Zoo Time

by Howard Jacobson

  He too wore a black suit, but where mine was a mourner’s, his was the deceased’s. In reality this did not reflect our professional relationship: he had been hired to bury me. But his bones rattled when I banged against him, and I still had flesh on mine.

  On the spot I decided to cast my vote for life. I would leave Scylla and Charybdis. Had I been bolder I’d have left the day Merton shot himself. You have to know when the writing’s on the wall. I felt light-headed. New book, new publisher. The world lay all before me.

  I called in to say goodbye to Margaret.

  ‘I’ve had it, Margaret,’ I said.

  To my astonishment she knew exactly what I meant. Were all Merton’s authors doing this? Was I the last?

  She came from behind her desk and put her arms around me. Strange to say, I smelt Merton on her. I didn’t doubt that they had done this countless times. ‘I’ve had it, Margaret,’ he would come in and say, and she would get up from behind her desk and put her arms around him.

  So had they been lovers?

  The question was irrelevant. I knew what she felt. She felt she had failed him. ‘I’ve had it, Margaret,’ he had said, and she had not taken the full measure of what it meant, not understood what desperation the man-haters and the word-haters drove him to. And so she was trying not to make the same mistake with me. ‘I’ve had it, Margaret,’ I said, and in silence she held on to me for dear life.

  35

  Too Late for the Apocalypse

  New book, new publisher.

  Light-headed, did I say I felt? Optimism doesn’t last long in my business. New book, new publisher was all very well, but what if the book took longer to finish than I hoped; and what if, by the time I had finished, there were no publishers left to publish it?

  Needing to see Francis urgently and the day being mild, I strode in the direction of his office, bought an unnecessarily complex cappuccino from a nearby Carluccio’s, sat outside with it and, knowing that Francis didn’t like anyone dropping in on him unexpectedly, rang his number. His line was permanently engaged. As like as not disconnected so that no one could get through to him. In my self-absorption I hadn’t noticed that Ernest Hemingway was sitting two tables away from me, writing. One unwashed testicle was visible through his ripped trousers. It lay on his seat like an exotic fruit that had fallen off his plate.

  Antonio Carluccio, the mushroom king, had long ago sold his chain of inexpensive Italian restaurants – how did I know that? because chefs and restaurateurs are the inverse of writers: people know about them and love them – but that still didn’t make this branch a hang-out for dossers. The management would have been well within its rights to move him on. He wasn’t eating or drinking anything. And his appearance might fairly have been considered detrimental to trade. I certainly would not have wanted to eat spaghetti and meatballs at an adjoining table. And yet there he sat, unmolested, an unfailing reproach to all novelists of faint-heart, flipping over the pages of his reporter’s notepad as though he feared his time was running out.

  Was he invisible, I wondered, to everybody but me? Was he the ghost of serious writing – all that now remained of us? Was he Ernest Hemingway himself, come back from the dead, to stir the conscience of a public that didn’t even notice he was there?

  I was too far away to see what he was writing. And I couldn’t exactly ask. How’s the novel going? Have your sentences got any longer?

  I tried to catch his eye. ‘I see you,’ I wanted him to know. ‘I applaud you.’

  But he was beyond person-to-person contact. People didn’t interest him. The world didn’t interest him. He had stuff to write.

  On and on, he went, writing at the speed of light and rolling his unwashed testicle around in his fingers as though it were a rosary.

  I tried Francis again. This time I got his answer machine. ‘Please pick up, Francis,’ I said. ‘I’m finally done with S&C. I need to talk to you now. I’m just across the road. If you look out of your window you will see me. Pick up or I’m coming over.’

  You need a bit of luck if you’re a writer in the age of the dying of the word. Mine came in the shape of Kate and Ken Querrey, the owners of Slumdog Press, a sensational new publishing house whose speciality was the debut novel. The Querreys had worked out that if you paid young unheard-of writers a small fortune for their first novel, that in itself was reason for readers, dreaming of writing their own debut novels, to buy the book. How and what the debutants wrote was irrelevant; the being plucked from obscurity was all that was needed by way of plot, the size of the advance all that was needed by way of denouement. That the rise of the debut novel was the cause of much bitterness to experienced writers whose debut novels were behind them needs no explaining; but most of us took consolation in the necessary brevity of the debut novelist’s éclat. They were like the Latrodectus mactans, the male black widow spider of North America – one fuck and they were dead.

