Zoo Time Read online

  I raised an eyebrow. ‘Should there be?’

  ‘You even raise your eyebrows like her.’

  ‘Like whom?’

  Vanessa blew out her cheeks with impatience. This was evidently as long as she could bear a confused conversation to continue. ‘My mother knows your mother,’ she said. Meaning, now can we get on with the rest of our lives?

  ‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Well?’

  ‘Well what?’ Don’t ask me which of them asked that.

  ‘No, I meant does your mother – forgive me –’ turning from the daughter – ‘do you know her well?’

  At that moment a customer emerged from the dressing room wanting to be pinned up. How long had she been in there? All day? All week? This was too much for Vanessa who, having been in the shop all of three minutes herself, felt she had been there the whole of her life. ‘If we go and have tea might your mother be here when we return?’ she demanded to know.

  ‘No. My mother is on holiday.’ I looked at my watch. ‘Probably on the Nile right now.’

  Poppy looked disappointed. ‘I told you,’ she said to her daughter, ‘that we should have rung first.’

  ‘No, I told you.’

  ‘No, darling, I told you.’

  Vanessa shrugged. Mothers!

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, looking from one to the other. ‘Have you come far to see her?’

  ‘Knutsford.’

  I expressed surprise. Knutsford was only a short drive away. Given their agitation, I expected them to say Delhi. Vanessa read my surprise as anger. Angry women do that. They think everyone is at the same temperature they are. ‘We are new to the area,’ she said. ‘We are not yet used to the distances.’

  Knutsford is of course the town on which Mrs Gaskell, a one-time resident of the area, based her novel Cranford. And this sounded like a scene from Cranford. ‘We are new to the area.’ Imagine, reader, the perturbation in every heart when the new residents were introduced on the first Sunday after Easter to the parishioners . . .

  Which was nothing compared to the perturbation in mine. New to the area, were they? Well, in that case they would need someone who was old to the area to put them at their ease.

  How it was that Poppy knew my mother, who was considerably older than her, I discovered later. Not that I was curious. Mere plot, how people come to know one another, on a par with why the butler did it. Something to do with an older sister (Poppy’s) who’d died in tragic circumstances – car crash, cancer, cranial palsy – one of those. Something about my mother having gone to school with her, the older sister. Who cared? Poppy, returned to Cheshire, wanted to pick up the connection again for her sister’s sake, that was all.

  Mills & Boon.

  ‘Tasty shop,’ she said, looking about her for the first time. ‘A girl could get into trouble in a place like this.’

  Girl?

  HarperCollins.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘My mother’s taste. She’s rarely here now. I keep an eye on the place for her.’

  I was trying for insouciance. People who think of themselves as writers cannot believe that any other calling can be of interest. Only once they’d been apprised of the fact that I went home at night and wrote sentences in a lined notepad would Vanessa and Poppy want to know me better. As for shopkeeping – oh my Lord, I did that from a distance, through the back of my neck, while I wasn’t looking. But I couldn’t come straight out with it and say I was a novelist because then one or other of them, or most likely both of them together, would say ‘Should we know anything you’ve written?’ and I didn’t want to hear myself reply that I wasn’t a novelist in the crude sense of having actually produced a novel.

  Even allowing for my naivety, that’s a measure of how things have changed in twenty years. Then, no matter with what foundation in truth, it was possible to believe that being a writer was a glamorous occupation, that two beautiful women might travel up again from Knutsford sometime soon to renew their acquaintance with a man in whose head words cavorted like the Ballets Russes. Now, one has to apologise for having read a book, let alone for having written one. Food and fashion have left fiction far behind. ‘I sell suits by Marc Jacobs in Wilmslow,’ I’d say today if I wanted to impress a woman, ‘and when I’m not doing that I’m practising to be a short-order chef at Baslow Hall. This fiction shit is just a way of killing time.’

  Had I known then what I know now I would have burnt my books, boned up on Balenciaga, and held on to the shop for dear life, instead of letting it pass to my younger brother who lived the life of Casanova from the day he got it.

