Zoo Time (13 page)

I say ‘eventually’ as though it just happened over time, but in fact Vanessa hit upon a very particular usage of Guido that took the gloss off it. We were a few years into our marriage. I’d published a brace of novels, the first of them still generating sufficient interest for me to be invited to the sort of festival that would put up a poetry tent in a field, next to the hamburger and noodle stalls, as a diversion, mainly for the older visitors, from the main business which was music. I didn’t enjoy these gigs. Not my sort of readers, that’s if they were readers at all. They sat on cushions on the grass expecting someone to recite something with easily graspable rhymes and hypnotic rhythms, in the spirit of the music from which they were taking a short break. The writer on before me did lineless free association on the spot, as the spirit moved him. ‘Heroes, zeros, losers, users, holding hands, folding wands, kissing, missing, missing what? missing nought, in love no ought, whatever teachers taught, bodies warming, love-ties forming . . .’

Amazed that anyone could detect in language the consonance of terminal sounds, the woodland folk banged their little hands together.

‘Shouldn’t be here,’ I whispered to Vanessa as we stood at the back of the tent drinking beer from biodegradable plastic cups. ‘This is no place for prose.’

‘Whooh!’ she shouted, punching the air with her free hand. Not in response to my words but the performance poet’s. As someone who sweated hard over every line and had nothing to show after four hours at the computer but a few random swear words addressed to the readers she didn’t have, she was bowled over by the impromptu.

‘Don’t do that whooing shit,’ I told her.

‘Why not? Because it’s not you I’m whooing?’

‘Because it’s not seemly, for one. And two, because he’s crap.’

‘Whooh!’ she shouted. ‘Yeah!’

The impromptu poet was so touched by her appreciation that he began to hymn her beauty. ‘Lovely lady, be more bravely, come into my parlour, a little farther, still more farther, fuck your friend (unless he’s your father) . . .’

I had agreed to do this gig only because Vanessa fancied the idea of a trip to the country.

‘Let’s camp,’ she’d said.

I thought about it. ‘Let’s not,’ I’d said.

‘Go on. It would be such fun. We could build a fire. We could cook sausages. I could suck your dick under the moon.’

‘You could do that in our garden.’

‘You have no poetry in your soul, Guido.’

This was why she was paying me back, first by whooing at the performance poet and then by joining a small queue to buy a collection of his poems.

‘How do you collect poems you make up on the spot?’ I wanted to know.

‘Don’t be cretinous,’ Vanessa said.

‘How am I being cretinous?’

She didn’t tell me. I was too cretinous to be told. But after I’d done my reading – ten pages of my most dense discursively lubricious prose containing references to characters the audience knew nothing of and events they couldn’t possibly comprehend, which might be why there was barely any audience left by the time I’d finished – she picked up the word again. ‘Cretin,’ she said.

I was sitting staring into space behind my pile of books for which there was, to no one’s surprise, not a single taker. I could smell burgers and pizza. I could hear jazz. Opposite me flags fluttered and the litter police made sure that people graded their crap before putting it into bins. Though there was no bin I could discern for the crap impromptu poet’s crap impromptu poetry. Other than me, everyone was being lovely to everybody else, twittering like little love birds.

‘It’s not me that’s the cretin, Vee,’ I said. ‘Illiterate twats.’

‘What did they do wrong? They came, they sat, they listened –’

‘– they left . . .’

‘What did you expect, you cretin?’

‘Knock off the cretin,’ I said.

‘I won’t. Guido Cretino.’ She laughed at her own music. Vee the performance poet. ‘Have you met my spouse, the distinguished louse, writer of fiction with his
dick
tion, Guido Cretino?’

And the name stuck.

