Zoo Time (9 page)

Who knew what Quinton thought, or even if he thought anything? Maybe he’d only ever taken the manuscript away to line his boots.

I went ahead with its publication agentless anyway, suggesting to Merton, who had published my monkey novel, that as no one could now prove otherwise, we take the killer route on the jacket.
This book is dangerous
.
Think twice before you read it – especially at altitude
.

But Merton no more liked putting the word ‘dangerous’ on the jacket of a book than he liked putting the word ‘hilarious’. ‘Another life-changing masterpiece from the prize-winning author of
Who Gives a Monkey’s?
’ was what he plumped for instead.

People compared me to John Braine and Alan Sillitoe.
Tuesday Night and Wednesday Morning
meets
Room at the Bottom
. Which was a comedown, I thought, from Apuleius and the Marquis de Sade. Though one reviewer did say that he thought the screams of chimps on heat were following me around the north-west of England, while a second (who turned out to be the same person, reviewing me under another name) wished I’d stuck with the territory I knew best – the monkey house. In a third review, for the
London Magazine
, again under another name, Lonnie Dobson, aka Donny Robson, aka Ronnie Hobson, delivered his most deadly verdict. ‘In his debut novel Guy Ableman made an entirely unsuccessful job of imitating a woman; in this his second, and we can only hope his final novel, he has made an entirely unsuccessful job of imitating a man.’

Shortly after publication I ignored poor frozen Quinton’s advice and moved to London. At first, this pleased Vanessa and her mother who were city girls at heart. But gradually they began to wonder if they’d done the right thing. In Cheshire they had the air of louche women who’d been expelled from somewhere else and were only waiting for their reputations to catch up with them and they’d be off. In the city, everyone looked like that. They were still a sensational pair, but they didn’t bring the traffic to a halt.

Me neither.

There is a school of thought that has it that London was the end of me. But there is also a school of thought that says I never began. My work changed, that much we can agree about. It lost some of its raw verve. It became more orderly in its disorderliness. Wandering about the streets of Wilmslow with a cigarette dangling from my bottom lip I’d been able to believe I was anathema to respectable society and wrote accordingly. The minute I settled down to write in London I felt respectability settle on my shoulder. ‘For a man of the big cities,’ Henry Miller once wrote, ‘I think my exploits are modest and altogether normal.’ That’s what big cities do: they normalise what elsewhere would be thought outlandish. The monkeyman who had become my trademark hero cut a poor dash in west London. Wilmslow and Sandbach, if they didn’t quite excuse, at least explained him to a degree. He was like the beast of Bodmin Moor, a creature made fascinating by his out-of-placeness. But once transport him to the pubs and clubs and lonely-wife bars of the capital and the fascination ebbed away. What made a man a rough diamond in the north, made him just one more loutish boor in Westbourne Grove. He was like too many men trying to go to seed in the big city.

But it would have made no difference had my third and fourth novels been works of genius –
Middlemarch
,
Cranford
and
Sexus
,
Plexus
and
Nexus
rolled into one. They would still have vanished within weeks of being published, and would barely have lasted longer when – and not so much when as if – they got their second wind as paperbacks. Readers had changed. Expectations of the book had changed. In a word, there were none.

When did my books stop appearing in the bookshops? Where did my oeuvre go? My question was a general one: every novelist in the country capable of writing sentences with conditional clauses in them was asking it. We were all being written out of history. Was three-for-two to blame? Was it the celebrity memoir? It had all happened so quickly. Your work was on display in alphabetical order of title, spines showing, as though for all eternity, then it wasn’t. It coincided with bookshop staff not knowing who you were. One day their eyes fell out of their heads with the excitement of seeing you. The next they didn’t know you from a mere member of the non-book-buying public. ‘Name,’ they’d say when you turned up to sign books. ‘How do you spell that?’

Was it happening to Kundera? Was it happening to Gore Vidal? ‘That’s V, i, d, a, l.’

Mailer was dead, Bellow was dead, Updike was dead. Was it having to spell their names in Borders that had killed them?

And now Borders itself was barely breathing.

There were no doubt a thousand explanations for this, but paramount among them was Flora.

8

So What Are We Going To Do With You?

Had I needed to plead mitigating circumstances for shoplifting one of my own titles, I’d have added Flora to the extensive list. Not Flora the margarine, but Flora the legendary paperback publisher in whom the art of unpromoting any male novelist who wrote in the first person, made light of life or described intercourse with a woman from the man’s point of view, was honed to the highest level of sophistication. In her younger days, Flo McBeth had put together her own imprint of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century women writers whose husbands, brothers or fathers had refused to allow their manuscripts to leave the house. What was remarkable was not only the quality of the work Flo and her staff rescued from obscurity, but the apparent frequency, even as recently as 1940, with which men of all classes of society – afraid for one reason or another of their womenfolk’s creative spark – had repressed it. Flo’s enemies wondered aloud if some of these recovered works were frauds, but if they were then who had written them? Flora herself? In which case her skills as a pasticheur were no less prodigious than her skills as a publisher. Either way, she was able to quit the world of books as a young woman, wealthy, with an unequalled reputation and a CBE. Then, after a retirement which she was said to have found irksome – she’d made the book person’s mistake of going to live in the country (rolling fields, smell of hay, silly sheep, baa baa, and time to read all one
wanted
to read) – she was back in the role of publisher of a paperback list that had always been boldly masculinist in spirit, that’s to say comprised books she
didn’t
want to read.

It was a strange appointment all round. Was the Swedish group who had bought Scylla and Charybdis Press looking to have it quickly wound up? And what was Flora herself up to? Was she avenging those generations of silenced women by extinguishing in men the same spark that men had attempted to extinguish in them? No one knew her motives, and certainly none of the writers she’d taken over was prepared to speculate for fear she would unpromote them even more than she already had. Flora it was, anyway, who at the age of sixty had made a notable return to the profession just in time for the paperback edition of my third novel.

