Zoo Time

by Howard Jacobson

  Wuhth her. Christ! Considering how recently she’d been wuhth me, I felt that we were conjoined in her, Maarten and I.

  ‘So where’s your partner while Maarten’s with you?’

  ‘He’s here. He’s a great admirer of Maarten’s work. I told you we had an open relationshup.’

  I wanted to ask about Mrs Noort and how open about her relationship she was, but all things considered I didn’t feel I was in a strong position to take the side of wives.

  ‘Well, I hope you’ll all be very happy, Philippa,’ I said.

  ‘You too, Guy,’ she said.

  It was the most final goodbye I’d ever been on the receiving end of.

  So that was three women who’d left me in the space of three hours.

  I can’t go more than a day without a woman’s company. I’d have rung Mishnah Grunewald had I not heard that she had left the zoo, married a rabbi, and gone off with him to help officiate at a new synagogue in Cracow where Jewish life was said slowly to be returning.

  Everyone was having a better time than I was.

  Poppy and Vanessa found a nice hotel in Moreton-in-Marsh where they stayed for a week before Poppy moved into a red-tiled cottage with the little garden she was after in Shipton-under-Wychwood.

  ‘She got her hyphens, then,’ I said to Vanessa on her return.

  ‘Leave her alone,’ Vanessa said. ‘If you’d been nicer to her she might not have gone.’

  ‘Did she say that?’

  ‘No, I deduced it.’

  ‘How have I not been nice to her?’

  ‘The way you’re not nice to everybody.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘By being uncivil. By ignoring people. By being locked away inside your head.’

  ‘That’s called writing, Vee.’

  ‘No it’s not. It’s called being self-fucking-engrossed.’

  Since Broome, we hadn’t exactly not been getting on, more getting on as we had always got on, only more so.

  Now she was back, she blamed me for not allowing her to stay.

  ‘Allowing! ’

  ‘Encouraging. Facilitating. Don’t play word games with me, Guido.’

  And now that she was back from the Cotswolds she was charging me with forcing her mother to leave us and go and live in Wychwood-Over-Wherever-It-Was.

  I shouldn’t pretend to be ignorant of the location. Two weeks after Poppy moved in I was at a symposium in Oxford and halfway through it I lashed out on a taxi to take me to her cottage, the address of which I’d never been given but had found among Vanessa’s papers. The village looked as it sounded. Nice. Village green, village church, village pub, village idiots. I could imagine Poppy being very happy there.

  With me.

  She was in the front garden when I turned up, sitting on a wooden bench, reading shit under a large sun hat with flowers in it. She was wearing silky knee-length batik shorts, which both as a fashionista and a man I considered a mistake, but then I hadn’t called to say I was coming. She narrowed her eyes when she saw me but didn’t close her book. I decided not to let the taxi go quite yet.

  ‘Just passing,’ I said.

  ‘That’s a coincidence. Did you just happen to recognise me from the taxi?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Where are you passing from?’

  ‘Oxford.’

  ‘Where are you going to?’

  ‘Notting Hill Gate.’

  ‘This isn’t the way.’

  ‘I know. You couldn’t give the driver directions, could you?’

  ‘Tell him to go back to Oxford and start again.’

  ‘A glass of wine before I leave?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Tea?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And you don’t need me to kill any spiders for you? I would imagine the country is full of them.’

  ‘Definitely not that. I’d rather have them living in my clothes.’

  ‘I’ll be going then.’

  ‘Please.’

  I tried to sneak a look at what she was reading. Writers do this. They are book-transfixed. They can’t see a person reading a book without wondering what it is.

  ‘What are you looking at?’

  ‘Just wanted to see what shit you’re reading.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just curious.’

  ‘No you’re not. If you were curious you wouldn’t call it shit.’

  ‘I’m curious which shit.’

  ‘Well, you’ll have to stay curious.’ She clasped the book to her bosom like a baby. My baby, my baby – they want to take my baby!

