Zoo Time (12 page)

But there was no beyond the page. Beyond the page was no business of our readers. And if we
made
beyond the page our business, no wonder that the page was no longer being turned.

A plain logic demanded that we ask ourselves this question: if we wanted to play the comedian why didn’t we just call ourselves comedians and dispense with the vestigial bookishness? We were finished, anyway. Comedians had taken over. The best of the stand-ups worked from scripts that might as well have been short satiric novels; they saw as novelists saw, they enjoyed the rhythm of the language, they deployed exaggeration and bathos as we did, they excoriated, they surprised, they caught laughter on the wing, in the moment it threatened to tumble into terror. They were predictable and complacent and self-righteous, too, but then who wasn’t? What is more, they had a slavish following. Where had all the readers gone? Wasn’t it obvious? They were watching stand-up comedy.

Had Vanessa not warned me against discussing my career while she was driving I’d have told her I was getting out. No, not out of the van, Vee, out of literature. And where would I go? The stage, the stage . . .

Take my mother-in-law
. . .

In the event, I just sat and navigated. The miles went by; every now and then Vanessa stopped the van so that the two women could get out and pluck a desert pea, or fix their binoculars on a wedge-tailed eagle who felt about the prospect of sinking his teeth into their browning flesh pretty much as I felt, and once we had to pause to catch our breath after nearly running into a troop of tarty emus with hair cropped like Vanessa and Poppy. They teetered across the road and looked back at us with contemptuous expressions, not in anger that we’d almost killed them but as though they were out on a hen night and we, the stags, had just thrown them a pathetic chat-up line. Fuck you, they said in Emu. And faced with such natural wonders I never did figure out a way to change my career.

Now, a year or so later, with my name mud in Chipping Norton, with fellow writers and publishers dropping like flies, with bookshops closing up and down the country, and agents hiding from their clients, here I was tearing at the skin behind my ears and still wondering. In that time, stand-up had bloomed like wild flowers in the Great Sandy Desert. Who were the unacknowledged legislators of the world? Not poets or novelists. Comedians. Who took tea at 10 Downing Street? Not poets or novelists. Comedians. Their jeering was the jeering of the age. They
were
the age. Well, it was too late now for me to make a change. I no longer had the cojones. Maybe I’d never had the cojones. All very well to talk about it as an option, but what if one became a writer out of timidity, as a way of being a performer without having to perform? Were comedians just novelists with balls? Granted a bolder personality, would D. H. Lawrence have been W. C. Fields?

Funny might be ruling the world but, as far as the novel went, it was a dead letter. You can’t have funny where you have sacred, and someone somewhere had left the windows of the novel open for sacred to spirit itself in on broken wings. And what was the sacred, anyway, but the cloak the funereal threw over their turgidity? Eugene Bawstone – the literary editor and sacristan who had greeted my first novel (
Who Gives a?
) with a two-word review: ‘Not me!’ – a man whose shy, depressed demeanour and Bambi-eyed good looks had earned him the nickname ‘the Princess Di of English Letters’ (though I can avouch that there was nothing promiscuous about his reading), was rumoured to have written to each of his reviewers by hand, telling them they were no longer to use the words funny, riotous or Rabelaisian when writing for him. The quality he looked for in literature being ‘weightlessness’, he had never found a novel funny, riotous or Rabelaisian in his life (and that included anything by Rabelais) and assumed his reviewers were either lying or showing off when they claimed they had.

‘Have you ever wondered,’ I once asked him at a party, ‘whether the fault doesn’t lie in you?’

I now realise, though I didn’t know it at the time, that I must have been drunk. Drunk and riotous.

He raised his sad eyes prettily to me. Was he going to confide the details of his personal unhappiness, I wondered. Or was he going to slip his hands down the front of my trousers?

‘What fault are you referring to?’

‘The inability to feel pleasure. Psychologists call it anhedonia.’

‘Psychologists! Are you saying I should be sectioned for not finding what you write diverting?’

