up again.’

  So was that smirk an acknowledgement that he knew his fucking Poppy would be even more painful to me than his fucking Vanessa?

  I couldn’t allow him to think he had my number there. I rose from the table and went to the bar. Not to pour alcohol into each eyeball or smoke a cigarette through my ear, but to attempt some deep breathing and ring for a taxi.

  One came in ten minutes. On the way out I put a chilled hand on Jeffrey’s shoulder. He didn’t move. ‘I’m sorry about your tumour,’ I said. ‘I’d be even sorrier if you’d allow me to be. But you will let me know if there is anything I can do for you.’

  In the taxi to the railway station it occurred to me he might have been lying about the tumour, that this was just another of those dead faints he used to fall into to get me banished and himself carried into our mother’s bed. I had no idea why. He had her to himself now. And I was already banished. To sugar the pill of his confession, maybe, assuming a confession was what it was. To explain his behaviour. It wasn’t him that had been sleeping with my wife or mother-in-law, it was the lump in his brain. But then if he didn’t have a lump in his brain, why had he bothered to confess?

  It was only as I was getting out of the taxi that I took the full impact of what had happened that day. I’d had another of those encounters with my brother in which it was impossible to disentangle truth from fiction, or sanity from madness. My father had asked me if I fancied joining him in a spit roast of my mother. My mother had understood what he meant – which alarmed me – and was only fractionally annoyed. Had they done this in the past? On the QE2? All right, he was senile. But we go senile in a way that reflects our natures. I’d always wondered who my father was. Now I knew. He was a sleazebag. Perhaps with a lump in his brain himself. We were the sons of a whoremonger, Jeffrey Tumour and I. And maybe of a whore as well. We were the children of the damned.

  Jeffrey wanted me to know he’d been sleeping with either Vanessa or Poppy, but what if he wanted me to know more than that? What if he’d been sleeping with them both?

  I wouldn’t write the books I write if I didn’t have a tireless imagination. I get quicker than most men from a whisper to a kiss, from a kiss to an affair, and from an affair to a sexual barbecue.

  One at a time was bad enough, but what if – between them – my wife and her mother had been spit-roasting Jeffrey?

  Not easy, but I put nothing past them.

  But spit-roasted or not, my brother was dying. And if he was lying? To lie about that was a sort of dying in itself.

  An involuntary cry escaped me as I was paying the fare, a sudden stab in a place I couldn’t locate, as though it was the memory of pain.

  ‘You all right?’ the driver asked me.

  ‘Me? All things considered,’ I replied, ‘I’m fine.’

  I had to run to catch my train.

  26

  Fat Checker

  The journey from Monkey Mia to Broome passed off without incident. Poppy slept in the back of the van. Vanessa concentrated on the driving. We couldn’t do it in one day, though Vanessa did suggest she and I take turns to drive through the night.

  ‘I’m too tired,’ I told her.

  ‘Why, what
have you been doing to be tired?’ she asked.

  I could have said, ‘I’ve been killing spiders,’ but I didn’t. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ I said instead, rubbing at my eyes to suggest the labour that was thought.

  Saying I’d been thinking was always a good way of shutting down conversation with Vanessa. She was frightened I’d bore her by telling her what I’d been thinking.

  We arrived in Broome late the following evening and checked straight into a hotel with a view of the mangrove swamps. I spent an hour sorting out the Wi-Fi connections for my laptop and getting my messages.

  ‘Can’t you wait?’ Vanessa said.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For one more night without your career taking over our lives again.’

  ‘What career?’

  ‘That’s exactly what I mean.’

  But I heard the bad news humming in the machine and couldn’t wait to retrieve it. Once upon a time it was the Oracle. Now it was the Apple. But disaster is still disaster, no matter who’s foretelling it.