In fact, for all that it had been a mistake to set it in Westbourne Grove,
The Silent Shriek
hadn’t gone down too badly in hard covers. ‘A novel that subtly enacts its own futility’ was the worst Jonny Jobson had found to say about it in the
Yorkshire Post
. Not exactly complimentary, but after what he’d written about
The Lawless
(my novel set in Sandbach) I felt I was on my way back up again. It didn’t sell more than a couple of thousand copies, but then no one expected hard covers to sell more than a couple of thousand copies. Paper covers hardly much better, come to that. Paper was simply a second bite at an apple that had gone rotten. Only with Flora there wasn’t even an apple.

‘So what are we going to do with
you
?’ she called me into her office to ask.

The emphasis carried the distinct implication that she’d known exactly what to do with everybody else.

‘Market the balls off me,’ I suggested.

Risky, that. But I’d been determined not to go down in Flo’s presence without laying my virility on the table.

‘Believe me, Guy . . .’ she said, laughing and letting her office chair take her a long way back, as though she didn’t mind my seeing what a strong jawline she still had for a woman her age.

She was a walker and a mountaineer, small and wiry with good calf muscles which she showed off by wearing hiking shorts to work in all weathers. Hiking boots, too, with which she was rumoured to have kicked a number of her male authors who’d expressed dissatisfaction with the manner in which she hadn’t marketed them.

Me, she didn’t kick. Unless you call it kicking to suggest I find at least three young women writers to endorse the novel it was her bad luck to have to find a way of bringing to the attention of a book-bored public in paperback.

I suggested E. E. Freville. Eric the Endorser. He used to be a fan of mine, I told her.

‘Darling, he used to be a fan of everybody’s. But he’s not a woman and he’s not young, and anyway he’s A-list now and will only endorse a book if we can guarantee him a print of fifty thousand and a window in Smith’s.’

‘So guarantee it.’

She made a fist around a paperweight and snorted. ‘Let’s get back to these girls,’ she said. ‘Ideally under twenty.’

‘Flo, I don’t know any girls under twenty. I don’t know
anybody
under twenty.’

‘I wouldn’t boast about that.’

‘Besides,’ I said, ‘a writer under twenty would barely have been walking when my first novel came out.’

‘That sounds a positive recommendation to me,’ she said, raising herself on the arms of the chair, once, twice, three times, and taking deep breaths as she did so.

There’s a pinnacle of naked insult which is so breathtaking that you must admire the view, no matter that it’s you who’s being thrown from it. I wondered if I ought to applaud her. ‘Bravo, Flo!’ Instead I asked if she could recommend any young women of the age she suggested.

She pretended to think about it, using a couple of paperweights to exercise her biceps. ‘Well, here’s the whole problem,’ she said after she had pumped herself up sufficiently, blue veins starting out of her forearms, ‘would any of them like you?’

‘Do they have to like me?’

‘Your work, darling. Would any of them
get
it?’

‘Identify with it, you mean?’

I wondered if ‘identify’ was an exclusively female concept, like hormonal or moody, so angry did my use of it make her.

‘Try “empathise”, darling,’ she said.

You always knew when an interview with Flora McBeth was finished. She would make small rapping movements on her chest with her fist, and her voice – though always becomingly hoarse, like syrup passing through muslin – would start to sound as though sand had somehow got into a hairdryer.

Two weeks later she rang to say she’d found a bright young thing called Heidi Corrigan who was prepared to say I was one of her favourite farceurs over forty.

I skipped the ‘prepared to’. ‘I’m not a farceur, Flo,’ I said.

‘Doesn’t matter in the least. No one knows what the word means anyway.’

‘There’s another problem with Heidi Corrigan,’ I said. ‘Her mother was the publicity director here when S&C published my first novel. She sometimes brought Heidi into the office. Pretty little girl. I sat her on my knee while I discussed strategy with her mother.’

‘Which shows no affection is ever wasted in this business, darling. But don’t worry – I won’t tell.’

‘I’m not worrying. I just want to know how it helps to have a quote from Heidi Corrigan?’

‘Helps the Pound Shop.’

I don’t recall exactly, but this could have been the conversation that caused me to begin pulling the skin away from my cuticles. ‘The Pound Shop!’

‘Well, I’m not making any promises. They might not go for it.’

‘But a quote from an adolescent on the back of a book jacket could persuade them – is that what you’re telling me?’

‘Who said anything about the back? We’re talking front. Wider, younger audience, darling.’

‘She’s only published two short stories.’

‘
C’est la vie literaire
.’

‘Flora, I’d rather drown myself.’

Whereupon, like everything else, the line went dead.

But she responded to my wishes. The book went out without a word from Heidi Corrigan on the front or back, but where it went out
to
was anybody’s guess. Certainly not the Pound Shop.

That’s not quite the end of the story. I did find out where one copy landed. It landed on the desk of Bruce Elseley, a novelist some twenty years my senior – and therefore even deader meat than me – who on two previous occasions had written to my publishers accusing me of plagiarism. Nothing had come of these accusations, perhaps because he’d asked my publishers for action to be taken against at least a dozen more of their writers, each of whom he accused of stealing from him. That he’d have had more chance of receiving satisfaction had he chosen only one novelist per publishing house to accuse, I could have advised him were I in the business of advising him anything other than to keep up the erotic self-asphyxiation – an exquisite but dangerous form of auto-pleasuring which I mention only because Elseley was widely known to be a solo fetishist who’d already had to be cut down from a hook on the inside of a hotel door in Wales where he’d been attending a literary festival.