Zoo Time (27 page)

‘Admit it,’ she said when we last met at a party, ‘underneath those sheets you’re beavering away.’

‘Yes, but not at your prose, Lisa.’

That wasn’t gratuitousness. We’d been lovers briefly and so could be rude to each other with affection. And besides, she didn’t believe me.

She blew me kisses when she left the party and promised to send me her latest.

It arrived early the next morning by courier. It was inscribed

For

My dear Guy,

Enjoy –

Your secret’s safe with me

Not something you want your wife to find. But that wasn’t the only reason I put it through the shredder. I didn’t want posterity to come upon such a book on my shelves and take its author’s assumption as a fact. No, I was not in denial. No, I was not beavering away at Lisa Godalming under my sheets. No, I did not have a secret hankering to read shit.

25

Terminus

‘Admit it –’ Jeffrey said, as we pulled into the pub forecourt in time to see the sun go down.

I stopped him there. ‘Fuck off, Jeffrey,’ I said.

He wouldn’t let me buy the drinks. They had interesting vodkas here and I didn’t know my way around them. Something else I was bound to be in denial about: how little, compared to my brother, I knew about drink. We’d had this out. ‘I’m a wine man,’ I’d told him. ‘If you want to test your wits with me when it comes to wine –’

‘Wits! You see? That’s you all over. I’m having a drink, you’re taking an intelligence test. And by the way, by drink we mean vodka up here. Wine’s so out. Such a depressant – ugh.’

‘I’ve read about the vodka rage,’ I said. ‘I’ve read you drink it through your eyes. That sounds more of a depressant than red wine to me. Doesn’t it depress your sight?’

‘You talking about eyeballing? Yeah. But that’s students.’

‘Not you?’

‘Are you asking me if I’ve eyeballed? Of course, once or twice. Haven’t you?’

‘Why would I?’

‘You’re a writer? Aren’t you supposed to experience stuff ?’

‘Not that kind of stuff. Jesus, Jeffrey, through your
eyes
? You’re a human being. Aren’t you supposed to treat yourself like one?’

‘I don’t do it any more. Not much. Not all the time. Just occasionally. These things come and go quickly up here.’

‘So does your eyesight. But what’s this crap about
up here
? We’re in Alderley Edge not Cutting Edge, Jeffrey. Up here is the end of the fucking world.’

‘Just because you’ve left?’

‘No – I left
because
it’s the end of the fucking world.’

‘If you knew who lived here you wouldn’t say that.’

‘Who lives here?’

He reeled off names, ersatz, quasi Latin American names of the Ryanair jet set, the people who emailed you offers of Viagra and penis extensions – Felisha, Tamela, Shemika, Alysha, Shera, Teisha, Shakira . . .

‘Are these Spanish waitresses?’

‘Ha, ha! Don’t pretend you don’t know.’

‘I honestly have never heard of them.’

‘Shows how out of touch you are. Do you know how many top photographers and interior designers live in Cheshire?’

‘Tell me.’

He made his hands flap like butterflies. ‘You’re in Happeningsville,’ he said. And as though to prove it he rose from the table, went over to the bar, and returned with a plate of cold meze for each of us. Meze! Now call Cheshire the end of the fucking world!

‘So who’s fucking you right now, Jeffrey?’ I asked him when he handed me my plate. ‘Someone from Wilmslow? Someone I know? Someone whose mother I know?’

‘Ha, ha!’ he said. Ha. Ha!

‘Is she a joke?’

‘You wouldn’t say she was a joke if you saw her.’

‘What are her distinguishing characteristics?’

Before he could tell me, an Asian boy with a temple dancer’s body and hair as floppy as Jeffrey’s came over from the bar and kissed him on the mouth. He was wearing a Savile Row striped suit with a public-school scarf thrown around his throat. Something made me think of Billy Bunter’s chum, Hurree Jamset Ram Singh, the Nabob of Bhanipur. Once again Jeffrey did not introduce us. We nodded to each other awkwardly.

‘The confusedness is terrific,’ I said to Jeffrey after the Nabob had left us.

Jeffrey did not pick up the allusion. He was not a reader. Maybe drinking vodka through your eyes was another explanation of why no one read any more: you opened a book and you saw not words but vodka.

‘I couldn’t remember his name, that’s why I didn’t –’ he explained.

‘Shakira? Tamisho?’

‘He cuts my hair.’

‘Jeffrey,’ I said. ‘Tell me something . . .’

He knew what I was going to ask him.

‘Do I go both ways? Yes.’

‘I wasn’t going to ask you that.’

‘What were you going to ask me?’

‘How much it costs to get a good haircut these days.’

I expected him to say ‘Ha, ha!’ but it appeared he had stopped finding me amusing.

‘It’s just that Vanessa does mine,’ I said, ‘and I think it’s time I put myself in the hands of a professional.’

‘I agree with you,’ he said, looking at my hair. ‘I always wanted to ask you if Vanessa cut it.’

‘You can tell it’s not professional?’

‘You can tell it’s been cut by someone who doesn’t like you.’

‘You can tell that from a cut?’

‘I can tell it from your unhappiness, Guy.’

‘Ha, ha!’ I said. ‘Who’s unhappy?’

Denial again.

‘Suit yourself,’ he said.

I leaned forward and held him by his wrist. It was slender and hairless. Did he shave his wrists? I wondered. Was the hair on his head the only hair on his body? Men were shaving their chests and their backs, their legs, their balls, their anuses. In Happeningsville Wilmslow, God knows where else. Did Shakira run his razor along Jeffrey’s perineum?

