Zoo Time

by Howard Jacobson

  It seemed to me I had to pace my responses. And not to offer it as my opinion that the whole thing was just Jeffrey playing dead again to get me into trouble. ‘I didn’t think you liked Jeffrey,’ I said, after a while.

  ‘He was the one who never liked me. But that’s not the point. No one in your family did, and I don’t wish the poor boy ill.’

  Poor boy!

  Was that why? Was there someone else’s bed he hoped to be carried into, white as his own ghost and winking all the while at me?

  And if he was a poor boy to Vanessa, what was he to Poppy?

  ‘Is that true that he never liked you? I thought he liked you a lot.’

  She didn’t rise to that. Gave not a sign.

  She wanted to know whether it was malignant. I hadn’t asked. I assumed anything that grew in your brain was malignant. Wasn’t the brain itself a malignant organ? Wasn’t Jeffrey’s, at any rate?

  ‘Call him,’ I said. ‘I’ll give you his number.’

  She didn’t rise to that either.

  The news had a profound effect on her. She sat around for days, looking into space, sometimes shaking her head as though in an argument with an unseen foe. She didn’t eat. If I wasn’t mistaken she even did some writing.

  ‘You’d better get yourself checked over,’ she told me.

  ‘Do tumours run in families?’

  ‘Don’t ask me. Just do it.’

  ‘I’ve already got a colonoscopy booked.’

  ‘They won’t find a brain tumour looking there.’

  ‘That’s what I’m hoping.’

  Instead of turning on the radio or putting on headphones or in some other way blocking out the sound of me when she went to bed, she sat up and initiated a conversation. I couldn’t remember how long it had been since we’d talked in bed. Talked, not brawled.

  ‘Everybody’s dying,’ she said.

  She sounded so fatalistic I wondered how her mother was. ‘Oh, she’s fine. She’ll go on for ever. She’s probably the only one of us that will.’

  A thought occurred to me. ‘You?’

  She dodged the question. I didn’t read anything into that. She’d always wanted me to think she wasn’t long among the living. And she was a highly suggestible woman. A brain tumour was now just a matter of time.

  ‘What’s it for, Guido?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh –’ I was about to tell her but she interrupted me.

  ‘Apart from the books and the fame, what’s it about?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘That’s why you have to have the books and the fame.’

  She gave me a long, penetrating look. ‘Lucky you, then,’ she said, ‘for having both.’

  ‘And for having you,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, me.’ She flicked her fingers, as though that was all it would take for her to be gone. Already the tumour had started.

  It suited her to be talking about death. Her tears apart, I’d never seen her so blooming. But I decided against rolling on top of her.

  The next day – as though in fulfilment of the lie I’d told Garth Rhodes-Rhind – she took up her novel again.

  I did the same. But without my alter ego, Little Gidding. Gid the gadfly was, to employ Jeffrey-speak, so over. Jeffrey too, but in another sense entirely. And I could give Jeffrey immortality of sorts, no matter that it wasn’t the sort he prized.

  He was the way forward for me, anyway. A hero for our times. He went both ways where Little Gid went only one. Jeffrey was dying from the brain out, Little Gid was merely stillborn. And Jeffrey had outraged decency, betraying his brother, perhaps betraying his brother twice over, and in combinations even my imagination had to race to keep up with. Poor Little Gidding, like me, hadn’t got beyond popping his tongue down his wife’s mother’s throat.

  Should it all turn out to be the lie I had now convinced myself it was – well, that was even better. Heroes are meant to be liars nowadays. Lying’s the great cliché of the novel. Like story. Have your hero start his story – the false prick – with the promise that everything he tells you is a pack of lies and you’ll cream off however many readers are left out there.

  The literary lie is what you’re reduced to telling when invention is no longer prized, when fact is thought better of than fiction and publishers print the words ‘Based on a true story’ on the jacket of a popular novel. The literary liar is art’s last desperate cry for attention.

  Did I really want to go in the direction of the unreliable narrator, when there’d never in the history of literature been a good narration that was reliable?