  I at least was still limping about, looking for another.

  The Querreys, meanwhile, could practise fatalism and move on to the next.

  I knew them vaguely. I had been at university with Ken Querrey who was said to be second in line to a baronetcy and I ran into him and his wife occasionally at literary festivals. Kate Querrey had even chaired an event of mine once, in the course of which she said I was one of those writers who had the courage to learn as they went along, which I took to mean I hadn’t learned much yet. But at least she acknowledged my existence. So when I saw them leaving Francis’s office, obviously on business – rather than having to drag his bulk around to publishers when there were matters that needed discussing face to face, Francis would entice them to his rooms with lavish finger food and a selection of the best malt whiskies – I saw no reason not to wave and invite them to join me for coffee. In all likelihood, they needed coffee.

  We engaged in the usual literary small talk, who was hot, who was not, which of Francis’s authors they published (never heard of them), how, speaking of writers one had never heard of, things were going in the realm of the debut novel, and finally, how things were going in the realm of me.

  ‘You’re S&C, aren’t you?’ Kate Querrey asked, pulling a strand of hair out of her eye.

  I say ‘eye’ intentionally. She had only the one. But she used it in a way that implied it did the work of three, darting it about to take in whoever else was sitting out at Carluccio’s, looking at the person I presented myself as being, and looking deeper into the real me.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘for my sins.’

  Ken Querrey took no time understanding me. ‘Sandy Ferber?’

  I nodded. The nod which said, but not for much longer.

  Kate Querrey shuddered. Sandy Ferber – ugh!

  In an ideal world the Querreys would now have leapt on me like out-of-print monkeys getting their revenge on Flora. Guy Ableman! What good fortune puts him in our way on the very day he decides to leave his old publisher? But if they were thinking anything along those lines, they kept the thought discreetly to themselves.

  They’d been secondary-school teachers originally – or at least Kate Querrey had: no one was quite sure what her husband had been up to, only that he was second in line to a baronetcy – branching out into publishing on the back of an anthology of children’s writing they’d privately printed. Not the Fetch, Fetch school of children’s writing. The children whom the Querreys taught would never have seen a dog – except maybe in a stew. Addiction, abuse, gang bangs, consensual schoolyard rape – those were the lived experiences which the Querreys had encouraged their pupils to mine. Write about what you know, kids.

  Ken Querrey wore a T-shirt with what looked like a rapper’s face on it under a Ralph Lauren leather jacket. Kate Querrey, a woman who seemed always to be on the point of falling apart, was wrapped, as though to hold herself together, in several layers of brown cardigan. How she was able to be décolleté under so much knitwear, I couldn’t work out, but no matter where I looked I couldn’t avoid her long, ginger, milky b
reasts. I wondered how Francis, a notorious breast man, had fared. Perhaps he’d kept his gaze fixed on her eye.

  Since nothing was coming from them, I steered the conversation towards my new book. ‘But your speciality is the debut novel,’ I laughed, ‘and I doubt I can pass what I’m writing off as that.’

  They looked at each other quickly. ‘Well,’ Kate Querrey said – more out of pride than encouragement – ‘we don’t only do that. We’re always on the lookout for breakthrough novels as well.’

  Ken Querrey shaped his face into an interrogation mark? Had I broken through yet?

  I threw them a who-am-I-to-say smile. The concept of the breakthrough novel troubled me even more than the concept of the debut novel, though they were, of course, in the nature of things incompatible. Breakthrough into what? Primark! Since I was stymied as to debut, I could see that breakthrough was my last chance. But it seemed to me I’d broken through sufficiently by becoming a writer in the first place. I was the son of fashion retailers. My mother took Drapers magazine and the Sun. My father had never knowingly opened a book. They had sent me to a nothing school (when they could have afforded to send me to a minor public one) in the hope that I would never knowingly open a book myself. I was a Jew – I know, I know, but I never said I was against using it when I needed it (call me a foul-weather Jew) – living in a Gentile country. How much more breaking-through was I obliged to do to stay in print? But I knew none of that was going to wash with a pair of ex-comprehensive-school teachers from Rochdale – the word was that Ken Querrey had taught there for a week – where breaking through in the sense I was using it meant licking cobblestones for a living when you were five years old, eating dog, sending your sister on the street to pay for your education and going up to Oxford with holes in your shoes.