  ‘Couldn’t I just stay, full stop?’

  ‘No. You can’t even just stay, comma.’

  ‘I could be your page turner.’

  ‘I don’t need a page turner. This book’s so interesting the pages turn themselves.’

  ‘Who’s it by?’

  ‘Just someone you think is shit. Vanessa tells me you think every writer is shit.’

  ‘That’s not true. Only the live ones.’

  ‘You’re a live one.’

  ‘Not for long.’

  ‘Well, this one is a live one and he isn’t shit.’

  ‘He! You’re just trying to hurt me.’

  ‘That’s right. Now go.’

  ‘If that’s what you really, really want.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Really, really, really . . .’

  ‘I beg you.’

  She was firm about it, but I chose to look on the bright side. She hadn’t told me never to return.

  In some part of myself – no, in some parts of myself – I was relieved. The novelist in me needed this to go on indefinitely. An easy conquest was against the interests of a good story. I wasn’t mad about plot, but I knew the value of suspense. The moralist in me, in so far as there was one, needed it to go on indefinitely too. Broome was one thing: Broome was off the moral map. But for Poppy to have invited me in and removed her silly shorts in Shipton-under-Wychwood would have thrown me into crisis. Could she really do this to her own daughter? Here in the very heart of England? Did she not know the difference between right and wrong?

  Why she hadn’t already told Vanessa that her husband was a wretch was a worry to me. Didn’t a mother owe that, at least, to her own flesh and blood? Get rid of him, Vanessa, he’s rotten to the core, always has been, always will be, just don’t ask me how I know.

  But the son-in-law in me, the lover and the child in time, ached for consummation. Broome might have been off the moral map but I still longed to be standing on the spider again with Poppy in my arms. And if she had said nothing to Vanessa didn’t that mean that she longed to be back there again among the monkeys too?

  32

  Fetch, Fetch

  The subject of the Oxford symposium I’d bolted from was the role of children’s literature.

  In what?

  The education of children?

  There was no education of children. If there was education of children – if there were education of children – there’d be proof of it in educated adults.

  But then what did I know? I’d been invited only to be publicly humiliated – an adult sacrifice on the altar of the adolescent paragraph. The short, adolescent paragraph.

  I’d agreed to participate – half expecting what was going to happen – only in order to have an excuse to check how my mother-in-law was settling in around the corner. Oxfordshire had suddenly become exciting to me.

  For their part, the organisers wanted to make a spectacle of me because I’d said something on one of those desperate late-night Radio 3 arts programmes you know nobody is listening to, because you wouldn’t be listening to it yourself if you weren’t on it, along the lines of my you’d expect educated children to turn into educated adults, and since there aren’t any, there aren’t any point. Where are they now, I’d asked, those avidly literary toddlers who had queued through the night to get their hands on the boy magician? Either still reading about
the boy magician or reading nothing.

  It demeaned our children, I argued – daring anyone to challenge me on the sanctimony of ‘our’ on the lips of a person who was, in all but deed, a child murderer – to suppose they needed children’s books in order to progress to adult books. What they needed was grown-up literature from the off, with a few concessions made to the areas in which they weren’t yet grown. Thus you didn’t give them Tropic of Cancer. But you did let them know that Tropic of Cancer was waiting for them as soon as they’d finished Wuthering Fucking Heights.

  I couldn’t pretend to know what I was talking about. I had no children of my own and didn’t mix with people who did. We lived in a child-blind world, Vee and I, and supposed children to be, in the abstract, like us only smaller and messier. ‘Not that much smaller,’ I hear Vee saying, looking me up and down.

  But why did I need to know what I was talking about? There was universal agreement that children’s writing had never been stronger, and there was universal agreement that anyone under forty was struggling to read anything more demanding than a Tweet. Ergo . . .

  I’d also said, in an interview discussing my own early reading – a subject about which I’d been lying for years, pretending I’d read Henry James and Henry Miller at kindergarten – ‘Junk anything that addresses the child qua child.’

