Zoo Time (24 page)

He wrote and wrote, furiously at times, his fingers gripping his pen like a dagger, flipping the pages of his pad over as though even they were an unbearable impediment to the flow of his thought. Had Vanessa been with me she’d have urged me to get closer to read what he was writing, and then give him all my loose change, but on my own I lacked the courage for either of those acts of impertinence.

The surprising thing about the Scrivener’s Society and the Jotter’s Club was not the interest they had suddenly started to take in their members’ bowels, but that they existed at all. Authors’ clubs, whether mere bureaux offering services related to the business side of our profession or more elaborate watering holes for writers needing to get out, had mushroomed in the years I’d been writing. Some writers belonged to more of them than I did and yet my wallet could no longer hold the memberships cards I possessed, each offering me advantages I didn’t want, such as help with my finances from a London firm of stockbrokers, the opportunity to buy books I would never read at a 15 per cent discount, or advice on self-publishing – the last refuge of those who dreamed of showing the world it had been wrong to reject them, though the world seldom was. Viewed from one perspective there was no explaining this steep and sudden rise in the membership of authors’ societies. The logical consequence of there being fewer and fewer readers for any but a handful of books of the sort Merton had shot himself rather than publish was surely a reduction in the number of writers. Only the fittest survive and we weren’t the fittest. But neither evolutionary nor market forces worked in literature as they did elsewhere. For every reader that went missing a hundred new writers appeared to take his stroke her place. Soon there would only
be
writers. Was one explanation, therefore, that authors’ societies provided a sort of refuge for a profession for which there was now neither justification nor employment, a shelter for the otiose on the banks of the Styx where they could gather and console one another before the ferryman finally came for them?

We will all go together when we go
– was that our motto?

Was it any wonder we were constipated.

Though constipation was incident to anyone who spent too much time sitting in one place, I didn’t for a moment doubt that the severity of it I experienced was writing-related, the direct consequence of trying to make an art of language in an age of mechanical communication. When my words flowed and were allowed to flow, so did I. When they didn’t, I didn’t. A blockage is a blockage. I’m not talking writer’s block, in which, as someone who was married to one, I happened not to believe. I’m talking the refusal of reciprocity. The warm reception of a book, first by Francis, then by poor Merton, then by Josephine Public, had always facilitated an easy bowel movement, whereas the hint of a demur from my publisher or my agent or a series of bad reviews made me feel niggardly of myself, resentful of all I had given, and determined to keep myself to myself from that time on. An American novelist friend, living in London, reported a direct correlation between the number of weeks his novels were on the
New York Times
best-seller list and the frequency of his visits to the lavatory. Too many weeks at the top and he would end up with acute diarrhoea and have to suck on an Imodium every hour, too few and his wife who happened to be a doctor put him on a diet of Miralax, Lactulose, malt soup extract and hot curries.

My experience was less extreme in its variability. For all the walking I was doing I was constipated full stop. And all the Lactulose in Christendom wasn’t going to help me. So while I was secretly grateful for the lavishly illustrated stool charts which both the Scrivener’s Society and the Jotter’s Club had sent, I didn’t hold out much hope of them doing the trick.

And then, to make things worse, Vanessa found them.

‘What the fuck are these? Recipes for bread rolls?’

I told her she was disgusting.

‘If you’re frightened you’ve got bowel cancer go and have a colonoscopy.’

Vanessa had as many as she could fit in. Her mother the same. They were colonoscophiles.

In this they were not exceptional. Everyone we knew had had, or was having, a colonoscopy. It was like eating in expensive restaurants – it was all there was left to do. Soon they would be performed on the same premises, simultaneously. But until then I couldn’t face the procedure.

‘I’m not frightened I’ve got anything,’ I said.

This wasn’t true, but I was frightened I had so many things – being found dead and purple-faced on the lavatory after a heart attack, for example – that colon cancer was the least of my worries.

‘Try walking more,’ was Vanessa’s advice. ‘Try leaving the house. Try giving me my turn.’

I was constipated, by her reasoning, because she wasn’t writing her novel.

So why wasn’t
she
constipated because she wasn’t writing her novel?

It was a mistake to have asked her that.

‘Don’t make unwarranted assumptions,’ she said. ‘Just because I don’t kick up the fuss you do doesn’t mean I’m idle.’

She put her index finger up to her temple and made a whirring motion with it, denoting a novel at work on itself even as we bickered.

I wished I could have said the same about my bowels.

Writing and marriage to me apart, Vanessa was a lucky woman. Constipation was not in her nature. Why, then, the colonoscopies? It’s a good question. I could only assume that they were social events for her. That she liked watching the video of the camera travelling deep inside her colon. Or that she was having an affair with her colonoscopist. She was, anyway, someone who moved her bowels with consummate ease. Poppy the same. They were out of the WC before anyone knew they’d been in it. They were like wild animals. Had we lived on a savannah I didn’t doubt they’d have nipped out the back door and used that. As indeed they did on the road from Perth to Broome via Monkey Mia.

Which had to mean, since neither of them was writing, that they weren’t cut out to be writers. Just as my constipation proved that I was.

The Mother-in-Law Joke
wasn’t going well. I didn’t like my hero, Little Gid. It was precisely my constipation that told me this. I’d rise early, full of writer’s juice, take a pot of tea up to my desk, glance at what I’d written the day before, visit the lavatory not expecting complications, and feel my bowels seize. Little Gid’s fault.

So what was wrong with him?

Not enough was wrong with him, that was what was wrong with him. He was too unremarkable. Inadequately, insufficiently feral.

