Zoo Time

by Howard Jacobson

  ‘OK,’ I said, ‘she wasn’t. I hope you’ll be very happy.’

  ‘There’s no need to be sarcastic.’

  ‘I’m not. I think she’ll make you an excellent receptionist. Unless she’s progressed to reading manuscripts for you by now.’

  ‘Well, that’s something else I wanted to tell you.’

  ‘You’re handing me over to Poppy? Do you know her taste in literature?’

  ‘No, I’m not handing you over to Poppy – though I don’t doubt you’d like it if I did. Poppy will be leaving. As will I. I’ve had it. I’m getting too old for this. It’s not what it was. The fun’s gone. The soul’s gone. The words have gone.’

  ‘What about Billy Funhouser?’

  ‘I’m Funhousered out, Guy.’

  I didn’t believe his motives. He was saying half this for me. But I didn’t doubt his resolution. I saw what was waiting for him. Cutting mint for Poppy in Whichever-over-Shitheap for the rest of his days. Lucky devil.

  ‘Love in a cottage, is it?’ I enquired. I didn’t say I knew the very cottage. I didn’t say the last time I’d visited my mother-in-law there she’d kissed me full on the mouth. Full on the mouth, Francis.

  Why spoil things for him, just because he’d spoiled things for me?

  Besides, I had other things to worry about. I was agentless.

  ‘You make it sound confined,’ he said, ‘but I’ll count myself a king of infinite space there after bloody London.’ He made as though to move his arms, to cut his octopus. Impossible. All he could do was flap his elbows.

  ‘And me?’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘What do I do?’

  ‘Well, you don’t come to the country with Poppy and me, if that’s what you’re asking. Though you’re welcome, of course, to visit.’

  Full on the mouth, Francis.

  But I said, ‘What do I do about an agent? What do I do with Terminus?’

  He took a deep breath. ‘Do you really want me to say?’

  ‘No, but you’d better say it.’

  ‘Tear it up.’

  ‘Tear it up? There’s nothing to tear.’ That was a lie, but I had to protect myself in my own eyes against this proposed vandalism.

  ‘Tear up the whole idea. Burn the notes. Destroy everything you’ve shown me.’

  ‘I haven’t shown you anything.’

  ‘Don’t make this difficult for me. I’ve heard you speak about it enough. An anathema hero with a fucking tumour, adventuring around women who are now adventurers of their own, terrorising nothing but your own head. Those kinds of books are over, Guy. If Henry Miller turned up in my office tomorrow I’d show him the door.’

  ‘That’s because you wouldn’t want him to lay a finger on Poppy.’ A last, desperate, libidinous nostalgia seized me. I closed my eyes, remembering my mouth on Poppy’s.

  And remembering what hadn’t happened, and now never would. Not ever, ever . . .

  Squish-squish.

  When I reopened my eyes I found Francis toying with the idea of being furious. ‘Leave Poppy out of it. This is about you. Terminus! Guy, it would be your terminus all right. No publisher would touch it. Who’s it for? What’s the market? I should have been sterner with you. I should have asked for two pages from you on who you think your readers are, how old, what sex, how many. That’s what other agents would be demanding from you before they read a word.’

  ‘I’m published, Francis, don’t forget. Readers know what they’re getting.’

  ‘More’s the pity.’

  Before I could answer that he rose to go to the lavatory. It always amazed me that the place had one. He was away fifteen minutes. So had Poppy cured his constipation? Or made it worse?

  ‘What did that mean?’ I asked after he’d lowered himself back into his seat. ‘More’s the pity. Explain that.’

  ‘Guy, you’ve got to face up to what’s changed. Things are different. Books don’t send tremors any more. You’re living in a world that’s got beyond shock.’

  ‘Got beyond words, you mean.’

  ‘All right. That too.’

  ‘So what’s it not got beyond?’

  ‘Ah, now you’re asking. I don’t know. That’s why I’m quitting. If you stay with the company, maybe Heidi Corrigan will tell you.’