  One of my stroke our favourite words. Not child, qua.

  The idea of junking anything that addressed the child qua child had struck the organisers as a usefully fiery starting point for discussion. Hence my invitation.

  ‘How do you propose to do that?’ the chairman of the morning session asked me, rubbing his hands. ‘Ban them? Burn them?’

  ‘Burn the children?’

  ‘We were wondering if you’d go that far.’

  (‘Why do you detest children, Mr Ableman?’)

  He was the owner of the children’s bookshop in which we were gathered. We were crammed into a stockroom, forty or fifty grown-up children’s readers on foldaway metal chairs – I was surprised they weren’t high chairs – and the three panel members, of which I was one, arranged around a small card table. On the walls were blown-up photographs of famous children’s writers of the past, together with reproductions of the jacket of the chairman’s own latest contribution to the genre, a picture book about a dog called Fetch. Fetch, Fetch, it was called.

  I answered these offensive opening questions, calmly I thought, making the usual writerly noises about being against banning or burning anything – I even invoked the Nazis – though in my heart there was much I’d happily have seen banned or burned, including, as the day wore on, this shop, this event, and everyone attending it.

  ‘Allow me a little rhetorical flourish,’ I said, enunciating my words clearly in case the proponents of children’s writing were unable to grasp what I, as a writer for adults, meant. ‘I am, of course, against censorship of any kind. But we can lead our children into books without condescending to them. John Stuart Mill was reading classical authors in the original Greek and Latin when he was three. I venture to assert that this would not have happened had his father given him, at an early age, Hairy Hettie and the Bullshit Factory, or whatever else it is they’re reading now.’

  I can’t say that I was making a good job of getting them to love me. Even Fetch, looking endearingly at his master from every wall – waiting for the call, ‘Fetch, Fetch’ – now seemed to bare his teeth at me.

  One member of the panel made as though to leave, gathering up his rucksack from the floor between his legs – a small urban cyclist’s rucksack with Paddington Bear key rings hanging off it – but it turned out he was only searching for a handkerchief.

  ‘If that’s an example of your sense of humour I’m not surprised you aren’t read by children,’ he said, blowing his nose.

  I couldn’t tell if he was going to lean across and punch me or burst out crying. Tears, I thought, were favourite. Everyone cried now. The world was awash with tears, the literary wasteland more watered with them than any other.

  No wonder nothing was growing.

  In the end he just blew into his handkerchief a couple more times. Heston, he was called. Heston Duffy.

  ‘How do you know I’m not read by children?’ I asked. I had never wanted to be read by children, but suddenly the thought that I wasn’t upset me terribly.

  ‘Well, you’re not read by mine.’

  ‘Nor mine!’ someone in the audience shouted.

  Heston Duffy proposed a quick straw poll. Hands up, how many people’s children had read anything by Guy Ableman? No hand went up. Then he had a better idea. How many people had themselves read anything by Guy Ableman? Again not a hand went up. He sat back in his chair – an inappropriately grand man for a children’s writer, I thought: more like a country solicitor or an auctioneer – and smirked. The smirk did not become him. His face was already too fleshly – not a face I’d have wanted close to a child of mine, had there been a child of mine – and the smirk only added to his unsavoury handsomeness. He wore a crumpled black T-shirt, slightly spotted with water-paint or Play-Doh. His petulant expression reminded me of Victor Mature’s in the role of Samson, though I was the one trying to bury the Philistines in the ruin of the Temple.

  ‘What you read or don’t read is your lookout,’ I said, addressing the audience directly, ‘but I am amused by the idea that you think you know what your children read. Do you check under their covers each night? I kept what I read – Ulysses, The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom, Coleridge’s Table Talk – secret from my parents. That was the fun of it. Or has the fun gone out of reading now, along with everything else?’

  I glowered. They glowered back. Fun? They’d show me fun!