  3

  Me Beagle

  To Vanessa and to Poppy, anyway, my first novel was dedicated. It was theirs. My beloved Vanessa’s comma, and Poppy’s.

  Or forget the comma.

  An elegantly profane novel, told from the point of view of a young and idealistic woman zookeeper – hence its lingering interest to women’s reading groups, who found less not to identify with in it than in my later work – Who Gives a Monkey’s? made a bit of a splash when it was first published thirteen years before it found its way on to the shelves of Oxfam. The title, as I should have realised, and as my publisher should have warned me – but he might already have been contemplating a suicide of his own – was nothing if not a hostage to fortune. Who gives a monkey’s fuck? – ‘Not me!’ some tart reviewer was bound to say. And one did. Eugene Bawstone, the literary editor of one of those giveaway London newspapers no one wanted to be given. But as he had cracked the same mirthless joke in a review of a revival of Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and no doubt said the same to King Lear when he asked ‘Who is it that can tell me who I am?’ and, more to the point, as no one read him anyway, his jeu d’ennui did not succeed in halting the novel’s gentle progress.

  I had some insider knowledge of zookeeping on account of my having gone out for a while – before V&P (I should date everything from their arrival: BVPE meaning Before the Vanessa and Poppy Era) – with a woman who worked in the chimpanzee breeding centre at Chester Zoo, home to the largest colony of chimps in Europe. As a child of Wilmslow and Wilhelmina’s, brought up to think of women as exemplifying civilisation at its most delicate and refined, I was stirred to madness by the thought of the untamed jungle on our very doorstep. There I was, tying pretty bows around boxes of the laciest, most feather-light creations, yet just down the road apes and monkeys were riding one another with an abandon that made a mockery of the very idea of clothes at all, let alone haute couture. Push-up ruffle bra-dresses by Prada! Versace metallic skirts in chartreuse green, slit to the waist! Garter belts by La Perla! Who were we kidding?

  Mishnah Grunewald was the daughter of an Orthodox rabbi, much given to weeping and mysticism, whose family had got out of Poland just in time. She had turned to chimpanzees in rebellion against the stories of persecution with which her relations had persecuted her. ‘I haven’t left the fold, I just want the space to question,’ she told me. ‘And nothing calls Judaism into question quite like monkeys.’

  ‘Not even pigs?’

  She threw me a cross look. ‘Pigs, pigs, pigs! The one thing everybody thinks they know about Jews – their aversion to pigs. You, however, Guy Ableman, should know better.’

  ‘Me?’

  I was no more in denial about being Jewish than she was. It simply never entered into the scheme of things for me. As it never had for my parents. Jews? Were we Jews? Fine, but just remind us what Jews were when they were at home?

  Here’s the proof I wasn’t the genuine article. A genuine fired-up apocalyptic Jew, who thought about being Jewish every hour he was awake and most of the hours he wasn’t, could never have resisted concluding that sentence with a bitter, deracinated joke. ‘So what were Jews when they were at home – wherever home was?’ But I knew where home was. Home was Wilmslow. We’d been there for centuries. Look up the Wilmslow Ablemans in the Domesday Book if you doubt my word. There you’ll find them – my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents
: Leofrick and Cristiana Ableman. Yeomen retailers.

  Mishnah threw me a ‘whatever’ smile, though ‘whatever’ was not yet in common usage. I’d been smiled at like that before – by the Felsenstein twins and Michael Ezra, boys I’d flunked football and metalwork with at school. The bonding, we’re all in this ancient shit together smile, whatever my denials. They had even called me boychick which, as a boy lacking affection – only words loved me – I hadn’t minded. Michael Ezra, I minded, but that was later, and for other reasons.