  ‘The last person to know the value of what he’s writing is the writer,’ I said, flushing a little to hammer home my modesty. ‘But I do feel I’m going where I haven’t been before. Greater sickness and deeper despair. It’s about a man with a brain tumour –’ I was about to add that the brain tumour came about as a consequence of his drinking vodka through his eye when I realised just in time that Kate Querrey might have lost her eye doing the same.

  Were they listening? ‘Fundamentally,’ I said, ‘he is a hero in the French mode –’

  ‘Meaning he philosophises as he screws?’

  ‘Exactly that. It has always seemed to me that the unexamined screw is not worth having. But also in the extent of his destructiveness. I see him, essentially, as an impious disturbance.’

  I glanced to see if Ernest Hemingway had picked up the reference, but he had left the table and was wandering off, in defiance of horns and the shouts of hell-bent cyclists, in the middle of the road.

  ‘What does he disturb?’ Ken Querrey asked.

  ‘The tramp?’

  ‘Your hero.’

  Kate Querrey wound herself tightly in her cardigans, in anticipation of my reply.

  ‘The sexual decencies, for a start. Not only is he having an affair with his brother’s wife, he is sleeping with her mother.’

  It was shocking to me, but I could imagine that where the Querreys had been this was normative not to say exemplary behaviour.

  ‘Didn’t I once read a review of your work,’ Kate Querrey asked, ‘saying you couldn’t decide whether you were Mrs Gaskell or Rabelais?’

  Meaning she had decided for me. And it wasn’t Rabelais.

  ‘I think it was Charlotte Brontë or Apuleius,’ I said. ‘And I don’t think it said I couldn’t decide between the two, I think it said I was a happy synthesis. But this book is different. This time there’s no happy anything. Everything gets blown sky-high.’

  Everything? Well, I wasn’t going to mention Wilmslow. Or explain that by sky-high I meant as far as Alderley Edge.

  ‘It sounds,’ Ken Querrey said, tapping his chin with his finger, ‘as though what you’re writing is a dystopian novel.’

  ‘More apocalyptic,’ I said.

  ‘Ah.’

  They fell silent again.

  ‘Is apocalyptic a problem?’

  ‘Only,’ Kate Querrey answered for him, ‘in that we have a number of those on our list already.’

  ‘So I’ve missed the apocalypse,’ I laughed.

  It was evident that neither could understand why I had laughed.

  ‘We aren’t saying we definitely don’t want to look at it,’ Kate Querrey said. Down, down into the valley of her ginger breasts I peered. ‘It might turn out that apocalyptic novels are all anyone is going to want to read over the next few years.’

  ‘Assuming,’ I unwisely added, ‘that over the next few years there’s going to be anyone here to read them.’ I laughed again – ‘Not that I’m trying to rush you.’

  We let it go at that. I apologised for ambushing them. Especially on my agent’s very doorstep. He wouldn’t be very impressed, I laughed. How many times was that I’d laughed in the last ten minutes? They said they didn’t feel at all ambushed. If anything they were flattered that a writer as successful as I was would even consider having them as his publishers one day. One day . . .

  Indeed that was twice in a single afternoon they’d been flattered in this way by me. I wondered when the other time was. Well, when they said me they didn’t mean me exactly. But Francis had told them, though it wasn’t for public consumption – and I could count on their discretion – that Vanessa was my wife.

  My ear, already hanging by a thread, so much skin had I pulled off it, throbbed and roared.

  ‘Ah,’ I said. ‘You’ve been discussing Vanessa.’

  Ken Querrey patted his briefcase. ‘In here,’ he said.

  Vanessa victrix.

  Kate Querrey’s single eye ransacked my soul.

