Zoo Time

by Howard Jacobson

  MOTHER: Is this the Big Bang theory?

  DAUGHTER: No, I think that’s something different. This is about the speed of light.

  MOTHER: Will we see the monkeys tomorrow?

  DAUGHTER: I’ll ask. I’m not sure. But we can row with the dolphins.

  MOTHER: I’ll have another drink.

  DAUGHTER: Do you need one? Do you really need one? Look how lovely the sky is. You can almost feel nobody but you has ever looked at this sky. Have you ever seen so many stars?

  MOTHER: Yes – when I met your father on the Isle of Wight. When I was a girl. And there were more stars then.

  DAUGHTER: There couldn’t have been, Maman. Maybe the skies were clearer in those days.

  MOTHER: What do you mean there couldn’t have been? If stars keep falling out of the sky there must be fewer of them than there were. Why do you contradict me all the time?

  DAUGHTER: Look! – there’s another.

  MOTHER: There you are – one less.

  DAUGHTER: I think someone’s waving to you.

  MOTHER: Where? Is this another one of your falling stars?

  DAUGHTER: There. From that boat. Look – he’s waving his arms about.

  MOTHER: I know what you’re doing – you’re trying to distract me. Let’s have drinkies.

  DAUGHTER: Wait a little longer. Wait till dinner.

  MOTHER: He does seem to be waving at me. Lend me your lipstick.

  DAUGHTER: Your lipstick’s fine. You look beautiful. You look so beautiful he’s fallen in love with you from all that way away.

  MOTHER: How do we know it’s happening now and not a hundred million light years before? Maybe he waved before the Ice Age.

  DAUGHTER: Maybe he did. But he hasn’t fallen into the sea. He’s still waving.

  MOTHER: How do you know he isn’t waving at you?

  DAUGHTER: I can tell. It’s you he’s smitten by. It’s always you they’re smitten by. Have you forgotten?

  MOTHER: When was any man last smitten by me?

  DAUGHTER: You have forgotten. Only last week, in Perth. A jeweller proposed to you.

  MOTHER: You’ve made that up.

  DAUGHTER: Why would I make it up?

  MOTHER: To make me believe I’m losing my mind.

  DAUGHTER: Why would I do that?

  MOTHER: So that you can have me put away. Life would be better for you with me out of the way.

  DAUGHTER: If I wanted you out of the way I could have fed you to the dolphins this morning.

  MOTHER: You wouldn’t have got away with that. You want them to declare me senile, so you can get that power of attorney you’ve been after for so long.

  DAUGHTER: I only mentioned it last week.

  MOTHER: It shocks me that you mentioned it at all.

  DAUGHTER: Only for your sake. I want to be in a position to look after you.

  MOTHER: I don’t need looking after. Why do I need looking after?

  DAUGHTER: Because you’re forgetting things. You’ve forgotten the jeweller in Perth. You’ve forgotten there are no monkeys in Monkey Mia. One day you’ll go out and forget your name.

  MOTHER: You’re worried I’ll spend your inheritance.

  DAUGHTER: There you are, that’s something else you’ve forgotten – I don’t have an inheritance.

  MOTHER: Blame your father for that.

  DAUGHTER: Maman, I blame no one. I am happy. I could not be more happy. Look at the night.

  MOTHER: Darling, do you know there are times when I see so much of me in you I could cry? It’s as though we are sisters.

  DAUGHTER: There it is. There’s what’s wrong. We aren’t sisters. You’re my mother.

  MOTHER: So act like it, is that what you’re saying? If you want me to act more like your mother, don’t you think you should act more like my daughter and stop pimping for me?

  DAUGHTER: Pimping! When have I ever had to pimp for you? You’ve pimped successfully for yourself as long as I’ve known you. There wasn’t a man I brought home you didn’t make a pass at . . .

  There . . . right there.

  Though I knew from the novel that I had nothing to fear, that I had no part to play in this, that the generalities of the terrible rivalry between mothers and daughters left me out and let me off – that where such mighty opposites were pitted against each other, my petty and unconsummated sinfulness did not merit so much as a walk-on role – I held my breath in the cinema fearing she might tell it differently this time and I would finally be exposed.