  I didn’t know what I wanted. I was aflame with possibilities. And I was jealous of Jeffrey, whatever he was up to. Jealous of him for dying. Jealous of him for lying. Jealous of him for not lying. And jealous of him for lying with my wife stroke mother-in-law.

  Good. Jealousy works for some men. Especially if they’re writers.

  My jealousy was inseparable from my renewed creative excitement. I had only to picture Jeffrey with either of the women I loved and before I knew it I had written a chapter. What would happen when I got around seriously to picturing him with both of them God alone knew.

  In my dying world, Jeffrey was tomorrow. I had it in my power to write the seamiest novel of an admittedly exceedingly tame century.

  I no sooner saw him as my hero than my constipation eased.

  30

  Murdering Time

  A month or so later –

  ‘So that didn’t last long,’ Francis said.

  ‘It wasn’t a good enough idea.’

  ‘Not the idea. Your ma-in-law.’

  ‘Oh, that’s still a goer.’

  ‘Pity, I was hoping –’

  ‘Hoping what, Francis?’

  But he couldn’t even be bothered to frame a lewd suggestion. We were clapped out.

  He looked at his watch.

  He used to look at his watch every thirty minutes. Now it was every five.

  We were lunching in a new club in Soho. Clubs were like authors’ magazines – the worse things got, the more of them appeared.

  After he’d checked his watch, he checked the room. We were all doing this, looking to see who else was there. Though there was no one whose company we sought, anyone had to be better than the person we were with. We were murdering time. Now was no good. What happened next had to be better. And we’d think the same about whatever happened next, whether or not anything did. Life was some place, some time, some person, else.

  And if it still wasn’t to be found, it was probably on your mobile phone.

  The food the same. Wherever we ate, we discussed the menu of somewhere else. No one on the planet was where he wanted to be, discussing what he wanted to discuss, eating what he wanted to eat. We’d all slipped a cog.

  ‘Do you have another appointment, Francis?’ I asked.

  ‘Sorry, sorry, God no. I’m just on edge.’

  ‘Me too.’

  This time we both looked around the room. Everyone was on edge. People whom their dining companions didn’t want to be with were the object of greedy curiosity, even desire, on the part of people who didn’t want to be with whom they were with. We could have played musical chairs. When the music stops you change your life. It didn’t matter if you got it wrong. It would turn out shit whoever you chose.

  ‘You know what, Francis?’ I said. ‘I think we’re being prepared for the end of the world. We’re being broken gently into hating our lives so that we won’t feel too bad about losing them.’

  ‘I don’t hate my life.’

  I shrugged. I wasn’t going to tell him he was in denial.

  We sat silently, chewing children’s food. Mince and mash. Soon it would be mashed peach and rhubarb.

  ‘So,’ Francis said at last. ‘You’ve met Ferber.’

  ‘If you can call it meeting.’

  ‘He’s the future, Guy.’

  ‘There is no future.’

  ‘Maybe you’re right. But he’s the future that isn’t.’ />
  ‘I’ve just been up to see my brother. He’s the future that isn’t.’

  ‘I didn’t know you had a brother.’

  ‘Jeffrey. He runs the family business.’

  ‘What’s the family business?’

  ‘Christ, Francis, I’ve written about it often enough. Fashion. We have a boutique in Wilmslow.’

  ‘I thought that was fiction.’

  ‘It was fiction, told through the false prism of truth.’

  ‘Then you must be ashamed of it. Why has it only ever popped up incidentally? Why haven’t you written the great boutique novel?’

  ‘Good question. I’m writing it now. From my brother’s point of view.’

  ‘What’s wrong with your own?’

  See! Any minute Francis would be asking me to turn it into a memoir. ‘Based on a true story.’

  ‘I don’t interest myself any more. My brother does.’

  ‘How is he that different from you?’

  ‘Well, for starters, he’s gay.’

  ‘Who isn’t?’

  ‘Well, he isn’t. He’s both. Plus he’s dying. Unless he’s not.’

