Zoo Time (15 page)

‘I’ve eaten.’

‘A burger? Fish and chips?’

‘That’s food. I’ve just said I’ve eaten.’

Gideon in his comedic phase might have scratched his head and said, ‘How about a fuck in that case?’ but I was no comedian. I was twenty-four and writing the novel of what was happening in my head.

It’s true that Henry Miller might also have asked her for a fuck. In fact Henry Miller might well have asked to see her cunt, but I wasn’t yet Henry Miller either, more was the pity.

In the event, what I did would probably have shocked Henry Miller, Leonard Cohen and Norman Mailer rolled together. I asked, since she didn’t want to come out herself, whether perhaps her mother did.

I expected her to query ‘did’. ‘
Did
what?’

Did want a fuck, I decided against saying.

14

OCD

It was a shame we didn’t make it to Monkey Mia until dark. It meant that we missed out on being scrutinised by the pelican who guarded the beach. Before you could get to what else Monkey Mia had to offer, you had to pass the pelican. And if he didn’t like you you could kiss goodbye to the dolphins, never mind the monkeys.

Although under normal circumstances she would not be parted from her mother, Vanessa couldn’t face having her sleeping in the van with us that night. Drunk, Poppy snored. Not a loud snore but loud enough to spoil the outback experience for her daughter. We were in a complex of lodges and cabins, bars, cafés, restaurants; we parked the van where we could avail ourselves of the most modern conveniences known to camping – had we asked, they’d have piped red wine into us through our taps – but we were still half a thousand kilometres from the highway, on a promontory protruding like a nose from the coastline of Western Australia far into the Indian Ocean. We were a long way from anywhere. Vanessa had come here to get away. From me, from my writing, from her own writing, from the morbidities of London where, even before Merton took his life and our favourite independent bookshop closed its doors, the prognosis for civilisation had been made and was declared terminal. It would be good to hear the silence, she said. Or the sound of life that wasn’t human life. I wasn’t sure what she expected to hear. The waves? The pelican opening and closing his beak, click-clack? The night-time cries of dolphins? She didn’t know what she wanted to hear, only what she didn’t. Number one was her mother snoring. Number two was me on any subject.

So we moved her mother into a lodge. She was awake by this time and wanting dinner. ‘Sleep,’ Vanessa said. Her words had an uncanny effect on Poppy. If Vanessa said sleep, she slept. Ten minutes after seeing her in, ascertaining where the switches were and how the air conditioning worked, she was flat out on the bed, snoring.

‘See,’ Vanessa said.

On me too her words worked hypnotically. I saw.

We ate dinner at wooden tables looking out into Shark Bay. The air was warm and silky. The sea barely moved. ‘It smells like baby out here,’ I said.

‘Like a baby?’

‘No, not like
a
baby. Like baby. The essence of newborn baby that you get when you smell its head.’

‘Christ, I hope you’re not thinking of writing that down.’

I was, but didn’t dare to now.

‘I’ll tell you what I can smell,’ Vanessa said. ‘Dolphin.’

‘What does dolphin smell like?’

‘Breathe in. Can you smell it now?’

‘Yes,’ I lied. In fact, what Vanessa could smell was the barbecued barracuda at the next couple’s table. Unless it was their baby.

Every now and then Vanessa gestured to the sea and said, ‘Look!’

I looked but couldn’t see anything.

‘There! Do you see?’

Dolphins.

For my money what she saw could as easily have been monkeys. From this distance and in this light any oil-slick grey dolphin rolling over and waiting to be tickled in Shark Bay would not have been visible. But Vanessa was in marvelling mode. She looked up at the stars. She inhaled the night. You can tell from the night when you’re far from anywhere, and this was a night a million miles from everything. And then a shooting star shot by, just for us.

‘Christ, Guido,’ she said, taking my hand, ‘isn’t it something?’

‘It’s something all right,’ I said.