  But she didn’t and I wasn’t.

  So was Vanessa entirely unsuspicious of me? Did she not guess? Did she truly know nothing? Was she being, for her own reasons, discreet? Or didn’t it, in the bigger scheme of things, matter a jot to her?

  An alternative reading presented itself. There was nothing to know?

  42

  Luss

  Three weeks after the premiere she left me. ‘Make this easy for me, Guy,’ she pleaded. ‘Let me have my chance.’

  What’s making it easy? Making a fuss, to show you care, to show your heart is breaking, or making none?

  I made none, unless you call a flurry of tears a fuss.

  I think I wept as much over the nature of her appeal as I did over the fact of her going. No man likes to think he has stood in another person’s way – any person’s way – let alone the way of someone he loves.

  ‘Take it,’ I said. And then wept a little more over my own words. They had such a ring of stoicism about them.

  I had one final request. Would she slip her feet into her highest shoes while I sat on the bed and watched? There is no more arousing sight than that of a woman with beautiful legs stooping slightly, stiffening her calf muscles, angling her toes towards her shoes, and then wiggling her feet into them. The height she then attains when she straightens up can be arousing too, but nothing beats the metatarsal tension in that split second before entry, especially if the shoe is just the slightest bit close-fitting.

  She obliged. ‘Just one more time,’ I said. And she didn’t begrudge me that either.

  I didn’t ask about de Wolff. I couldn’t take him seriously as a threat, though undoubtedly he was one. Sexual competition more often than not assumes a melodramatic form; rakes, lechers, seducers, femmes fatales, belles dames sans merci – what are any of them but figures that stalk the stage of our own lurid terrors? Quite frankly I am ashamed to have introduced so obvious a character. But what to do? Life shames every writer and once you start leaving life out you get magic realism. If de Wolff hadn’t existed I’d have had to invent him – and that’s the truth of it. I like to think that somewhere out there I have similarly stalked the stage of other men’s inadequacies. Brought other men out in cold sweats. Andy Weedon, maybe, without going so far as to give him an idea for a book. What goes around comes around. If Vanessa had chosen to throw in her lot with de Wolff for five minutes (I certainly wouldn’t have given them any longer than that), it only proved that all human life was farcical. ‘I can see his knob,’ Poppy had mouthed to me giggling – not a word I care to use, but there was no other – as she was led off to his boat and the night stars fell from the skies. She knew how ridiculous it all was. So I wouldn’t so far demean myself as to mention his name to Vee in the solemn hour of our parting. I bowed my head before the inevitable absurdity of things and offered to move out. Let de Wolff have my bed. He was a figment, knob or no knob. When I returned there would be no sign that he had ever lain between my sheets. Vanessa thanked me but said it would not be necessary. She would be the one to go.

  That shocked me more than her initial announcement.

  ‘I’m so lonely I could die,’ I said, the day she left.

  ‘No you won’t,’ she said, kissing me on the cheek.

  I held on to her for ten full minutes.

  A month later I received a brief email from her in Broome. She was writing another book with a view to turning it into another film. About Aborigines. A subject, she reminded me, in which she had always
taken an intense interest and would have pursued much sooner but for my obstructionism. She hoped I was busy and happy, writing about whatever I was writing about though she didn’t for a moment doubt that it would be myself. She thanked me again for making it so easy. Life had closed over peacefully, she felt, and it was as though ‘we’ had never been. Did I, too, feel that, she wondered.

  It was only then I realised it was all over between us.

  So between whom and me wasn’t it over?

  It was one thing to have no wife and no wife’s mother, but I had no publisher or agent, either. My earlier complaint – that I had no readers – shrank before these new privations. But then you can’t complain about having no readers when you aren’t writing anything for them to read.