  ‘Heidi Corrigan?’

  Heidi Corrigan was the tot Flora had insultingly suggested I beg an endorsement from.

  Francis looked ever so slightly sheepish. ‘Shush!’ he said, keeping his voice down. ‘It’s not a done deal yet. She’s still thinking about it.’

  ‘Thinking about what?’

  ‘Taking over.’

  ‘The world?’

  ‘The agency.’

  ‘To do what with? Turn it into a brasserie?’

  ‘Running it, Guy.’

  ‘Running it! Francis, she’s ten.’

  ‘She’s twenty-four.’

  ‘Twenty-four! As old as that. I’m surprised you haven’t gone for someone younger.’

  ‘She’s very bright. She’s the queen of YA.’

  I turned my face into a question mark.

  ‘Young Adult. It’s big.’

  ‘Queen in the sense that she writes it or finds it?’

  ‘Both. More – writes it, finds it, places it.’

  ‘And the advantage to me in this?’

  ‘None. But you’d like her.’

  ‘Francis, I know her. I used to sit her on my knee.’

  ‘Well then – you could always try that again.’

  ‘What I need is to sit on hers. I’m in trouble, Francis. I require guidance. You’ve just ripped up my novel.’

  ‘You’ll thank me for it one day.’

  ‘Will I? We shall see. In the meantime I’m without an agent.’

  ‘Maybe Heidi will keep you on.’

  ‘Maybe! ’

  ‘She’s hot, Guy.’

  ‘And I’m cold?’

  He stared out of the window and pretended to whistle. Right at that moment the author of The Old Man and the Sea shuffled past on one of his circuits of the city, oblivious to humanity, writing in his notepad, wandering off the pavement into the middle of the road, careless of all the honking and the shouting. Every other passer-by peered briefly into the restaurant, attracted by the noise, and perhaps by the smell, of literature in its death throes. Only Hemingway was beyond curiosity.

  Francis looked knowingly at me.

  ‘What does that expression mean?’ I asked.

  ‘What expression?’

  ‘You know. There but for the grace of God – is that what you’re suggesting?’

  He tapped the table with his stubby fingers. His nails, I noticed, were manicured. No prizes for guessing who was responsible for that innovation.

  ‘Accepting change is always the hardest part,’ he said, reading my mind at least.

  ‘Who are you referring to? Poppy? Vanessa? Heidi Corrigan?’

  He didn’t even pretend to hesitate. ‘All three.’

  ‘You’re a bastard, Francis,’ I told him.

  And that, essentially, was that.

  I went on seeing him. You can’t just part from your agent. There were royalty issues – small royalty issues – to address. There was the matter of who was to take me over when Francis finally left – introductions to make, hands to shake, hellos and farewells. And because no one ever truly leaves the literary life unless he does what Merton did, there were bound to be encounters in muddy fields at literary festivals, prize-giving dinners, summer books parties, winter books parties, funerals.

  One sunny afternoon I stumbled upon him on the lawn outside a tent in Witherenden Hill which, like every other small town and village in the country, now had its own literary festival. Poppy, wearing a long, book-reader’s skirt, was beside him. They were reclining in deckchairs waiting to go into the village hall to hear three eminent atheists debate the non-existence of a God nobody believed in. They didn’t notice me, though I got close enough to see they wer
e reading from matching Kindles. I liked to think they were on identical pages of identical novels, but I couldn’t be sure. I wasn’t familiar enough with the technology to know whether they could talk to each other through their Kindles as they read, pointing out favourite passages, laughing or shedding tears together. But they seemed very close. That Poppy had, by the look of it, become a serious reader now, and a frequenter of festivals to boot, I found upsetting. Had she been waiting for me to spark her into intellectual life as Francis had? Could this have been us, lying Kindling together in the sunshine, had I gone about things differently? Had I not told her, for example, that every book by every living writer was shit?

