Zoo Time (5 page)

But more worrying was that no one wanted to see in. I was like a garden no one gave a monkey’s fuck about.

5

Me, Me, Me

Make allowance for the self-pity intrinsic to a dying profession. In truth, Vanessa gave sufficiently a monkey’s fuck as to say she thought I needed a holiday. And never mind that she’d been saying I needed a holiday, needed to be off, needed to be somewhere else, needed to be somewhere she wasn’t, for the nearly twenty years we’d been together.

‘A holiday from you?’

‘From your work. From yourself. Be somebody other for a while.’

‘I’m always somebody other. Being somebody other
is
my work.’

‘No it isn’t. You’re always you. You just give yourself different names.’

I sighed the marital sigh.

‘Don’t make that noise,’ she said.

I shrugged the marital shrug.

But she was flowing. It was exhilarating, like being swept away in a warm river. ‘Get away from yourself. And if you think you need a holiday from me as well, then take one. I won’t stand in your way. Have I ever? Look at me. Be honest with me.’ She slipped her hand between my thighs. ‘Be honest with yourself. Have I ever?’

In the excitement I forgot the question. ‘Have you ever what?’

She withdrew her hand. ‘Stood in your way.’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Thank you for being honest.’

I waited for her to slide her hand back. Wasn’t that how a wife was meant to reward a husband for his honesty?

‘But this isn’t a green light for one of your literary flings,’ she went on. ‘I’ll know. I always know. You know I’ll always know. You get soppy with me on the phone and shitty garage flowers start arriving twice a day. In which case enjoy yourself, just don’t expect me to be here when you get back.’

‘
If
I get back . . .’

That might sound like a man looking for a way out. But I wasn’t. I loved Vanessa. She was the second most important woman in my life. What I was looking for was something to write about that somebody not me wanted to read about. If she left me I’d have been heartbroken, but at least heartbreak is a subject. It’s not abuse but it’s still a subject.

‘Don’t threaten me with empty threats,’ she said. If I was running low on ideas she was running low on humour. Not that jokes had ever been her strong suit. She was too good-looking to be a joker. At forty-one she could still walk on seven-inch heels with blood-red soles without her knees buckling. And you need serious concentration for that.

‘Come with me,’ I said, picturing us strolling arm in arm down some Continental promenade together, she towering over me in her sado-spikes, men envying me her legs. Our stopping every now and then for her to stoop and slide her hand between my thighs. Men envying me that.

‘I can do fine on my own,’ she reminded me.

‘I know you can do fine on your own. But life isn’t all about you.
I
don’t do fine unless you’re with me.’

‘You, you, you.’

‘Me, me, me.’

‘And where would we go?’

‘You choose. Australia?’

Now that
was
picking a fight. We’d been to Australia the year before, to the Adelaide Festival – where else? – in the hope I might get a book about a writer going to the Adelaide Festival – where else? – and had very nearly come unstuck. The usual. Fan of writer in need of a fillip (fan is even called Philippa: get that) tells how she’s trembled over every word writer writes whereupon writer checks the coast is clear, takes fan outside and trembles over every button on her dress.

Did Vanessa know? Vanessa knew everything.

‘Vanish again,’ she warned me, during a getting-to-know-everybody breakfast in the Barossa – Philippa, whom I knew well enough by this time, sitting opposite in all her prim lasciviousness: such dirty girls, these word tremblers – ‘and you’ll be going back to London on your own.’

‘What are you proposing – that you stay here? You’d go mad here.’

‘No, that’s you.
You’d
go mad here. You already are mad here.’

‘And you’re telling me you’d keep chickens and grow wine?’

‘I’d get some peace.’

Ah, peace! The one person you don’t get married to, if it’s peace you want, is a writer. You’d have more chance with a bomb-disposal expert.

So my suggestion, when we were back home, of an Australian holiday, was purposely provocative. Novelist provokes wife – there was surely a novel in that.

In the event we stayed in London and talked about a divorce.

‘Don’t threaten what you can’t deliver,’ she said.

Actually, the idea was hers. I reminded her of that. Divorce was the last thing I wanted. I still enjoyed her bruising company, still got a kick out of looking at her. Her face was like a small hall of mirrors, all sharp edges and bloody reflections. When I looked at my face in hers I saw myself cut to ribbons.

The halo of red hair around her head – the blood fountaining from mine.

The slightly snaggled front tooth, which looked loose but wasn’t – the state of my brain.

So why had I vanished into the South Australian night with Philippa whom I did not get a kick out of looking at? Because she was there. And because I had a reputation for wildness to keep up. Don’t ask with whom. With myself.

And because Vanessa threatening to divorce me was exciting.

‘You don’t have to tell me it’s my idea,’ she said. ‘All your ideas are my ideas.’

‘I grant you that. I don’t have any ideas. I’m not a philosopher. I’m an anti-philosopher. I tell tales.’

‘Tales! When did you ever tell a tale unless I gave it to you.’

‘Name a tale you gave me, Vee.’

‘One!’

‘Yes, one.’

‘Do you know what,’ she said suddenly, turning her face from me as though any sight had to be better, ‘I hate your mind.’

‘My
mind
?’

‘What’s left of it.’

‘Is this all because I’ve started a new book?’

Vanessa hated it when I started a new book. She saw it as me getting one over her who hadn’t started a new book because she hadn’t finished, or indeed started, the old one. But she also hated it when I hadn’t started a new book, because not starting a new book made me querulous and sexually unreliable. At least when I was writing a new book she knew where I was. The downside of that being that as soon as she knew where I was she wished I were somewhere else.