I thought about it. A strange negative energy came off him, as though he possessed the gift of sucking vitality from the room. I felt the breath of life leaving my body. It was either him or me. ‘Well, I hadn’t quite put it to myself like that,’ I said with brutal unsubtlety – what could I do? he brought out the brute in me, just as Diana must have brought out the brute in her men – ‘but now you mention it, yes, I think the madhouse might be the only place for you.’

‘In a straitjacket?’

His voice possessed that very quality of weightlessness he admired so much in literature.

‘You are,’ I said, ‘already in a straitjacket.’

A week later he was found dead, slumped at the wheel of his car, in an underpass in Paris
. He wasn’t, of course, but a man can dream.

Wrong to blame it all on Bawstone. No publisher with a business brain allowed the word ‘funny’ to appear on a book jacket. Merton had banned it from his list years before. He tore his hair when anything made him laugh. ‘What am I going to do with this?’ he’d ask. It was even possible that something had made him laugh just before he took his life. Maybe I had. Maybe I’d asked him what chance he thought I had of winning the Nobel Prize for Literature.

All this apart, the comedy phenomenon needed explaining: if no one wanted funny, why the triumphant march of the comedians? Something didn’t make sense.

Take my mother-in-law .
. .

What if Francis was wrong? What if a comedian who fucked his mother-in-law was the hero of sexual transgression everyone was waiting for?

It’s hard to embark on a story uncertain whether your hero is a comedian or a climate scientist. There comes a moment, and it comes early, when you must make the leap and see the story through with him.

What did I know about climate science? If it was hot in my study, I put on the air conditioning. If it was cold I imagined lying in the arms of my wife’s mother. Climate science.

Anything further would entail research and I didn’t do research. In this I was out of step with my neutered associates. Research was what desperation had driven them to. Especially research into the latest developments in epigenetics, particle physics or quantum mechanics. There’d been a time when novelists were proudly indifferent to all of this. The boffins did matter, we did the human heart. But we’d lost faith in the human heart, which meant we’d lost faith in ourselves. We weren’t important, they were. If we could hitch a ride on their wagon, maybe we’d get to where they were going. And where was that? Search me. Relevance? Contemporaneity? An audience?

Whatever we were hoping, we no longer stood up for ourselves. It wasn’t even a two-way street – we’ll bone up on you if you bone up on us. The scientific community’s response was that we weren’t worth boning up on. You aren’t where it’s at, sunshine. So any twopenny-halfpenny proponent of string theory believed he could do his job and not acquaint himself with the uses of metaphor or the seven types of ambiguity; any climatologist could draw his graphs in serene and unchallenged ignorance of
Henderson the Rain King
.

Well, if they weren’t reading us, I at least was not reading them. Whatever else he was or wasn’t going to be, my hero wasn’t going to be a climate scientist.

Take my mother-in-law – I just have
.

It was that word ‘just’ I found hard to resist. The idea of a comedian coming out to entertain his audience with the smell of his mother-in-law still on him. It was a disgusting concept which confirmed Vanessa’s view that I was a disgusting person.

‘Person or author?’ I’d always asked, to be on the safe side.

She never missed her cue. ‘Both.’

And that was leaving my disgusting thoughts about her mother out of it.

If my tentative hero had the taste of his mother-in-law on his fingers, I had the taste of his fear on me. The scene described itself. A comedy club in Chester, housed in the back of a riverside pub. Monday. First-timers’ night. Thirty people in a grimy room, simultaneously desperate to laugh and not expecting to be amused, their feet in puddles of warm beer. Not being a beer drinker myself, I associate its smell with human hopelessness. Warm beer, rats’ piss, failure. My hero would be smelling of all three. I saw him gnawing his fingernails behind the torn black sheet which served as a curtain. Then out into the limelight, tapping the microphone because that was what he’d seen real comedians do.

Take my mother-in-law – I just have.

Not a laugh to be heard. Too subtle for a Chester audience? Too gross? Francis said not. Francis said not gross enough. But Francis wasn’t Chester.
Get off the stage
, I heard them shouting, anyway.
Don’t give up your day job
.