  I crept away without their spotting me, gave a talk, generously sponsored by the Witherenden Women’s Institute, on the subject of Frank Harris and the Faux Confessional Male Novel, to a couple of retired schoolteachers and a librarian from Etchingham, and grabbed a lift back to London with the young woman who ran the online department at S&C who still owned my print-on-demand backlist. She insisted I join Facebook. ‘I have the power to make you,’ she said when I declined.

  Once upon a time that might have been exciting.

  I saw Poppy and Francis, together, once more. This was at the premiere of Vanessa’s film. Slumdog had not thrown Vanessa a publication party for the novel – few publishers threw parties even for their most successful writers any more: they couldn’t risk the ire of their less successful writers – and when I’d offered to organise something for her she’d declined on the grounds that she’d have to ask her mother and didn’t want to. There were things in the book that would upset her mother – namely, all of it – and she thought a party would be tactless. Whether Poppy had read the book she didn’t know. Her guess was not. Francis, of course, being an old-fashioned agent, had, but she believed he would find a way of dissuading Poppy from going near it.

  That she would not be curious, that she would not have devoured every word of it at once, I found hard to believe, but when I said that to Vanessa she told me I was a cretin and understood fuck all – I’m quoting her – of the dynamics of a mother/daughter relationship. Or any family relationship, come to that. ‘Who in your family has read a word you’ve written, Guido?’ she asked me. And that was the end of the conversation.

  Whatever the dynamics I knew nothing of, Poppy could not be kept away from the premiere of the film. Though it wasn’t the full Leicester Square red-carpet treatment – it was only a modest-budget two-hander, after all, filmed almost as though it were a play, the camera allowing the beauty of each woman to metamorphose into the other – the press viewing was not without glamour for all that it was largely without press. Francis turned up in a tuxedo with Poppy in full regalia on his arm. Blissful, they both looked. Poppy proud of her daughter, Francis proud of Poppy. Poppy tried not to look at me. I tried not to look at her. But I saw enough to see she’d got her desirability back. A black suit with a fur collar, the fur falling into her vertiginous cleavage. Ankle boots, high but not too. Vermilion lips. Some confusion with the seats meant she had to brush past me. Her thighs played Brahms. The Double Cello Concerto. Mine Bach. Christ on the cross.

  They didn’t stay long. Ten minutes into the performance, Poppy, breathing hard, got up to leave. Her thighs once more brushed my knees. On this occasion she was the bow, I the strings. Haydn this time. The Seven Last Words. Francis, a man with no ear for music, shrugged and stretched his chin at me, and obediently followed.

  I was glad that Vanessa had opted to sit with de Wolff in the back row, taking notes, though with what intention I had no idea. I didn’t want her big night spoiled. But afterwards, as we took our places at a nearby fish restaurant – more octopus and sea bream – she looked around for her mother and I could see was alarmed not to find her. She asked me what I knew. I said I suspected Poppy had gone down with a migraine.

  ‘My mother doesn’t get migraines. Did she stay for the whole thing?’

  ‘Not all of it.’

  ‘How much of it?’

  ‘Oh, an hour, half an hour.’

  ‘Tell the truth.’

  ‘Twenty minutes.’

  ‘So she missed the scene on the yacht?’

  ‘Not sure.’

  ‘Weren’t you following either?’

  ‘I was following the film, Vee, every second of it. What I wasn’t following was your mother.’

  Liar.

  We drank champagne. Dirk made a toast. ‘To Vanessa!’ We drank to that.

  Vanessa proposed a toast to the two unknown English actresses. We drank to them. Not a patch, I thought, on the women they were playing, either as beauties or as performers, but then I was privy to what others weren’t, I had been on the journey, no matter that I’d been written out of it. I might not have mentioned that. There were no men in the movie as there were no men in the novel. Not me, not Dirk, not Tim. Even the beach-guarding pelican was a she.

  ‘Did you really think the screenplay was good?’ Vanessa said, in a voice just for me.

  ‘I thought wonderful.’

  ‘Truly?’

  ‘Truly truly.’

  ‘Have I surprised you?’

  A trick question. ‘I always knew you’d be good once you got going, but never this good, no.’