A rule of thumb when choosing a name is that it should look arresting on the page. I’d never been a Bill and Mary novelist. Life is banal enough, in my view, without a writer replicating it. But you can also strive too hard. Beaufield Nubeem, for example, or Tyrone Slothrop. Gideon was feasible and yet still caught the eye. Erudite reviewers would make something of the biblical Gideon being a feller of trees, God’s agent in the slaying of the Midianites. Thus, a feller of the decencies. In fact, I only ever chose a name for its sound and its appearance, not its meaning. Only after the reviewers had been to work did I know why I’d called X, X. And by that time it was too late to disabuse them. Gideon worked for me aesthetically, and because I could abbreviate him to Gid, which worked for me because it looked like gad, as in the gadfly – a small sexual irritant, goading his mother-in-law into what he hoped at last would be sexual frenzy.

Goading, giddying, Gidding.

‘Little Gidding’, someone at the
TLS
was going to notice, the last of Eliot’s
Four Quartets
. ‘Is Guy Ableman telling us he has finally come to feel what Eliot called “the laceration / Of laughter at what ceases to amuse”?’

Finally?

That ‘Little Gidding’ was also an ironic reference to any one of a number of Henry James’s flaccid heroes – those still waiting for their lives to start, for the beast in their jungle to rouse himself and leap, for the sacred terror of which they walked in fear to strike and tear their throat – I could count on the
London Review of Books
to point out.

Such dense literary affiliation, and all I was after was a gadfly name that sounded teasingly like my own.

Gid, anyway – maybe Little Gidding was better after all – Little Gidding – or why not simply Little Gid? – would manage, as at his age I managed, Wilhelmina’s of Wilmslow. I’d have, eventually, to fictionalise that – the Wilhelmina’s and the Wilmslow. I was only
lending
him my past. But for the time being we were in this thing together, running the shop, with the assistance of a couple of competent and voguish girls with no A levels, while our parents, cruising the world on its profits, wondered what to do with it – sell, come back and run again themselves, or pass down to the next in line, in my parents’ case to me, an ingrate fantasising about being Henry Miller while waiting for my younger brother to finish his business education, in Little Gid’s a more contented personality who did occasionally, without any reason to suppose he had the aptitude, think about being a comedian.

Whatever its congeniality to either of our personalities, Wilhelmina’s was, as I like to go on remembering, for I hadn’t always been down on my luck, an aromatic and exclusive boutique, stocking demonstratively upmarket clothes – the Rifat Ozbeks, Thierry Muglers, Gallianos, Jean Paul Gaultiers and of course Dolce and Gabbanas of the day – to women who would rather shop locally than have to find somewhere to park their Lamborghinis in Manchester, Liverpool or Chester, not that they’d find what Wilhelmina’s sold in Liverpool or Chester. Being younger than me – a novelistic ruse devised to throw autobiography hunters off the scent – Little Gid would number footballers’ wives among his clients. And if they weren’t footballers’ wives when they went in to his shop, they sure as hell would look like footballers’ wives when they left. Either way, they trusted him. They put themselves in his hands. Gid Pet, they call him. Gid Darling. Gid Angel. They felt that that something that had rubbed off on him, rubbed off on them. He accompanied his parents to Paris and Milan, then later he would go on his own. Met couturiers. Met models. It was worth going into Wilhelmina’s just to sniff the catwalks of Europe on him.

On me, too, for the brief time I did what he did. Guy Dear. Guy Angel. My heart wasn’t in it but I was fashionably thin, liked putting my hands on women’s bodies, and had pretty much the same taste as our clientele. Which did not yet include footballers’ wives. They were not a discrete species in my time. The difference between Little Gid and me wasn’t only a difference of chronology but of class. My Wilhelmina’s was genteel. By Little Gid’s time chav had happened. Jean Muir had lost her rail to Versace. But the designer labels, the trips to Paris and Milan, the couturiers, the models – these I too enjoyed in a provisional, Henry Millerish sort of way, by which I mean I wished the fashion houses had been whorehouses, actual whorehouses with real, working, thirty-pound-an-hour whores in them, for whorehouses belong to literature as couture never can. Like attracted like, anyway, so any number of well-turned-out women made the trip to Wilmslow if they didn’t already live there. Half of Lancashire, half of Staffordshire, all of Cheshire. Hence Vanessa, who had idled with the idea of being a model herself, as she idled with the idea of everything, and might have made it but for those incipient literary ambitions which have done, and I don’t doubt will continue to do, long after we are dead, such damage to us both. And hence her mother, Poppy, who for a short while had
been
a model, of a sort, and who was loosely connected to my mother, Wilhelmina.