  As for the agent, Francis had introduced me to his replacement, who was not – that was something – Heidi Corrigan aged twelve, or Heidi anything else for that matter. Carter, he was called. Carter Strobe. A bulky, intense man who looked you deep in the eyes and ceremented himself in tight Ozwald Boateng suits with scarlet linings, buttoning every button, knotting his tie at his throat like a hangman’s noose, as though to contain what would otherwise fly everywhere – not just flesh but enthusiasm, his love for writing and for writers so exceeding reasonable bounds that there was no knowing where it might end up once it was released. I should have been grateful to have him as an agent. I was grateful. All of us who had inherited him as an agent were grateful. But the inordinacy of his pride in having us as clients cancelled out any feeling of being special. If we were all that good, were any of us any good at all?

  Because he kept a tight rein on language, too, he was hard to understand. The first time he introduced himself I took him to be saying ‘The art of Rome was insightful’, and wondered how to reply. ‘Yes, the art of Rome was indeed unsurpassably insightful,’ I tried, ‘unless the art of Athens could be said to have surpassed it.’

  He looked deeper still into my eyes, then laughed wildly. He introduced himself again, just in case there’d been some mistake – ‘Carter Strobe, delighted’ – but kept the laughter resounding in his chest to show that if I had been deliberately joking, he had got, and would go on getting until eternity, my joke.

  He got me altogether, that was what he wanted me to know. He always had got me. He even reeled off a sentence from each of my first two novels.

  ‘Those were your plays,’ he said.

  I stared at him. ‘My plays? I’ve never written a play.’

  He laughed again, a basso profundo laugh from far in and deep down. Clearly he found me a riot. ‘Days. Those were the days.’

  I knew what was coming. Those were those days but these are these days. Things had changed and we too had to change to keep up with them. Quite how much information of a personal no less than a professional nature Francis had passed on to him I didn’t know, but he was aware that Terminus had hit the buffers and that I had come to something of a halt.

  We were in Francis’s old office which Carter had not yet had time to refurbish, hence, I supposed, there being none of my books on show. ‘It’s never been my philosophy to tell a writer what he should write,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ I agreed, hoping he hadn’t said that it had never been his philosophy to bill writers who were white.

  ‘But Francis said you were overhauling your oeuvre.’

  Those words I didn’t even try to comprehend. I smiled instead.

  ‘So let me just mention what I think you could address better than any novelist I know . . .’ Whereupon he leaned very close to me and, as though he supposed I heard through my eyes, boomed the word ‘Less’ into them.

  ‘Less?’

  ‘Luss.’

  ‘Luss?’

  ‘Loss. Loss.’

  ‘Ah, loss.’

  ‘You look downcast. I haven’t offended you?’

  ‘Offended me? No. It’s just that loss is not my subject.’

  ‘But it is. You write about it magnificently. It’s only because you’ve done so much else that readers don’t even know it’s there.’

  ‘Not just the readers,’ I said. ‘I don’t even know it’s there.’

  He roared with laughter again – I wasn’t only lossier than I knew, I was funnier than I knew – then looked down in surprise at his suit, as though he had just found another button to fasten, and fastened it. ‘Some writers just tear you apart,’ he said. ‘For me you’re one of those writers.’

  I thanked him. ‘But luss is not me,’ I said, hoping to make him laugh again.

  He put his hand to his throat. It was, I decided, a physical metaphor for putting his hand to mine. ‘But you do,’ he said. ‘That monkey. Beadle. Unbearable. I feel I know him. I feel he’s me.’

  ‘Beagle.’

  ‘Beagle, yes. Heartbreaking.’

  ‘What’s heartbreaking about Beagle?’

  ‘What isn’t? When he beats his chest at the end and bellows, Christ . . .’

  ‘But he’s bellowing for more, not less.’

  ‘Loss.’

  ‘Loss, luss, less . . . It’s not me. I do amplitude and accretion. I do booty, lilacs out of the dead ground, the spoils of the sexual war. I do crudity, Carter. I wallow in filth. I do zoo.’

  I could tell what he was thinking. I didn’t look that amplitudinous right now, a man with no wife, no mother-in-law, no book, no publisher and no readers. Or that filthy. And anyway, filth was over.