‘If you’re sorry you told me you go both ways,’ I said, ‘don’t be. I am not in the least judgemental. If anything I’m fascinated. I can’t imagine it.’

‘What is it you can’t imagine?’

Shakira running his razor along your perineum, was one answer. Putting your dick inside a man was, frankly, another. But I didn’t see that we could go that far back into Jeffrey’s psychology, or indeed into mine. And I accept that whatever it is you can’t imagine is a mark against you, not for.

‘This bi business,’ I said. ‘This wanting both. Isn’t a sexual choice by its nature an act of separation – this not that, her not her, and even more, though by the same logic, her not him?’

‘But who’s asking you to make a sexual choice?’

‘Isn’t that just what we do when we pick a mate – we reject the others? Isn’t it discrimination that gives desire its savour?’

‘Christ! Is that from one of your books?’

Have I said that I’m a mind-reader? I could read Jeffrey’s mind, anyway. ‘Then no wonder they don’t sell,’ he was thinking.

‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’ll put it bluntly. When I fuck a woman I am, among other things, very definitely and deliberately not fucking a man.’

‘What about another woman?’

I took too long to answer. Behind Vanessa, sitting astride me and calling me Guido, loomed the shadow of her mother standing like a heron on one leg.

‘There you are,’ Jeffrey went on.

‘There I am what?’

‘There you are silently admitting to yourself that sex is not exclusive. If I’m sucking off a man while a woman’s sucking off me, who gets precedence? Which is me doing to the one what I am very definitely and deliberately not doing to the other?’

I had no answer to this, in so far as I understood it, that wasn’t prissy. What about love? I wanted to say. What about decency and self-respect, for fuck’s sake? Deep down in the sewerage of my morality I even heard the Bible rumbling about ‘abomination’.

Visceral, I told myself, think
viscerally
.

‘So do you have no preference at all?’ I asked.

‘When it comes to?’

‘Oh – oh – I don’t know – oh – say blow jobs.’

I expected him to say, ‘It’s so over, up here, so yesterday, the blow job.’

But he answered me with candid directness. ‘I prefer getting them.’

‘No, I mean preference as to who you get them from.’

‘Man or woman?’

‘Man or woman.’

‘Depends on the man or woman, Guy. These things don’t divide on gender lines.’

The right-on prick! How had he done it? How – with his dick in one person’s mouth and his own lips around someone else’s – had he seized the moral high ground?

I changed the subject. Asked him whether his television series was still on track. He looked uninterested. They were talking, he told me. Asked him about the shop. Phenomenal. He looked melancholy about it.

In return he asked me about my writing, but didn’t listen to my answers. He gave the air of not wanting to humiliate me.

And then, without any warning, he began to cry.

‘Jeffrey,’ I said, offering to put a brotherly arm around him. ‘Jeffrey, what’s the matter?’

He ran the sleeve of his lovely jacket across his nose. ‘I lied to you earlier,’ he said.

‘That’s OK.’

‘Don’t say that’s OK. You don’t know what I lied to you about. It’s not OK. You remember the woman I was talking to in the shop when you arrived? Pamala Vickery? I told you her husband had walked out on her and she’d been diagnosed with a brain tumour.’

Ha, ha, so I was right. ‘Yes, I did wonder,’ I said.

‘Oh, you
did wonder
, did you?’

‘Jeffrey, it’s OK. Truly.’

‘
Truly?
’

‘Truly.’

He wiped his nose again and then made a fist of the hand he’d wiped it with. I leaned back, fearing he was going to hit me.

He didn’t. But what he said was worse than any blow. ‘Fuck you, Guy,’ he all but spat at me. ‘Fuck you!’

I put my hand in front of my face.

He pulled it away. ‘Let me tell you something
truly
,’ he went on, ‘you know-all cunt. There are things you don’t know. And there are things that you can’t tell me are OK.’

‘OK,’ I said.

‘It isn’t. Nothing’s OK. Get that into your head – nothing is OK.’

I grew anxious. The last person who had said that nothing was OK was Merton.

‘If that’s how it looks to you, Jeffrey –’

‘
Looks to me!
Christ, Guy, I might as well be talking to Dad. It’s not Pamala that’s got a brain tumour, right?’

I waited, not wanting to know what I knew was coming. ‘Oh, Jeffrey,’ I said.

‘Don’t “Oh, Jeffrey” me. I haven’t finished. I’m the reason Pamala’s husband has walked out on her.’

‘So she can look after you?’

‘So she can live with me – what’s left of me.’

‘Are you playing at this?’

‘Why would I play?’

‘Oh, Jeffrey,’ I said again.

‘You don’t have to be sorry for me. I’ve had fun.’

‘I know you have.’

‘You know nothing. I’ve had fun with everybody.’

He looked at me with a curious insistence. ‘Everybody,’ he repeated.

‘You’ve told me – men and women. What you do is your business. But, honestly, how bad is it?’

‘You’ve not understood. By everybody I mean
everybody
.’

And then I did understand. I read it through the vapours of vodka swirling about his eyeballs. By everybody he meant Vanessa.

So that was what she did in Wilmslow. My brother.

‘Are you telling me you’ve been sleeping with Vanessa?’

‘I’ve always liked Vanessa.’

‘That’s not an answer to my question.’

‘I read an interview you gave to the
Wilmslow Reporter
once –’

‘You wouldn’t have been able to understand it. You don’t read.’

‘I read this. You said you liked writing about wild guys. Well, you’re no wild guy. The wild guy in your marriage is Vanessa.’

‘Which justifies you sleeping with her.’

‘I’m winding you up.’

‘Why?’

‘Because you’re a sanctimonious prick.’

‘And I haven’t got a brain tumour?’