In which event I could have it both ways. My first-person narrator would be a comedian
and
a comedian manqué, a comic who never was. He would try out his riff and keep his day job, and his day job would be mine, he would do what I had done before the rabbit hole of publication had opened for me to fall through like that pervert Lewis Carroll’s Alice – he would be in the ladies’ fashion business, tending his parents’ shop. A fashion consultant.

This had been my world. I knew it inside out. Certainly I understood it better than I understood Chester Zoo, the wild smell of Mishnah Grunewald on my skin notwithstanding. I even began to wonder whether that was when it all went wrong: the day Mishnah called me ‘feral’ and I went in search of the monkey in myself. As a novelist, never mind as a man, wouldn’t I have done better had I stuck with retail? Quinton’s words: don’t sever your roots, stick with what you know.

Without question, Vanessa would be scathing. The moment I put my hero in charge of a lacy little boutique in Wilmslow she’d accuse me of shedding the last pretence that I was interested in somebody not myself. ‘Solipsistic shit!’ she’d called me when I’d written as Mishnah Grunewald – a Jewish woman zookeeper. ‘Solipsistic shit!’ she’d called me when I’d written as an unprincipled van salesman on the loose in Sandbach. She was hardly going to think any better of me when I wrote as a comedic Wilmslow fashionista with artistic pretensions and parents identical to my own.

But then Vanessa was not going to see this novel until it was too late for her opinion to count. Normally I presented her with a typescript hot from my computer. But how do you give your wife a novel about a man – a comedian or a fashion consultant – who’s in love with his wife’s mother? I’d deny the similarity of course.
This is a work of fiction, Vee, for Christ’s sake. Any resemblance between the characters and persons living or dead .
. . But she’d never swallow that. In her soul Vanessa didn’t believe in fiction. Her own work-in-progress, now in its second decade of non-completion, didn’t even bother to change names. The heroine was Vanessa, the bad guy was Guy. Once you changed anything, Vanessa maintained, you lost the ring of truth. So I had no hope of persuading her that I had entirely made up the story of a Cheshire-born shop assistant who’d formed an unnatural attachment to the mother of his wife, a woman in all particulars identical – because I too loved the ring of truth – to Vanessa.

Which left me with only two courses of action: either I’d risk ending the marriage, or I’d not write the book.

A no-brainer – as people with no feeling for language, readers who didn’t read me, readers who didn’t read anyone, the wordless walking brain-dead – chose to put it. A no-brainer.

12

Little Gidding

In my head I called him Gid, my comedian who wasn’t. Gid, short for Gideon, not to be confused with Guy, short – in mock-heroic Vanessa-speak – for Guido.

Guido was what she called me the first time we slept together.
Geeeedo!
Like Sophia Loren wheedling her way into the forgiveness of Marcello Mastroianni. She climbed on top of me and blew the name into my eyes.
Guido, Guido
. . . At a stroke, Wilmslow became Naples. I could smell the pungent lava of Vesuvius floating on the lavender-blue waters of the Mediterranean. See Wilmslow and die. With Vanessa astride me, death would not have been so terrible. Life with Vanessa astride me was better even than death though, and life crooked its libidinous finger at me.
Guido, Guido
. . .

I believed it. I
was
Guido. I even began to dress differently. More Italianately. More Armani than Boss. Soft black crêpe. The jacket like a second skin.
Guido, Guido
. . . And I was fool enough to think Vanessa believed it also. Maybe she had, at first. But eventually the name snagged on the ridiculousness of things and became ridiculous itself. ‘Use your nose on me, Guido,’ I recall her saying. I bridled at that, I’m not sure why. Was it the idea of being sexually adroit only by virtue of my nose? I acceded, nevertheless, and even enjoyed it, but I was never entirely free of the sensation that she was making light of me, even denying me, phallically. Henry Miller wouldn’t have minded, but D. H. Lawrence would. Eventually, when Vanessa called me Guido I did not see the Bay of Naples, I saw Mount Derision, and below it the Slough of Despond.