Zoo Time (35 page)

I offered to soundproof my room, to pack the door with bedding, to suffocate my keyboard with the softest swansdown pillow I could find. ‘I’ll type through the feathers,’ I promised.

But that wasn’t enough.

‘I need you out of the house from eight to eight,’ she said. ‘It’s not just the noise of your fucking computer, it’s the sight of you mouth-writing in the kitchen, it’s the atmosphere of you all around me, it’s the
idea
of your presence. If you’re in the house I can’t function. You take up all the creative space, you clog the magnetic field, you gluttonise the airwaves, Guido.’

I had no answer to that.

If Vanessa wanted me out that badly, I owed it to her to go. It wasn’t going to be for long. I knew Vanessa. The moment she got the silence she craved she’d write a sentence – ‘Gentle reader, sit on this!’ or something similar – and then start polishing the silver or self-harming. I estimated that after two paragraphs she’d be finding ways of letting me know it was all right for me to return. Not in so many words, of course – Vanessa didn’t do retractions. But she’d text me, wondering if I could order her an ambulance, or reminding me of a dinner party we were throwing (this would be the first I’d heard of it), to discuss the menu for which we needed to meet. And in bed at night she’d announce that writing was an overhyped activity, couldn’t understand why I enjoyed it, and was thinking of taking up yoga or the tango.

Maybe even offer me a blow job if it would stop me writing.

But between the Vee-victrix tone of our conversation in Soho and the new Clytemnestra-like desperation with which she’d stormed my sanctuary, there was no room for any doubt. She was started and she intended to finish.

I thought about decamping to the London Library, before deciding that the bookish spell it invariably cast was inappropriate to the novel I was hatching. That consideration hid another: in the London Library you ran the risk of running into a writer – as like as not a writer of imaginative non-fiction – for whom things were going well. I had high hopes for my new novel, provisionally entitled
Terminus
, with
Trickster
as a fallback, the trickster in question being my brother Jeffrey, a sexually demented anti-hero with a timebomb in his head – his tumour the perfect metaphor for literature in our time: irresponsible, self-defeating, self-delusional, eating away at the brain of the culture. I’d found a phrase in Georges Bataille that suited my mood and explained to me what I was writing. ‘Impious disturbance’. Jeffrey was that impious disturbance. He disturbed
me
, anyway. So I didn’t want my confidence rocked by some unlucky encounter.

An alternative to the library was turning up at Poppy’s cottage with my laptop under my arm, though I wasn’t sure of the welcome I’d receive and, besides, Vanessa would probably view that as my still gobbling up her airwaves. Furthermore, I wasn’t at all sure how things stood between us, not having seen or spoken to her for a while. The meeting in Soho hardly constituted seeing her or speaking to her. Poppy was a person you needed to see on her own to get the best of her.

So I took a room above a shop selling fifties kitsch on Pembridge Road, just a two-minute walk from home. I liked the feel of it – an old storeroom which I fitted out with a cheap desk and chair from a second-hand furniture emporium round the corner and an anglepoise reading lamp from the shop below. It suited the mood of the novel, or maybe it would be truer to say it suited how I felt about writing it – rough and ramshackle, on the edge, with nowhere else to go. This was it. The terminus.

Not impossibly, if Vanessa kept me away longer than I credited her with the patience for, I’d bring a woman back – not for sex, or at least not to satisfy any sexual cravings I had (I couldn’t speak for the woman), but because bringing a woman back to a writer’s room shorn of all but the most basic amenities would confer a degree of existential futility on my endeavour. Jeffrey was a colourful, impious fantastic who drove a car that was too fast for anywhere he was able to drive it and wore designer clothes so up to the minute that even I hadn’t heard of the designer, but when I imagined him with Vanessa or Poppy in any combination I saw a room like this, desperate and secretive. Perhaps that was because I could only understand the women’s motives for cohabiting with him as a sort of slumming. They had me for the high life. Through me they met twisted journalists, writers at the end of their tether, agents running rapidly to seed, suicidal publishers. I took them to literary festivals on yachts. I showed them the world. How else, but for me, would they have ever got to Monkey Mia?

Whereas Jeffrey Intracranial Neoplasm – what did he have to offer?

Nothing but the squalor of the provincial which no amount of fashionable bribery – I imagined him showering them with gifts of an intimate nature from Wilhelmina’s, sliding his hands up the stockings he’d bought them – could alleviate.

So I wouldn’t have been lying had I told Vanessa that things were proceeding very nicely on the writing front, thank you for asking, that my shabby room conduced to the very feelings I was seeking to inhabit. But I was happy to return if she was missing me. The only trouble was, she wasn’t. Day followed day, week followed week, and still Vanessa didn’t sue for my return, didn’t text me to ring an ambulance, didn’t once refer in bed at night to the tedium of writing, didn’t bring up the tango. Nor did she proffer a diversionary blow job. I wasn’t so wrapped up in my own work as not to notice that for the first time since we’d met she was wrapped up in hers. Sleeping soundly. Singing in the shower. And not blaming me for anything.

I wrote, she wrote. I had no idea how close to finishing she was. I wouldn’t have put it past her to have finished long ago – ‘Gentle reader, kiss my arse.
Finis
’ – and not have told me. She would choose her moment. Keep me waiting and then let me have it full in the face. Perhaps at our favourite restaurant – though all restaurants were our favourite restaurants – over a bottle of Saint-Estèphe. Perhaps in bed. Perhaps at the very moment when our fractious individuality was dissolved and we became as one. Who could say – maybe we’d make a baby and name it after her novel.
Why My Husband is a Prick
. Not much of a name for a baby but I could offer nothing better.
Terminus
– I didn’t think so, as I’d heard people say on television.