In fact, my question hid a lie; I hadn’t started a new book, not in the sense of starting
writing
a new book. I had mouth-written a hundred new books, I just didn’t believe in any of them. It wasn’t personal, it wasn’t only
my
books I didn’t believe in, it was books full stop. If
I
was over, it was because the book was over. But Vanessa wasn’t aware of the full extent of the crisis. She saw me trudge off to my study, heard the keys of my computer making their dead click and assumed I was still pouring forth my soul abroad like Keats’s logorrhoeic nightingale.

I even affected high spirits. ‘I’m sitting on top of the world,’ I sang, breaking for tea.

‘No you’re not,’ she shouted from her room.

She was contradictory to her soul. ‘I did it my way,’ I sang the morning after our wedding. ‘No you didn’t,’ she said, not even looking up from her newspaper.

If my singing irritated her, the sound of my writing drove her to the edge of madness. But so did the sound of my not writing. This was part of the problem of our marriage. The other part was me. Not what I did, what I was. The fact of me. The manness of me.

‘You, you, you,’ she said for the umpteenth time that night. It was like a spell; if she said the word often enough maybe I, I, I would vanish in a vapour of red wine.

We were out to dinner. We were always out to dinner. Along with everybody else. Dinner was all there was left to do.

It was one of those restaurants where the doorman comes round to greet the diners he knows. Be ignored by the doorman and it’s plain you’re no one. He doffed his top hat to me. We shook hands. I held his long enough for everybody to see just how well we were acquainted. It even occurred to me to call him ‘Sir’ and hold my hand out for a tip.

After he’d passed on we resumed where we’d left off. ‘You were saying,’ I said. ‘Me, me, me . . .’

‘You think you’re the only person out there not getting what you deserve. Do you think
I
get what
I
deserve? The spectacle of you wittering on about the extinction of the art of reading makes me sick. What about the extinction of the art of writing? Dirty-minded shopkeeper looking for sex in Wilmslow writes about dirty-minded shopkeeper looking for sex in Wilmslow. Christ, with a subject like that, you’re lucky you’ve
got
a reader!’

‘I wasn’t a shopkeeper, Vee, I was a fashion consultant.’

‘Fashion consultant, you! Whoever consulted you on fashion?’

I wanted to say ‘The women of Wilmslow’, which would have been the truth, but in the context of this argument lacked gravitas. ‘My advice was frequently heeded,’ I said instead. ‘Though not, I accept, by you.’

‘You looked after your crazy mother’s shop and drooled over her customers. I saw you, remember. I was one of the customers. And as for heeding your advice – why would I want to look like a Cheshire trollop?’

She had a point.

She never didn’t have a point. It was why I respected her. I’d say it was why I loved her but it felt as though I loved her in spite of her always having a point.

I scanned the restaurant. A psychologist might have supposed I was unconsciously searching for the Cheshire trollop Vanessa had refused to be, but in fact I was wondering if there was anyone here I recognised. It calmed me to think that rich and famous people had nothing better to do with their evening than I had. Ditto less rich and famous people who would be finding it calming to see me there. It’s possible I was looking for them too.

Vanessa was still ranting about readers and how I should count myself lucky that I had any at all. ‘If you had only one that would still be one more than you deserve and certainly one more than I’ve got.’

I didn’t point out that the reason she didn’t have a reader was that she hadn’t written anything for anyone to read. And I
hadn’t
been saying I was the only person out there not getting what I deserved. I’d been saying – well, what had I been saying? No more than that the roof was falling in on all of us.
No one
was getting what he (sorry: ‘he/she’) deserved, unless he (‘he/she’) was getting more than he (‘they’) deserved. There was, in the new scheme of things, no proportionality of reward. Either you got too much or you got too little. Which was a universal, not a particular complaint. But Vanessa didn’t believe I had a right to voice a complaint of any sort. I was one of the lucky ones. I was published . . .

And there you have it. Like the rest of the world, Vanessa wanted to be a published writer. She was the promise of the future: no readers, all writers. She’d seen me become a writer, watched the empty pages fill, been present during the initial excitement of publication, and if I could become a published writer, a man shorter than her even when she wasn’t wearing seven-inch heels, a man who said foolish things, fucked foolish girls, stole his own books from Oxfam and all his best ideas from her, why couldn’t she? Hadn’t she written a sample chapter? Hadn’t an important agent said she had what it took?

‘That was ten years ago,’ I reminded her.

I didn’t mention that the agent had his arm up her skirt while he was telling her she had what it took, or that he had since slashed his wrists – though there was no provable connection between those two events. It wasn’t tact that stopped me; Larry’s suicide was simply not worth mentioning. You could count on the fingers of one hand the number of people in publishing still breathing.

‘Well, what time do I have to finish a novel? I’m always having to listen to the racket of you belting out yours.’

When I wasn’t defending my right to make a racket, I was sorry for her. I could see she was at her wits’ end, that non-production was making her ill. It was as though, without a novel on the go, her life had no meaning. Sometimes she would put her fists between her breasts, like a mother ripped from her babies, or a Medea who had killed her babies, and beg me to be quiet so she could think. I was killing her, she told me. And I believed it. I was killing her.

She kept asking me to leave the house to write, to build a shed at the bottom of the garden, to rent an office, to go away for a year. It was the noise my writing made, the computer waking – ‘Boing!’ – to my presence every morning, the hammering at the dead keys. She was more jealous of my computer than she’d been of Philippa. Sometimes I thought I heard her crouching outside my door, to punish herself with the noise of the detested keyboard. On those occasions I typed gobbledegook at speed to goad her still more. It wasn’t my intention to torment her into greater extremes of jealousy, it was my intention to torment her into getting back to her book. In this I was as crazed as everybody else. Books were over but writing them was the only thing I valued. So long as she didn’t have a novel to her name, yes, Vanessa was a dead woman.