We kissed. Not bad after all those years of marriage, still kissing. Kissing was a skill we’d retained. She’d long stopped smoking but whenever I kissed her I remembered the tobacco taste of our first embraces. It was possible that I continued to kiss her passionately in order to seek out that very memory. Call it a Proustian kiss, then. Amplitudinous and digressive. And of course weighed down with the melancholy of time.

Was she kissing me for the same reason? Who could say? I’d never understood why she’d kissed me in the first place. She hadn’t appeared to like me. She disagreed with most of my opinions, didn’t think I had it in me to be a novelist – on the grounds that I didn’t understand her and was therefore unlikely to understand anyone else – refused on principle to wear the clothes I wanted her to wear, and regretted the disparity in our height. Could she have kissed me to stop me kissing her mother? Or to stop her mother kissing me? It had occurred to me over the years that she’d married me telepathically, by proxy or in answer to some sort of uncanny mother-daughter transference of affection, or simply to afford vicarious pleasure to Poppy. For that theory to have worked I’d have needed evidence that Poppy had wanted me for herself, only our age difference a barrier, but I had no evidence of the sort. If anything, she’d been as uninterested in me as her daughter – even the night she agreed to go drinking with me in Knutsford – and didn’t change her attitude in any marked way, as Vanessa definitely did, when Quinton O’Malley rescued
Who Gives a Monkey’s?
from the reject pile
,
sold it to Merton Flak who hailed it as a masterpiece and I became a shooting star myself.

It was also possible that Vanessa had loved me deeply but unconventionally, and I had not been unconventional enough to appreciate it. Except that I had stayed in love with her, no matter how great the provocation and temptation not to, and if that wasn’t appreciation what was it?

Our Monkey Mia kiss, however it was to be interpreted, came to an end when a motor yacht with lights blazing and loud music blaring hove out of the night and dropped anchor right in front of us, exactly where Vanessa swore she’d seen the dolphins doing cartwheels.

‘All we need!’ she said, as though this was the last in a series of intolerable vexations. That was Vanessa – the smallest irritation drove out all memory that she’d ever enjoyed a moment’s happiness in her life.

I suggested we move tables but there was no escaping the glare or the racket.

Vanessa’s father, in the brief time she’d known him, had been a sailing man and she’d inherited from him a hatred of anything that needed an engine to propel it through the water. You had a sail, or you rowed, the rest was parvenu grossness. Just before we left London, Garth Rhodes-Rhind, a crossover fantasy writer – which meant he moved implausible characters from another world and time into an implausibly rendered present, or vice versa as the fantasy took him – had thrown a bragging party in Docklands on a motor launch. ‘Launch on a Launch’, the invitation read. The boat, of which he was said to have bought a major share with the sale of the world rights in a novel about a thirteenth-century alchemist with a striking profile and second sight who’d blundered into contemporary Clerkenwell where alchemy was/is all the rage, was a crude pink floating brothel of a vessel which, at least for this one night, he called
Lulu
after the publicity girl for whom he threw over his wife on the strength of royalties from the previous crossover fantasy about a Clerkenwell banker with a striking profile and early-onset Alzheimer’s who’d gone back in time to a thirteenth-century monastery on the summit of Mont Ventoux. There were security men on the boat to stop the wife gatecrashing the party. ‘Don’t you ever think of doing this,’ Vanessa had said to me, squinting viciously through her flute of
Lulu
-tinted champagne.

‘Running off with the publicity girl or preventing you from attending the bash?’

She shook her head, a gesture which comprehended everything she loathed about the venue. ‘Don’t be smart with me, Guido,’ she said. ‘You know what I’m saying.’

‘Vee, what sign have I ever given you that I would like a motorboat? I can’t swim. It makes me seasick to have a bath.’

‘Wait till you earn what Garth Rhodes-Rhind earns.’

I rode with the punch. ‘I won’t be buying a boat.’