  Mishnah Grunewald, with purple eyes and hair as is a flock of goats – straight out of the Holy Land she seemed to come, without a trace of her family’s long sojourn in Eastern Europe on her, whereas I was as colourless as pewter, of the same washed-out hue as the Polacks who’d tormented her family for centuries, which is not to imply, for Christ’s sake, that I was a bit of a Jew-baiting Polack myself – Mishnah Grunewald smelt of the animals whose confidante she had become, an odour of unremitting rutting that turned me into a wild beast whenever I got to within sniffing distance of her presence. ‘You’re worse than Beagle,’ she used to tell me, Beagle being the dominant male at the breeding centre. I pictured him with a blazing red penis that he was forever working at, much like myself. Though she was matter-of-fact about her work, Mishnah had only to let drop some circumstantial detail of her life in the zoo, such as that she’d once had to lend a hand in the tiger cage, masturbating the wild cats, for all reason to desert me. What was she doing masturbating wild cats? That was just something they did, to keep the zoo quiet. Honestly? Honestly. Tigers? Yes, tigers. How did that make her feel? Useful. How did it make the tigers feel? You’ll have to ask them. And Beagle – did she ever masturbate Beagle? This I demanded to know as I clawed at her clothes. I imagined him looking into her Song of Solomon eyes, his jaw hanging, a chimp besotted with one of the daughters of Canaan, as I was. The answer was no. You didn’t do that to monkeys. They were too dangerous. Whereas tigers would go all dopey. ‘So which am I,’ I asked her, ‘an ape or a tiger?’ In the end I insisted that she call me Beagle during lovemaking, so there would be no mistake.

  Who Gives a Monkey’s? was only ostensibly Mishnah’s story. Its real subject was – no, not the fine line that divided animals and humans, nothing so trite – but the greater inhumanity and self-disloyalty of humans. Apes knew rage and spite and boredom right enough, but they were not cynical as mankind was. Crazed with undifferentiated lust they might have been, but they were serious in their monkeydom, understood what being of their species entailed, weren’t forever jumping ship and crossing over the way humans did, and cared for one another. They even showed a protective love to Mishnah which she assured me she had never met the equal of in her own species. ‘What about me?’ I’d asked. She laughed. ‘You’re more feral than any animal in Chester Zoo,’ she said. It was the nicest word any woman had ever used of me. Not zoo, though I loved the extra vowel she gave it – zooo, not zo or zuh – but feral. Feral! From the Latin for an unruly beast. Guy Feral. Feral Guy. But I turned it against myself for the sake of art. Who Gives a Monkey’s? told of unbridled selfishness and moral slippage in the world of men. If Mishnah was the heroine, I was the villain – a man ruled by pointless ambition and a blazing red penis, at whose behest he stumbled blindly into the zoo theologians call hell.

  Or was that unfair to zoos? Didn’t the undifferentiated lust of their inmates make zoos a paradise? Here was my point: the chimps weren’t kinder to one another in despite of their libidinousness, but because of it.

  I wasn’t some prophet of unbridled sex. I joined words, not bodies. But I remembered what the novel owed to sex, that sex was integral to it, that prose trumped verse because it celebrated our lower instincts not our higher, except that my point was that our lower instincts were our higher instincts.

  ‘Gerald Durrell meets Lawrence Durrell,’ the Manchester Evening Chronicle quietly enthused. Cheshire Life was more uninhibited in its praise – ‘At last Wilmslow has its own Marquis de Sade.’ You can’t buy notices like that. I was even invited to give the annual lecture at Chester Zoo until the head keeper read the book and discovered it ended in a scene of man-on-monkey mayhem in the chimp enclosure.

  Mishnah Grunewald, whom I’d stopped seeing years before, and could barely remember, to be honest, now I had Vanessa and Poppy constantly before my eyes, wrote to say she felt she’d been betrayed. Had she known I was planning to make a tasteless priapic comedy out of her profession she would not have taken me into her confidence, let her alone her bed.

  What had particularly annoyed her was the epigraph I had cobbled together from some throwaway sentences by Charles Bukowski – ‘I ate meat. I had no god. I liked to fuck. Nature didn’t interest me. I never voted. I liked wars. History bored me. Zoos bored me.’

  ‘How could you write those things about me?’ she wanted to know.

  I wrote back to explain they had nothing to do with her. The remarks were not attributable to any living person. In so far as they were the views of anybody, they were the views of the chimp, Beagle. And if he couldn’t say zoos bored him, who could?