  Among the Viagra and erection dross, I found an email from Bruce Elseley, who shouldn’t have had my email address, threatening legal action and wondering if I wanted to come and hear him read in a bookshop in Kentish Town; another from Merton, at that time still alive, attaching a belated review of my last novel but two – the best review he had ever seen, in his opinion, a review of breathtaking insight, only a pity it appeared four years after publication and in a journal no one read; and American Traveler were querying a few points in an article I’d done for them about the Barossa Valley. The one thing all writers dread, no matter where they are, is any communication, short of ‘can’t find fault with a single word’, from an American fact checker; but in a hotel in Broome at the end of a long and emotionally exhausting trip, an American fact checker with ‘a couple of queries’ is the least welcome person on the planet.

  Hearing Vanessa and me discussing the fact checker the following morning over breakfast, Poppy thought we said fat checker.

  ‘How do you know she’s fat?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t,’ I said. ‘She might be fat for all I know. But the word is fact not fat. She checks facts.’

  ‘Which is strange,’ Vanessa said, ‘given that you wouldn’t know a fact if it fell on you.’

  ‘Exactly,’ I said.

  ‘So what’s she checking?’ Poppy asked.

  ‘It’s a misnomer,’ I said. ‘What she actually is, is style police.’

  ‘She’s a fat-style policeman,’ Vanessa said, pleased with herself, as though she’d made a joke.

  Poppy thought about it. ‘Then maybe what she checks is fat, after all,’ she said. ‘Like a butcher.’

  ‘Are you saying I have a fat style, Poppy?’

  We exchanged shy glances, like schoolchildren who’d been behind the bike shed all lunchtime.

  I was secretly impressed with her. It took more critical sophistication than I thought she possessed to think of writing as akin to meat, capable of being too greasy, needing to be made more lean. Had she changed in the time I held her in my arms, with one leg on the tarantula? Had my kisses turned her into a literary critic?

  In her honour, anyway, that was what I decided to call the woman from American Traveler from now on – the fat checker.

  The consequence of my hearing from the fat checker, who was also worrying we were running late with copy, was that I had to stay in and work on my article while Vanessa and her mother began their exploration of Broome. There were three main areas of concern about what I’d written. 1) The fat checker didn’t understand it. 2) The fat checker didn’t like it. 3) The fat checker didn’t think any of it was true.

  These three were not unrelated. ‘Hyperbole,’ I wrote back to her. ‘You are not to take what I wrote literally.’

  ‘How then am I to take it?’ she emailed back.

  ‘As a grand gesture to an essential truth, without my stooping to the banalities of factuality.’

  ‘So when you say,’ she said, on the phone from New York this time – it must have been the dead of night or the dead of morning, that’s how dedicated to checking fat she was – ‘that the waitress at the Mount Pleasant Winery Barbecue and Bistro was a mermaid who had just stepped out of a barrel of Shiraz, her long flowing hair wet and purple with the grape, you mean she looked like a mermaid?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘No. That makes it sound like a flight of fancy on my part, whereas the waitress saw herself as mermaid.’

  ‘Can you substantiate that?’

  ‘No, not really. It was my impression. It was the way she held herself.’

  ‘So it is a flight of fancy?’

  ‘Well, it’s part fancy, part intuition. But I still wouldn’t want to say she looked like a mermaid. The simile diminishes her, diminishes me, and diminishes the reader. She was a mermaid.’

  ‘But she hadn’t actually stepped out of a barrel of Shiraz?’

  ‘Of course not. But she could have. And in the end, who’s to say she hadn’t? Are you worried that someone might try it in their own home?’

  ‘Don’t you think that patrons of the Mount Pleasant Winery would be put off their wine if they thought a mermaid had been swimming in it?’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t. But I doubt she had actually been swimming in it.’

  ‘Then why does she have wine in her hair? How did it get there?’

  It’s a law of writing for an American magazine that the fat checker always wins. ‘I’ll rewrite it,’ I said.

  ‘Moving on,’ she said. ‘When you describe the glasses of wine at the Henschke Winery as bouncing light like the window of a Bond Street jeweller’s, do you mean like the window or the jewellery in it?’

  I thought about it. ‘I think I meant that the wine dancing in the glass reminded me of jewels bouncing light in the windows of, say, Tiffany’s.’

  ‘In Bond Street? Isn’t Tiffany’s in Old Bond Street?’