  Francis looked around the room. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, eyeing off a raddled woman with a deep ravined, wrinkled décolletage. ‘Is that what Poppy Eisenhower looks like?’ he asked.

  ‘It certainly is not.’

  A pale perplexed waitress, from some country even further gone into hating itself than ours, wondered if we’d like to order a dessert. Jelly? Rice pudding? It was a pointless enquiry. We wouldn’t like what came. We’d be better ordering something else and not liking that.

  Francis, notwithstanding, asked for Bakewell tart with ice cream, custard and double cream. He was very particular about it, as though the order mattered.

  The waitress returned to tell him Bakewell tart already came with double cream, so did that mean he wanted double, double cream?

  ‘Yes,’ I said for him.

  ‘And two spoons,’ Francis added.

  ‘That’s not two more spoons,’ I helped out. ‘Just the one that it comes with and then an extra one.’

  The waitress nodded and turned on her heel, understanding only that she didn’t understand.

  ‘I think I want to write about a degenerate,’ I said.

  ‘You were writing about a degenerate,’ Francis said. ‘You’re always writing about a degenerate.’

  ‘No, I mean the real thing. An actual degenerating person. Someone who fucks men and women, at the same time. Someone who drinks vodka through his eyes. Someone who lies about having a fucking brain tumour. Unless he’s telling the truth. In which case he’s an even more degenerating person.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘What else is there, Francis?’

  ‘Abuse. Drug-running. Wife-beating. Pimping. Murder. Child rape. Sex tourism.’

  ‘He probably does all that too.’

  ‘In Wilmslow?’

  ‘Why not? The place is full of footballers.’

  ‘Excellent. Make him a footballer.’

  ‘A footballer! Francis, it’s all I can do not to make him a French philosopher. I don’t think you’ve grasped what I’ve been saying. This is going to be a pornographic critique of the pornography of our time, which isn’t pornography. The pornography of our time is our failure to admit the pornographic.’

  He stared at me and put his fingers together. ‘OK,’ he said, or rather, ‘OKaaay.’

  ‘What do you mean OKaaay?’

  ‘I mean good, sounds really interesting, but don’t write it just yet.’

  ‘I’m writing it already.’

  ‘OKaaay, but don’t finish it just yet.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I finish it just yet?’

  ‘Because I can’t sell it just yet.’

  ‘Because?’

  ‘Because the pornography of our time is our failure to admit the pornographic.’

  ‘I just said that.’

  ‘Which goes to show I listen.’

  ‘And when do you think that’s going to change?’

  ‘When do you think I’m going to stop listening?’

  ‘No, Francis – when do you think we will once again be able to admit the pornographic?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘So what am I supposed to do in the meantime?’

  ‘Fuck your mother-in-law, you lucky so-and-so.’

  ‘For a living, Francis.’

  He consulted his watch and then looked around the room.

  At that moment Vanessa appeared, with Poppy on her arm.

  Followed by the waitress with an apple-and-rhubarb crumble, and no cream.

  31

  Every Living Writer is Shit

  Poppy hadn’t stayed with us long after our return from Australia.

  ‘I feel like a change,’ she’d announced on the third or fourth morning back.

  I sneaked a look at her but she didn’t sneak one at me.

  Vanessa was distraught. ‘Ma, you’ve just had a change. You haven’t even unpacked your suitcases.’

  ‘Well, that’s exactly what I’m thinking. While I’m packed I might as well do it.’

  ‘Do what? You can’t just head out into the street. Where are you going to go?’

  ‘I thought the Cotswolds. Stay in a little hotel and see if I can find a cottage somewhere hyphenated to rent for the summer. Do a bit of gardening. It’s not for ever.’

  (‘It’s just until your overheated husband cools down,’ was the sentence I heard next, though she didn’t speak it.)

  I offered to help her find a hotel but my offer was declined. They would do it together. Without me.

  It was like being left by two women simultaneously. ‘I’ll be back when I’m back,’ Vanessa said. ‘I’d appreciate it if you didn’t turn the house into a brothel while I’m away.’