  But she had no feeling for fiction. Who does any more? She took the ‘I’ in the novel for her and therefore supposed that every thought expressed was intended to be hers. ‘You of all people know that zoos don’t bore me,’ she wrote. ‘That’s the part that hurts.’

  I buried my face in her writing paper. The ape-enclosure smell of it drove me half mad with desire, though I was married to Vanessa by this time. Vanessa, too, though she’d never been near a zoo, drove me half mad with desire. On her I smelt her mother.

  Who Gives a Monkey’s? was shortlisted for a small prize administered by the estate of a Lancashire mill owner with a taste for local literature and discreet pornography, and was chosen by the arts editor of the northern edition of the Big Issue as his Book of the Year. Even the homeless, it appeared, recognised something of their essential nature in my novel. Then it fell into the literary equivalent of those same piss-soaked doorways in which the homeless laid out their cardboard beds – the black hole known as back list.

  While I could chalk Chipping Norton down to spur-of-the-moment kleptomania brought on by professional stress – my own fault for succumbing to the hubris of supposing I could charm a book group, but stress is stress whoever is to blame for it – I couldn’t pretend I wasn’t in other ways behaving strangely. I was tearing off my fingernails, I was pulling hairs out of my moustache, I was peeling the skin from my fingers. When a caged parrot does the psittacine equivalent of one or all of these things, Mishnah had told me, he is diagnosed with depression or dementia. You open the cage and let him fly away; though by that time he has probably forgotten what it was about his freedom he has missed.

  I the same. Had anyone opened my cage I wouldn’t have known where to fly. Well, I would: I would have flown to my wife’s mother’s place. But then she wasn’t my purpose, she was my consolation for having lost my purpose.

  By purpose, understand readers.

  I wasn’t the only one. No one had readers. But every writer takes the loss of readers personally. Those are your readers who have gone missing.

  When you have no one to address you address yourself. This was another way in which I was behaving strangely: I was self-communicating, speaking words to no one in particular and not always realising I was doing it. Moving my lips to no effect, and certainly not in the hope of initiating a conversation, usually on long directionless walks through Notting Hill and Hyde Park – for I had moved south on the strength of my early, illusory success – unconscious of the world unless I happened to find myself outside a bookshop in the window of which not one of my books was to be seen. A writer found moving his lips outside a bookshop that doesn’t stock his titles is automatically assumed to be uttering menaces and maledictions, or even plotting arson, and I didn’t want people to think things had got as bad for me as that.

  Whatever it looked like, I wasn’t talking, I was writing. Mout
h-writing, I suppose you’d have to call it – practising the sound of sentences when I wasn’t anywhere I could write them down. This is called having a book on the go but the worrying part was that the book I had on the go was about a book I had on the go about a writer mouth-writing about worrying about mouth-writing. And this is when you know you’re in deep shit as a writer – when the heroes of your novels are novelists worrying that the heroes of their novels are novelists who know they’re in deep shit.

  You don’t have to be a psychiatrist to see that stealing your own books symbolises sleeping with your mother-in-law.

  Help me, someone, I was saying.

  4

  Death of a Publisher

  Things had not been going well in my neck of the woods: not for me, on account of being a writer whose characters readers didn’t identify with, not for my wife who didn’t identify with my characters or with me, not for Poppy Eisenhower, my wife’s mother, where the problem, to be candid, was that we’d been identifying with each other altogether too well, not for my local library which closed only a week after I’d published a florid article in the London Evening Standard praising its principled refusal to offer Internet access, and not for my publisher Merton Flak who, following a drunken lunch in my company – I had been the one doing the drinking – went back to his office and shot himself in the mouth.

  ‘I suppose you think all this has got something to do with you,’ Vanessa, mysterious and beautiful in black lace, whispered at the funeral.

  I shrugged through my tears. Of course I thought it had something to do with me. I thought everything had something to do with me. I was a first-person person by profession. ‘I’ was the first word of Who Gives a Monkey’s?. It was also the last. ‘And yes I said yes I will I’ – no matter that it was a monkey, or might have been a monkey, who was saying it. And the truth is, you can’t imagine yourself into the ‘I’ of another person, or indeed another creature, without imagining yourself.