  The other panellist was a woman with grey hair tied in a pigtail like a very ancient little girl. She had three silver rings in each nostril and two more in each ear. Her voice was high and fluting, as though not her own. Had a child possessed her? I wondered. She put up a placatory hand as if to calm a mob. I don’t know why I say ‘as if ’. They were a mob and she was attempting to placate them. ‘I’m Sally Comfort,’ she said, though she’d already been introduced.

  Everybody applauded her for the second time. I clapped for a second time too. So this was Sally Comfort! Another response was available to me: so who the fuck is Sally Comfort?

  But that she was a god among the mortals of children’s literature there was no mistaking.

  ‘I think I understand what Mr Ableman’s getting at,’ she went on, smiling at me in a way that would have made me run for the safety of my mummy’s skirts had I been a child (and had my mummy not been a whore who wore no skirts). ‘I think he’s trying to tell us – and I for one don’t mind listening, for I am a great admirer of his work, yes, I am – that children must not be written down to. I’m sure I don’t need to remind him that John Stuart Mill suffered a nervous breakdown as a young man, which perhaps should make us think again about the style of education he received, but that doesn’t detract from the essential point I think Mr Ableman is making, which is that we sometimes ask too little of our children’s intelligences and imaginations.’

  ‘Hear hear!’ I said, pleased with myself for not rising to the nervous-breakdown bait and saying ‘For all you know, half your children will be gibbering wrecks at the same age. And they won’t have the advantage of a decent education and an acquaintance with the poetry of Wordsworth to help them out of it.’ Instead I applauded Sally Comfort with my fingertips, like a pantomime Chinaman shooing away a mouse.

  I imagined blowing in her ear and thanking her for being nice to me.

  ‘Well, certainly no one,’ chimed in the chairman, a cheerful drunken-looking man with capacious eye pouches, ‘would accuse either of our guest speakers today of asking too little of our children’s intelligences or imaginations.’

  More applause. Though not, this time, from me.

  ‘Fetch, Fetch,’ I thought.

  Heston inclined his heavy, handsome head.
Sally smiled and rearranged the rings in her nostrils.

  I imagined blowing up her nose.

  There was then a moment of silence in which it became clear that I was expected to pick up Sally Comfort’s thread and run somewhere with it. Wychwood-Over-Shipton, I was thinking, sneaking a look at my watch.

  It would have helped had I known anything about the books Heston Duffy and Sally Comfort had written, but once you’ve decided there is a virtue in arguing out of ignorance you have to stick with it.

  ‘I guess the question has to be asked,’ I began, digging deep into the manual of writerly bluff, ‘whether quite so many wizards, daemons and other mythical creatures with pseudo-Icelandic names are necessary to stimulate the imaginations of the young. Are we not, when it comes to children –’ though how the fuck I knew, would have been a fair response – ‘too quick to assume that imagination equals fantasy, that –’

  ‘Not in my case,’ Heston interrupted. ‘My hero Jacko is no wizard. He is an ordinary boy born in Sussex who becomes a soldier of fortune fighting in many of the world’s most terrible war zones. There is nothing fantastical –’

  ‘Hang on,’ I said. ‘You say he is a boy soldier of fortune. How old is he exactly?’

  ‘Well, he ages from book to book. But he is nine when he first bears arms.’

  ‘Nine? Doesn’t that make him a fantasy figure?’

  Heston looked as though he couldn’t decide between flattening me and weeping again. ‘There are parts of the world where children even younger than that are conscripted.’

  ‘Yes, I know that. But Jacko is a soldier of fortune born in Sussex, you say, where as far as I know they don’t have conscription. If this isn’t fantasy, it is surely the wildest fancy.’

  ‘Not a word anyone would use of your novels, Sally,’ the drunken-faced chairman said.

  ‘No, indeed. The book I am working on now, for example, is the last in what I call my Chlamydia Series –’ she laughed – ‘in which teenage girls are taught the dangers of casual sex. It’s a matter of great concern to me that so many girls think sex is safe so long as they don’t go the whole way, if they stop at oral sex, for example.’