You can feel like this about your own characters. Once they assert their independence from you – and if they don’t do that you should try another job – you are free to dislike or even despise them. It can work the other way, too. You start off hating their guts and halfway through the book you can’t imagine ever enjoying life again outside their company. This was something Vanessa never quite understood about novels. From the first page of the few chapters she’d written it was clear whom she intended to murder and obvious on every line thereafter that she would sooner take her own life than spare his. His stroke hers? No – just his.

‘Novels aren’t acts of violence on their characters, Vee,’ I told her once. ‘Flaubert didn’t write “Emma Bovary was a fuckwit and deserved everything she got”.’

‘That’s because Emma Bovary wasn’t a fuckwit who deserved everything she got.’

‘I’m so glad you see that.’

‘
Charles
Bovary was a fuckwit who deserved everything he got.’

I rolled my eyes.

‘You write yours,’ she said. ‘I’ll write mine.’

In fact my novels started out as acts of violence too, but it was an article of artistic faith with me that I should relent. Or go in the other direction and fall out of love with those of my creations I’d originally been enamoured of.

But Little Gid bored me from the start and went on boring me. By putting too big a distance between us, by not making him a full-time writer or comedian, or at least some version of myself unchained – a chancer, a trickster, a word-risker – I ended up resenting him for getting what I’d laboured hard for without putting in the work himself. You could say I was jealous of him. Little Gid and Pauline/Poppy – never! I couldn’t see what she would see in him. More than that, I couldn’t see what
I’d
seen in him. Things were bad out there. There were a hundred writers for every reader, publishers were shooting their faces off, agents were going into hiding, some lunatic was depressing my sales on Amazon by overpraising my work, Primark would soon be selling books for the price of a bag of crisps, a national newspaper was rumoured to be employing reviewers who were still at school, awaiting their GCSE results, and my answer to this was Little Gid! What antidote to the great depression of our time did Little Gid provide? What walls would tumble when Gideon puffed out his cheeks?

What was it my old teacher Archie Clayburgh used to say?
Read viscerally, with your bowels, boys
. No wonder my bowels were failing. There was nothing visceral about Little Gid. The guy had no balls. He lacked rudery. He wasn’t the cause of my constipation, he
was
my constipation. A hero I had to squeeze out of me but who remained resolutely locked inside.

What did that say about me? Was I locked inside myself ?

Something made me decide to go to Wilmslow to visit Jeffrey Dearheart.

23

Less is Less

The day I’d earmarked for the visit north – I wasn’t able just to catch a train to Wilmslow, I had to fill my diary with red exclamation marks, as though readying myself mentally as for a trek into the Interior – I received a phone call from Margaret Travers, Merton’s secretary. Merton’s replacement had finally been appointed and wanted to meet me. Could I make lunch the following Wednesday at 1 p.m.?

You must never sound too eager. ‘I’ll just check my diary,’ I said, rustling paper. ‘Yes, if I move a couple of things, yes, I can make Wednesday at 1 p.m. Just. Who is it?’

‘It’s Margaret.’

‘No, who’s the replacement?’

‘There can be no replacement for Merton.’

I heard tears in her voice. Apparently she had wept every day since Merton did what Merton did. Had they been lovers? The word was not. Though she wore belted raincoats in the style of vamps from black-and-white films of the 1950s, and though her voice was suggestively husky, and though she had always pronounced the name Merton as if it were molten, Margaret Travers was a secretary of the old style, simultaneously faithful to her husband and her boss. When she said there could be no replacement for Merton she meant in her heart, innocently, as well as in publishing.

‘I know that. I meant who’s his –’ I couldn’t find the word, if the word wasn’t ‘replacement’ – ‘who will I be having lunch with?’

She lowered her voice, as though not to upset Merton. ‘Sandy Ferber.’

I knew a Sandy Ferber. He’d owned a highly successful minimalist gallery in Hoxton, providing one Turner Prize-winner after another, from which he went on to run a small but influential art press – Less is More – specialising in elegantly produced artists’ monographs in octodecimo, after which, quite out of character, he popped up as the fiction supremo at a bookshop chain that soon afterwards went into receivership. In the short time he was there he’d rationalised fiction so that there wasn’t any, boasting that he read at least one sentence of every novel published, deciding on its viability-or-not by opening it at page 100 and if there was too much happening in the way of words he wouldn’t buy. I had celebrated his fall from eminence with an article in the
Bookseller
, offering it as my view that he chose page 100 to sample because any novel that had a hundred pages in it was already too long for his exquisite concentration. The closure of the chain that had appointed him was, in my view, the logical extension of his credo. As was the disappearance of the book, and, not a moment too soon, the disappearance of him.

But that had to be a different Sandy Ferber. Under Merton, Scylla and Charybdis Press had specialised in novels that ran to six or seven hundred pages, each densely printed and packed with verbal incident. The one time Merton quarrelled with my work it was because the amount of dialogue in it made for too many white spaces on the page. Sandy Ferber, a great champion of white in art, was not the man for such a list.

I postponed Wilmslow. Vanessa was disappointed. She was hoping to have the house to herself not to write her novel in.

And to my surprise, Jeffrey was disappointed too. It was too long since I’d been home, he told me on the phone. A man should see his family. I didn’t agree with him but apologised for how long it had been. I’d reorganise, I told him. ‘Good,’ he said.

In the meantime I googled Sandy Ferbers but failed to find one with a publishing history that made him a suitable successor to Merton or indeed a suitable publisher for me. I decided I’d misheard Margaret. She must have said Sandor Ferber, or even Salman Ferber, a favourite of the parent company in Sweden drafted in from somewhere else, Hungary or the Indian subcontinent, it didn’t matter where since books were in a healthier state everywhere else than they were here. Whoever he was and wherever he came from I looked forward to a new relationship.