We left it at that, though I sensed she went in fear of what I would buy should I suddenly start earning big, whether I wanted a motor launch or not. A fear that caused its own friction, not only because I resented her thinking there was a vulgar plutocrat hiding out in me, but because we both knew that Garth Rhodes-Rhind’s earnings from urban fantasy were beyond a writer whose genre was the Wilmslow dissolute, no matter that there were some who viewed that as urban fantasy on my part.

Thus, either way, I felt a failure to her, and indeed to myself. Not least as I had known and helped – well, met and spoken to – Garth Rhodes-Rhind when he was penniless and had encouraged him to believe he could amount to something – though not very much – if he persisted, never for moment believing that he would.

Disheartened by the noise of the motor yacht, we went to bed in the van. In the morning we decided we’d have breakfast in the same restaurant rather than the van so that Poppy could enjoy the view she’d missed out on the night before. She was well rested and looked rather lovely in a safari dress with lots of pockets that complemented Vanessa’s. A miracle they could do that without consulting each other, not just choose to wear identical dresses in different colours, but put their hair up similarly, and both wear Roman sandals.

They looked like the mistresses of big-game hunters. In the pockets of their dresses they carried their lovers’ bullets.

The owner of the motorboat was out on deck, wearing a powder-blue sailor suit and giving orders. Provisions were being ferried aboard. Crates of champagne and baskets of lobsters, I assumed. In between taking receipt of these, he’d walk up and down, examining the boat, tugging at ropes, checking the paintwork and shaking his head in anger when he found a scratch. This was what you did if you owned a motor yacht – housework, only at sea.

He appeared to be a man in his forties, overcooked by the sun, so that while he cut a youthful figure you could tell, even from a distance, that close up he’d be prematurely aged. Ill-tempered, too, in the way of the idle rich. Be careful, as they say, what you wish for, and he’d wished for a boat whose appearance and well-being now took up every minute of his time.

He had a phone in each hand and another on his belt. All three were ringing.

Vanessa and Poppy drank their tea and laughed at him as he made his round of minute housewifely investigations.

‘God, aren’t men neurotic!’ Poppy said.

‘OCD if ever I saw it.’

This was designed for me to hear. I suffered from an extreme form of obsessive compulsive disorder whenever I had a book on the go. I believed I would no sooner write a sentence than I would lose it, either to the four winds if I was writing outside, or to the ill will of a computer when I was at my desk. So I made multiple backups of everything I wrote, writing on paper what I’d typed into a machine, saving on a multitude of external hard drives what I was not prepared to trust to the internal memory of my computer. In the days of carbon paper I’d hide a minimum of four copies of every page I’d typed and leave a note in a sealed envelope for Vanessa, telling her where to find them in the event of my death. Later, I did the same with flash drives of which I kept about a dozen active, depositing them in the pockets of jackets I didn’t wear, Sellotaping them to the backs of paintings, concealing them in Vanessa’s underwear drawer, hanging them from loops of string behind our bedhead. And the whereabouts of these were logged in a folder marked for Vanessa’s attention. If I die, this is where my work is to be found.

When
Who Gives a Monkey’s?
was published Vanessa presented me with a soft Italian briefcase embossed with gold lettering. Not my initials – GA – but OCD.

She thought she had married a madman, but if I was mad to suppose that writing was an open invitation to death to seize me, then every other writer was as mad as I was. You no sooner join two words together than you fear your life will soon be over, not because writing wears out the heart but because the act itself, with its wild gamble on futurity, is so presumptuous. Time does not wait for a writer to polish his periods. Even to start a sentence is to send out a challenge to the gods. ‘I will live beyond my physical existence, my words will put me among the immortals.’

Comes back the booming answer, ‘Oh no they won’t!’

Was it because she had failed to start a book she was never going to finish that Vanessa failed to understand the necessary morbidity of writing? She hadn’t, brick by brick, built her overweening Babel. She sketched an idea and went to bed. She tried a line of dialogue and tore her hair. Nothing followed. She didn’t do joined-up sentences. So the gods would let her live. She didn’t threaten them.