  Twenty minutes and three strong black coffees later I was taking the lift to the seventh floor and pressing Francis’s bell. It used to rouse me, doing this, wondering what new offers Francis had to excite me with this time, but those days were over. Now all I wondered was whether I’d get there early enough to find Francis still alive. If someone was going to kill him I wanted it to be me.

  There was no response, which I took to be a sign of Francis’s guilt. He was rearranging his features. Or rearranging my titles to prove I was still important to him. Ultimately a receptionist answered. A receptionist! How long was it since Francis had been able to afford a receptionist? I announced myself and waited. After a bout of unconvincing coughing – to give Francis more time to rearrange my titles? – she buzzed me in.

  There, sitting behind the reception desk, wearing headphones and with her lipstick smudged (I could have imagined that), was Poppy Eisenhower, my mother-in-law.

  THREE

  Famous Last Words

  36

  A Fuckload of Good Luck

  Some time later . . .

  I don’t think I need to be specific. Start counting years and all you are measuring is loss. Time passes – let’s leave it at that. Mankind cannot bear too much specificity.

  Some time, anyway, has gone by since I wrote those words – ‘Poppy Eisenhower, my mother-in-law’.

  I can no longer write them with equanimity. ‘Vanessa Ableman, my wife’, ditto.

  These are the specificities of loss I cannot bear.

  Otherwise not much has changed. Bookshops continue to go into liquidation, the word ‘library’ has passed out of common usage, immoderate opinion continues to pass itself off as art, chefs still take precedence over writers, less remains less. But I, amazingly – as long as I don’t count the years – am in fine fettle. In my profession you need, as I have said, a degree of luck. And that’s what came my way: a fuckload of good luck.

  That’s a phrase it’s difficult for someone with my acute northern vowel dysfunctionality to say.

  A focklord of god look? A fackloud of gerd luke? A ferklod of gud lock?

  Which could be why I had to wait so long for it.

  Mine now, however you account fo
r it, it is. I am even endorsed by G. G. Freville, the son of E. E. who one day simply ran out of puff and retired. ‘The rest is silence,’ he is – I think apocryphally – reported to have said, knowing that no author would want those words on his book jacket.

  But G. G. is proving to be, if you will forgive the pun, an able replacement. ‘Guido Cretino,’ he was kind enough to say for me recently, ‘can make a stone weep.’

  Yes, Guido Cretino. All above board. I am now Guy Ableman writing as Guido Cretino. It is not uncommon to do this when you want to show that you can drop a register but don’t want all trace of your earlier, more highfalutin writing self to disappear altogether. Though, between ourselves, all trace of it has.

  Whether I am indeed, as Guido Cretino, able to make a stone weep, isn’t for me to say. But women do approach me after readings with their eyes rubbed raw. ‘I feel you’ve penetrated my soul,’ they say. ‘I couldn’t believe, as I was listening to you, that you were not a woman.’

  I smile and bow my head and say that in another life – who knows? – maybe I was a woman. Sometimes I take their wrists, rather as a doctor might. The wrist is a safe place to touch a strange woman. Not that these women think of me as a stranger. My words leap all barriers between us. I know them better than their husbands know them, therefore, they reasonably assume, they know me better than my wife knows me.

  Wife? What wife?

  Nor is it only the women I reach. Men too – the very men who yesterday would not join me, satyr to satyr, in dancing with their goat feet the Antic Hay – today nod their heads and blink the moisture from their eyes. My mistake was to try calling up the monkey from their basement. Andy Weedon had it right: ‘Dad’ is the word that turns men on. Write ‘paternity’ and they get a hard-on. Write ‘visiting rights’ and they turn to jelly. Make ’em laugh, make ’em cry? Not any more. Make ’em cry, and then make ’em cry some more. Heartbreak, it would seem, crosses the gender divide. And, I suspect, the age divide as well. If I am not mistaken my audiences are getting younger. Soon I will be giving toddlers what they want. Even Sally Comfort writes to me, asking me to sign my latest for her nieces. So though I have still not yet blown into the silver portals of her ear or up her ring-guarded nostrils, it isn’t out of the question that I will.