  ‘Well, we call it all Bond Street, Old and New. But yes, Old Bond Street, if that would help your readers to locate it.’

  ‘And bouncing?’

  ‘Yes, bouncing light.’

  Now it was her turn to pause. I wondered if she was talking to the subeditor who was talking to the commissioning editor who was talking to the publisher who was talking to the owner of the magazine. She, too, I could hear, was wondering. In fact, it sounded as though they all were. ‘We are wondering,’ she said at last, ‘if we could find another way of putting that for our readers?’

  ‘That being “bouncing”?’

  ‘Yes, and “dancing” and “mermaid” and “barrel” –’

  ‘And “Shiraz”?’ I added, moving on.

  ‘Yes, and that.’

  I thanked her, rang off, and stepped out onto the balcony of the hotel. Had it not looked so poisonous out there, had the jellyfish not been waiting to put an end to the few cardiorespiratory functions the fat checker had left me with, I might have jumped.

  Why was I in Broome? Why was I anywhere?

  It can help to think about home when the nausea of travel strikes, but home was Elseley hanging from a hotel door in women’s stockings with an orange in his mouth, home was Flora McBeth systematically removing from the shelves of the country’s bookshops all books ever written by a man, home was . . . Where was home?

  And this Broome the two witches had brought me to – what sort of hell from hell was this? I stepped back from the balcony in revulsion. Disgusting, the heat, the crawling mangrove (‘Is it the mangrove that’s crawling or are there crawling things in it?’), the slow undulations of Roebuck Bay whose waters moved like soup (‘mushroom? tomato? jellyfish?’), the osprey gliding in their infinite patience, imperturbable in their conviction that life was food and food was life and that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know . . .

  Food and desire . . .

  Where were they now, the witchy women of my life? ‘And where, where, where is my Gypsy wife tonight?’ – Leonard Cohen, last of t
he old school of daredevil masochists.

  So where, where, where were my Gypsy wives? Pearl diving? On Cable Beach, showing off their figures to the musclemen? Riding a camel, one either side of his hump, Poppy’s fingers clasped like a child’s around her daughter’s middle?

  Out of the heat of my disgusting desire they rose from the Roebuck Bay mangroves, two mermaids shaking droplets of Shiraz from their empurpled toxic hair.

  Something I haven’t mentioned.

  On the night I killed the spider, the night all moral time stopped still, I returned at last to the camper van and found Vanessa gone. On my pillow, as though in mocking replica of what had been on Poppy’s, a note.

  ‘Just taking the air, the night too beautiful to miss. Don’t wait up for me. Kisses. V.’

  27

  Wildebeest

  We stayed a fortnight in Broome. Vanessa wanted to stay for ever.

  ‘This is the frontier life I’ve always longed for,’ she said.

  She’d never mentioned the frontier life when we’d lived thatched-roofed in Barnes or when we moved into the three-storey house in Notting Hill Gate. (At this stage Poppy was still living with us. She decamped to Oxfordshire only after we got back from Australia, for reasons of what I suppose you’d have to call decency.)

  I registered surprise that the frontier life was what she’d always longed for, but Vanessa was proof against my ironies. ‘I never used the word to you,’ she said, ‘because I knew you wouldn’t know what it meant. You’re such a townie.’

  A townie, me? I reminded her I came from Wilmslow. ‘From the window of my bedroom, Vee, I grew up seeing cows.’

  ‘Describe a cow.’

  ‘Sheep, then.’

  But since she was so enamoured of it, I left Broome to her. She returned the van and hired the most machismo jeep she could find. She loved the architecture and engineering of outback vehicles, the bull bars and the big tyres, the cans strapped to the roof, the noise the doors made when you flung them closed, the red dust on everything. For the two weeks we were there she became a well-known personality, driving at speed through the town, honking her horn and waving at the friends she’d made. She bought a new wardrobe of khaki shorts and ankle boots. She spoke in Aussie slang. At night she went out and drank with the Aborigines, the sound of whose laughter and brawling could be heard a hundred miles away.