  ‘What did you like most?’

  ‘The beauty.’

  ‘Well, that’s Dirk.’

  ‘The concentration of the thing.’

  ‘Also Dirk.’

  ‘But the verve was you.’

  ‘Yes it was. Thank you. And the feeling?’

  ‘Yes, the feeling. I cried. The whole row cried.’

  ‘And that bitch couldn’t sit through more than five minutes.’

  ‘Ten.’

  ‘The bitch!’

  ‘You don’t know she didn’t have a migraine. She might have cried herself into one.’

  ‘She doesn’t get migraines. She’s always boasted that she’s never even had a headache. That’s why I thought it was safe to give her a brain tumour in the story. That way she wouldn’t make the mistake of thinking I was writing about her.’

  ‘She left before the brain tumour was revealed.’

  ‘All the bitchier of her.’

  ‘She left, Vee, when it became clear you’d given her dementia.’

  ‘But she doesn’t have dementia in real life. Well, not completely. Apart from the monkeys. Why would she have thought the woman with dementia was her?’

  I wanted to say for the same reason you thought every woman I wrote about was you. But tonight was about her work not mine, no matter what the irony in her mother doing to her what she had always done to me. ‘Us doesn’t mean us,’ I used to plead with her to understand. ‘I doesn’t mean me. You doesn’t mean you. It’s fiction, for Christ’s fucking sake!’

  ‘Even though she is saying word for word what I say?’

  ‘Even then, Vee. Even then.’

  Myself, I found the whole thing mightily affecting. Their falling out, but also the reason for it. The novel, the screenplay, the film, the work – call it what you will. The imagining . . .

  Daughter and mad mother alone in the outback, hoping to see the monkeys at Monkey Mia. No Guido Cretino in sight. Just the two women, brawling and affectionate in a manless, monkeyless landscape. No mystery why the film was modestly successful with audiences of mothers and daughters. They saw their own psychology. And psychology is psychology, no matter whether you’re sitting in a cinema in Notting Hill or the West End or, finally, in Western Australia where Vanessa later put in a surprise appearance at a film festival. A surprise to me, that is.

  Vanessa’s handling of the audience’s slow realisation that the mother wasn’t suffering from Alzheimer’s but a brain tumour (for which my brother Jeffrey should surely have been given a credit) was exquisite. Little by little one realised that the attribution of dementia was a kindness dreamed up by the daughter. We’ll pretend you’re dotty, Ma, that way neither of us has to face up to the terrible fact of what�
��s really going on inside your brain.

  I say ‘Vanessa’s handling’ because I felt I could detach her touch from de Wolff ’s. His hand was clumsier, more allusively filmic, as when the mother’s failed hopes to see what was nowhere to be seen conjured up memories of Rizzo’s thwarted longing to make it to Miami in John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy. Or when the crazed refrain, ‘Are there monkeys in Monkey Mia?’ half echoed the simple-minded Lennie’s unbearable ‘Tell me about the rabbits, George’ in Lewis Milestone’s Of Mice and Men.

  The film was drenched in sadness anyway, to whoever’s talents one attributed it. But you can’t please everyone, and Are There Monkeys in Monkey Mia? did not please Poppy.

  41

  Tell Me About It

  I had my own uneasy moment. It came around about here in the script:

  Exterior. Night.

  A caravan park in Shark Bay.

  DAUGHTER: Maman, look! Did you see that?

  MOTHER: No, what are you showing me?

  DAUGHTER: A falling star.

  MOTHER: I missed it. Will there be another?

  DAUGHTER: There might. It was beautiful. Strange to think it fell millions of years ago.

  MOTHER: How do you know that?

  DAUGHTER: It’s just something one knows.

  MOTHER: If it fell millions of years ago, how can it be falling now? A star can’t fall more than once.

  DAUGHTER: No, but what we’re seeing isn’t now, it’s then.

  MOTHER: What are you talking about? What’s then?

  DAUGHTER: We’re watching what happened millions of years ago.