  For the record, I had no history of turning this or any other house I’d lived in with Vanessa into a brothel. I didn’t even have a record of bringing women back for tea. If solitude grew too unbearable after a couple of days I would go out, and what I did out was no business of anyone else. I was a writer. I needed to get out sometimes. And I needed to do things that were the business of no one else.

  So scrupulous was I in the matter of keeping the outside separate from the inside that I put a distance of a mile between myself and home before ringing Philippa on my mobile. We hadn’t spoken since Adelaide, not least as I had other things on my mind, but she had emailed me a couple of times in the immediate aftermath of whatever you call what we had done, and while I hadn’t expected to contact her again, the sudden emptiness of my life made speaking to her a matter of necessity. I even wondered, not for the first time, if I’d been in love with her and hadn’t known it.

  ‘I find myself on my own,’ I said. ‘I don’t suppose there’s any chance of your flying out?’

  ‘I’m in Auckland.’

  ‘I know. Lovely name, Auckland. Come on. Jump on a plane.’

  ‘I don’t see it, Guy. How long have you been on your own for?’

  I tried to remember. ‘Three, four hours.’ It had actually been two, three hours, but Philippa wasn’t my wife: I didn’t owe her the truth.

  ‘And how long are you going to be on your own for?’

  Again I thought it was enough to be approximate. ‘Three, four days. Could be more.’

  ‘And you want me to fly out to keep you company for that?’

  ‘Well, we had only one night in Adelaide.’

  ‘Yes, but we were both on the spot. Lusten, I don’t think I’m up for thuhs.’

  ‘Thuhs?’

  ‘Helping you through your boredom.’

  ‘You didn’t mind in Adelaide.’

  ‘I hadn’t realised it was boredom. I thought we were talking luhterature.’

  ‘We could do more of that.’

  She fell silent. Then she said, ‘Thuhs must be costing you a fortune.’

  I knew a brush-off when I heard one. Suddenly I realised I
had been in love with her. ‘I could come to you,’ I said.

  There was another long pause. Then, ‘I don’t thuhnk that would be a good idea,’ she said.

  ‘Why not? Is there someone else?’

  ‘I have a partner, you know that.’

  ‘And I have a wife. I meant someone else on top of someone else.’

  ‘Suhnce you ask – yes.’

  ‘Another writer?’

  It was a silly question. Of course another writer. Like many women who haunted the festival circuit with bags of books over their shoulders, she only did writers.

  She remained silent.

  ‘I take that to be a yes,’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Anyone I know?’

  ‘You don’t know him.’

  I heard a distinction being made. ‘Know of, then?’

  ‘It’s Maarten.’

  ‘Maarten Noort?’

  Maarten Noort was the silent Nobel Prize-winning Dutchman with the pendulous belly.

  ‘Yes, that Maarten.’

  ‘Christ, Philippa! He’s twice your age and size.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘He writes novels that are over by the second page.’

  ‘You don’t measure language in feet and inches, Guy.’

  ‘He doesn’t talk either.’

  ‘He does to me.’

  ‘He’s better by phone, you’re telling me?’

  ‘We don’t talk by phone . . .’

  Ah! Now it was my turn to be silent. Ah!

  So he was there, perhaps unbuttoning her as we spoke. I listened hard, imagining I could hear the heavy Netherlandish breathing that had transfixed the literati of Adelaide for an hour.

  It was a well-beaten path for internationally renowned novelists: Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, Auckland, Philippa’s bed – Philippa understood metaphorically. Adelaide, Auckland, prose junkie.

  I accepted I couldn’t have it both ways. I couldn’t lament the death of reading and then criticise those who read. At least prose junkies were hooked on prose. But accepting I couldn’t have it both ways didn’t stop me wanting it both ways.

  ‘He never made it back to his motherland then?’

  ‘I don’t know whuht thuht’s supposed to mean. He’s an international novelist. He travels the world. But yes, he’s here wuhth me, if thuht’s whuht you’re asking.’