I wrote, she wrote. It was becoming a test of nerve. Whose would be the first to snap?

Mine, of course. But it was not the doing of Vanessa.

‘It’s not exactly holiday reading, is it?’

The author of this impious disturbance was Flora McBeth. Sixth-sensed Flora knowing to a nicety the best time to strike. Just as my fluency was beginning to falter in the face of Vanessa’s inscrutable confidence in her own – I’m not saying you can’t have two productive writers in a relationship, only that it takes some getting used to; nor am I saying I begrudged Vanessa her productivity, only that it was beginning to unnerve me – Flora called me in to break the news that she was putting all my back list out of print.

I saw the irony of it at once. There wouldn’t be two productive writers in our relationship. There would be just the one. And it wouldn’t be me. In my mind’s eye I made out the long line of readers queuing to get Vanessa’s signature, a line that stretched out like Bunyan’s pilgrims waiting to cross the River of Death into the Beautiful City.

And I? Well, I could always take tango lessons.

Though that wasn’t how Flora sold it. By Flora’s reasoning, being out of print was an advantage every author should welcome.

‘How so, Flora?’

‘Well, it’s not like the old days,’ she said, ‘when no back list meant no you. Now we have print-on-demand.’

‘And what’s the advantage of that?’

‘With print-on-demand, darling, anyone who wants one of your books can go on the Internet to get it run off and have it in their sticky little hand in a matter of days.’

‘But anyone who wants one of my books now can go into a bookshop and have it in their sticky little hand there and then.’

‘Not if you’re out of print, darling.’

‘Then keep me in print.’

If it sounded as though I was begging, that was because I was begging.

‘But then we couldn’t print you on demand.’

‘But then I wouldn’t need to be printed on demand.’

‘Darling, there’s no particular virtue in being in print. It just means being in the warehouse. It doesn’t mean being
out
there. You say anyone who wants one of your titles can go into a bookshop and buy it, but when did you last see any of your titles
in
a bookshop?’

I racked my brains.

‘Precisely,’ Flora said. ‘Whereas this way –’

‘– no one will ever again go into a bookshop to look. At least when you’re there someone might find you while they’re looking for someone else.’

‘But they can’t find you if you’re not there.’

She made it sound like my fault.

Before I could remind her it was hers, she said, ‘Darling, I’m going to tell you what I tell all my non-celebrity authors – you have to stop thinking in terms of
in print
.
In print
is so yesterday.’

‘What’s so today?’

Her answer was in her look. ‘Not you,’ her face said.

She was wearing the clothes of someone half her age, and even on such a person they would have looked desperate: silky black leggings with a little floral skirt, boots and a sort of weightlifter’s singlet. The strange thing was, the desperation made her desirable. Would it have helped, I wondered, had we slept together? It crossed my mind to ask. ‘Would it have helped, Flora, had we . . .’

I was sorry that we hadn’t. Not just sorry professionally, but sorry personally. Though I didn’t like her, and knew she didn’t like me, I felt that I had missed out on a strange and rare experience. An act of cohabitation based entirely on loathing that would have tested my mettle as a man. Or as something other than a man. When I thought about it – and, gentle reader, I didn’t think about it often – I saw myself taking her as an ape might, from behind, with my teeth in her neck and my claws in her belly. Quickly. Out of pure hate. In and then out and then in and then finish. And then looking round to see if anyone had tossed us in a banana.

Except that monkeys, Mishnah told me, don’t fuck out of hate. Only
Homo sapiens
fucks out of hate. Only
Homo sapiens
has the developed consciousness that can make hate such a powerful aphrodisiac that there is no going back afterwards to love, sweetness, gentle caresses, cigarette smoke and soft music. So monkeys don’t know what they’re missing.

Did Flora, in her hyperconsciousness, feel the same? That hate would take us somewhere so overwhelming that it would finish us off for anything else?

It must have been imagining this that made me tell her, as a sort of post-coital gift, what I was working on. As a rule you don’t talk about a novel until it’s done. It brings bad luck. But sometimes, out of a superabundance of self-belief, or more usually a deficiency of it, you take the risk. Give it a little airing, see how it goes down, return to your desk heartened by the interest.

As far as publishing etiquette went – an oxymoron if ever there was one – Flora wasn’t the first port of call. First you go – or rather your agent goes – to your hardback publisher, then he seeks what’s laughably called ‘paperback support’ before he makes his offer. ‘Offer’ being another laughable expression. The book passes to Flora to be put out of print only after it has languished for a year as a hardback, supposing anyone, that’s to say Sandy Ferber, is prepared to ‘offer’ on it at all. These days none of us could be sure.

I suppose I must have thought that if I could enthuse her about Jeffrey and his metaphorical tumour, Jeffrey the lover of his brother’s wife and mother-in-law, Jeffrey the son of a spit-roast mother, Jeffrey who drank vodka through his eyes, she would remember what I was good at – my famous louche-light touch, as they referred to it on Amazon – and keep all earlier examples of it in print, no matter that in print was passé.

‘It’s not exactly holiday reading, is it?’ she said, interrupting what there was of plot.

‘Not exactly what?’

‘Beach reading – reading for the beach.’

‘Should it be?’

‘Well, that’s the only place people read now.’

‘I’ve never read a book on a beach in my life,’ I said.

I found a scab behind my ear and began picking at it.

She looked me over. I was wearing a black suit. I always went to see my publishers in a black suit. As a mark of respect, I thought. It’s always possible there was some unconscious funereal association too. But I wouldn’t have let the black suit stop me taking her as a primate would. Zip down. In, out. Zip back up.

And the pair of us lost to any other sort of happiness for ever.

‘Well, I can see that you aren’t the beach type,’ she said. ‘Have you ever actually been on a beach?’