As
for
Wilhelmina and my father, they had relinquished the business and they hadn’t. No matter how many times they sailed away, they always sailed back again, partly to check whether I’d run it into the ground, or run off with the staff, partly because they missed the razzamatazz – the whizzing off to Paris, the London parties, the sound of champagne corks popping in Chester.

Little Gid’s fictionalised folks, I fancied, would be less concerned about him. He would have more of a flair for fashion than I ever had. And he would actually
enjoy
running a shop. There are such human beings. They take pleasure in what’s called ‘meeting people’. They enjoy making a sale, cashing up, reordering, doing the books – commerce, accountancy, money as and for itself. My brother Jeffrey – Jeffrey Darling – was such a person. He drove a BMW sports coupé through the lanes of Cheshire, the snow-white cuffs of his shirt protruding from his Gucci jacket, humming happily to himself. He dreamed clothes. I haven’t invented that. He told me once that he dreamed beautiful clothes. ‘And what are your nightmares about?’ I asked him. ‘Hideous clothes.’

The last time we talked there was a chance he would soon have his own TV series. Or at least one half of a TV series.
The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse
– a tale of two fashion retailers, one in Manchester, one in Wilmslow, and the differing demands their customers made of them. It didn’t seem to have much meat on its bones televisually to me, but what did I know about television? And if it didn’t eventuate, it didn’t eventuate. Jeffrey Sweetheart was cool about it.

So Little Gid, were I ever to put flesh on his bones, would have a bit of Jeffrey in him, visually and in relation to the joys of retailing, at least. His head would not be in the clouds. He would hear when people spoke to him. He would remember to reply. He would not be so transfixed by words – on labels, on a passing vehicle, in a newspaper that had been brought into the shop – that he would forget he’d left someone in the dressing room waiting to try on the same garment in another size. He would not, in short, be a writer. Which meant it was always possible I’d be able to stitch him up a happy ending here on earth, whatever Francis’s advice to the contrary – that’s if nothing terrible happened on account of his fucking his mother-in-law, which I couldn’t at this early stage of the narrative guarantee.

13

Viscera

It’s a curse, the writing impulse, if it gets you early, and if it doesn’t get you early it isn’t a writing impulse. Don’t listen to anyone who tells you they discovered they had literary talent late on. Either they’re lying about the chronology, or the talent they are talking about they don’t have. The impulse to write is an impulse to alter the conditions of your childhood. Not to falsify them, but to make the world other than the hellhole it looks to you when you’re young. Show me a happy child and I can imagine all manner of future occupations for him – in sport, in politics, in fashion retailing – but none of them in literature. Novels are born out of misery, which is why the best ones aren’t miserable, no matter that misery is a seller. The fact that the novel has been written is evidence that the misery has been overcome.

Misery of the succumbed-to sort you can get in life.

So I began with the highest of ideals. I would make the world a better place than it was, if not to live in then to read about.

By better I didn’t mean more wholesome. I meant full of the rudery we were too scared of in Wilmslow. It could be that I’m talking only about myself. Full of the rudery, in that case, that
I
was scared of. If I could master rudery, I thought, I’d master life.

And death.

I pinned photographs of writers considered beyond the pale of polite society to my bedroom wall. Jean-Paul Sartre, William S. Burroughs, Henry Miller, Leonard Cohen, Brendan Behan, Dylan Thomas, Norman Mailer. All devilish, existential blasphemers in their way, all men in pain, like me, though I was but a boy in pain.