  But he rejected the idea that it had to be one thing or another. You could be greedy and heartbreaking. He offered to show me a novel that was both regretful and ample. He’d just sold it for an unspeakable sum of money. First-time novelist. Twelve hundred pages, a tearaway wild child of a novel, about the agonising demise of every member of a family going back five hundred years. Innovative, in the formal, print-job, typeface sense, a book that looked like no other book, with pages set out like gravestones, doctors’ prognoses, real bloodstains, death certificates, line drawings of cemeteries and sepulchres, the endpapers impregnated with the smell of death, you name it, but the feeling in it, Guy, the sadness, the fucking heartbreak . . . he put his fists to his chest like Beagle and ground away at himself. When he took his fists away, I wondered, would there be two deep gouges in his jacket going all the way through to his breastbone?

  ‘What’s it called?’ I asked, making a mental note never to read it.

  ‘The Big Boys Book of Loss,’ he said.

  ‘Meaning it’s a big book or it’s a book for big boys?’

  ‘Both, both!’

  This was a first-time author who had thought of everything.

  ‘Young readers are going to love it,’ he told me.

  ‘The young are into loss?’

  ‘Big time. Loss, heartbreak – they can’t get enough. But with a bit of formal innovation. They like a book to feel different in their hands.’

  ‘And in their nostrils . . .’

  ‘Exactly. Let me show you . . .’

  I thanked him for the recommendation but refused a copy. ‘It’s too big for me to store and too heavy for me to carry,’ I said.

  He shrugged. I was the writer.

  He kissed me when we parted, took me into his tight embrace and held me fast. Now I knew what it was like to be those things in him he didn’t dare release, so many particles of appreciative matter with the potentiality for wholesale destruction.

  But it was nice to be kissed by somebody.

  I went home and thought about burning myself in my bed. Heartbreak! Loss! What would Archie Clayburgh have said? Visceral, boy, think visceral. Loss wasn’t visceral.

  And then, out of the blue, a distraught phone call from Francis. ‘It’s Poppy,’ he said, his voice reverberating as though from the furthest corners of space.

  I thought the receiver would melt in my hand. Please don’t let it be a brain tumour, I prayed. Better a heart attack – sudden, quick, painless – while lying in the garden in the sun, with Francis by her side, reading her Kindle.

&nb
sp; It was neither, more’s the pity. The good news was that she was still alive. The bad news was that she was still alive.

  In imagining the smaller irony of her succumbing to the brain tumour Vanessa had given her, I missed the greater irony of its being the dementia Vanessa had given her. A daughter’s curse.

  I thought it was unheard of for dementia to seize someone still in her sixties. It was commoner than I thought, Francis told me, especially among women. And anyway, Poppy was a little older than either of us had believed.

  Really?

  But it was too late now to castigate her for deceiving us.

  He couldn’t cope, that was why he’d called me. He couldn’t cope with any of it, neither the sadness nor the practicalities. And he just needed to hear himself say it: I can’t cope. After which, maybe he would be able to.

  She’d been deteriorating for some time, but the illness had accelerated and she was beyond his care. For a terrible moment I wondered if he wanted me to take her. Irony was piled upon irony, so why not one more? But that wasn’t what was on his mind. Vanessa neither, though it was surely Vanessa’s duty. ‘Have you called her?’ I asked. As yet, he hadn’t. Did he want me to? No, no, he didn’t. Vanessa, he feared, would make things even worse. ‘You know what they were like,’ he said. ‘They fought so savagely.’

  ‘Did Poppy tell you that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, it isn’t true. They didn’t fight.’

  ‘Well, Poppy thought they did.’

  I wondered if that was part of the condition. Dementia made the worst of everything, didn’t it? Dementia left out the nice parts.

  We continued the conversation three days later at the Soho club where no one wanted to be but where he and Poppy had first met. His idea, not mine. He wanted to dare sentimentality to do its worst. Which was why, presumably, he began by attacking me. ‘So what were these nice parts?’ he wanted to know.

  ‘Between Poppy and Vanessa? Where do I start? They were like sisters, Francis.’

  ‘Have you forgotten Vanessa’s book? Being like sisters was precisely what she said was wrong.’

  ‘Sure, in the book.’