Zoo Time (26 page)

It didn’t upset me that he was demented. Here was the advantage of never having liked your parents, or never having known them entirely sane.

‘Look at those legs,’ he said. I could hear the saliva sluicing through his teeth.

‘They’re good,’ I said.

‘Good? They’re magnificent. My ex-wife had legs like those, but not quite so magnificent. Hers banged together in the middle. These are the bee’s knees.’

‘Do you take this as an insult to you?’ I asked my mother. ‘Or a compliment?’

‘Neither. I just take it that he’s cuckoo.’

‘You really don’t mind?’

‘He’s company. He’s actually better company cuckoo than he was –’ She couldn’t find the word for what he was.

‘What are you two whispering about?’ he asked.

‘He was agreeing with you,’ my mother said.

‘About what?’

‘About me.’

He pushed his face in my direction, trying to focus on me. An idea seemed to dawn on him. ‘Do you want her?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Why, what’s wrong with her?’

‘Nothing’s wrong with her. She’s fantastic. I just feel I should leave her to you.’

‘We could have her together,’ he said. ‘She wouldn’t mind that.’

He winked a half-blind bloodshot eye at my mother and then turned again to me. ‘Do you know what a spit-roast is?’

‘All right, Gordon,’ my mother said. ‘That’s enough.’

Through the dementia clouds my mother’s words had their old effect. At once the life went out of him. ‘Go back to your jigsaw,’ she ordered him. ‘You’re doing the moat, remember. Just the straight pieces to start with.’

He did as he was told. It was the first time in my life I had ever felt sorry for him. Maybe I was feeling sorry for me at the same time, not because I’d missed out on spit-roasting my mother, but on account of the defeated wickedness we shared. It was so hard to be a black-hearted libidinous old devil any more. So hard to be scurrilous with grace. So hard to be a man, full stop.

Dementia was the only opportunity left, and even this they took away from us.

Now that poor constipated Little Gidding was a goner, I wondered about replacing him with my father. A new sort of hero for our clapped-out times – an old, mad, male fool, more Othello than Lear, who no longer knew who his wife was and so had taken her as his mistress, happy to share either with his son, except he was too crazed to know who his son was. How’s that for visceral, Mr Clayburgh? That’s if my father had any viscera left.

That’s if any of us did.

He was back at his jigsaw, sorting out the straight pieces with bits of moat on them. (Me in forty years? Me in twenty?) My mother was watching over him, to be sure he was doing it right, but also because she was wanting me to go now so she could get back to it herself.

‘But you’re all right?’ I asked her.

She gave me one of her big, expressive Wilmslow shrugs. I remembered her saying, the last time I visited her, that she wished she were Jewish like everybody else in the business. ‘But, Ma, you
are
Jewish,’ I’d told her. ‘Am I?’ ‘Yes, we all are.’ She’d thought about it. ‘Well, that’s all right then,’ she’d said.

But something had changed. ‘What did you just ask me?’ she said.

‘I asked if you were all right.’

‘All right! What’s to be all right about?’

I couldn’t think of anything to suggest.

So what
was
Jeffrey? Was he gay or was he just playing at it? North of Nantwich, these days, there was no knowing who was or wasn’t gay. Maybe it had always been like that and I had been too busy doing the other thing to notice. Perhaps that was why Quinton O’Malley had pressed me with such urgency to stay up north, in the hope I’d discover what was really going on and spill the beans.

Thinking about it now, I remember how my mother used to take Jeffrey and me to Manchester on the train to buy bits and pieces for the boutique – the plunder lines, she called them – non-designer scarves and stockings, sunglasses, impulse-purchase jewellery (not too expensive) for a single revolving stand that stood by the wooden till, now an electronic cash and PIN point. She always used the same porter when we returned to Piccadilly Station with boxes to take back on the train, a great burly bear of a man with round arms and red cheeks who never failed to give us sweets or comment favourably on what my mother was wearing. One evening when we’d stayed late in Manchester for a Chinese meal I saw him at a nearby table wearing lipstick and a wig. The other men he was with – railway porters or drivers, I decided, on account of their all-round muscularity and oiliness – were dressed as women too. He waved. He was wearing gloves such as you see in faded photographs of waitresses serving tea in Harrogate in the 1920s, fingerless and with lace around the wrists. The men at his table laughed as he made dainty movements with his fat porter’s fingers. I wasn’t sure whether to wave back. I wasn’t sure I got the joke. When I looked a second time I realised he was dressed pretty much like my mother, particularly in the matter of the shortness of the skirt. Seeing my confusion, she explained that Derek – I hadn’t realised she was on first-name terms with him – was experimenting with his identity. ‘Are they all experimenting with their identity?’ I asked. My mother said of course not, the others were just friends helping Derek through a crisis, but even at the time I suspected she was wrong – half the working-class men in Manchester were experimenting with their identity, and using wigs and lipstick in their hypotheses.

I wasn’t tempted myself but Jeffrey Cuddly Wuddly, as he was then, might have been. It’s possible he didn’t in fact sit forward at the table and look intently into space when my mother used the word ‘identity’, but then again it’s possible he did. You know quite early on, I suspect, whether any of this is going to appeal. Jeffrey saw something of himself in a railway man in a short skirt; where I, even before I knew what any of them were, caught my reflection only in scoundrels, perjurers, lechers and novelists.

It was late afternoon when I got to the shop. Jeffrey was in earnest conversation with a woman I thought I recognised from the newspapers. A bit still in the face for a footballer’s wife, unless she’d come straight from Botox. And too old when I looked a second time. I guessed she was nearer Poppy’s age than Vanessa’s, but with that air of not knowing what you’re for any more that you see on models no longer young but which I’d never seen on Poppy. Poppy knew what she was for. Inflaming me.

Jeffrey signalled to me to entertain myself for a few minutes. There were places in the world where a man who ran a provincial boutique would have been proud to introduce an important customer to his distinguished writer brother, but Wilmslow wasn’t one of them. What I was hoping was that she’d recognise me and abash Jeffrey by saying she’d read everything I’d written, loved every word, and demand he introduce us. A hope that only goes to show there’s a shlock novelist in all of us.

‘Sorry about that,’ he said, kissing me, after she’d left. He kissed me strangely, dodging my face as though frightened to get too close, unless he was frightened that I’d be frightened. He told me about the woman he’d been talking to. I was right. A model past her best. ‘Beautiful still,’ Jeffrey went on, ‘though she’s had a bit of work done.’

‘
Bit of work?
Jeffrey, she looks as though she’s been in taxidermy for the last decade. Can she smile?’

‘Nothing to smile about,’ he said. ‘Her husband’s just walked out on her.’

‘It happens,’ I said.

‘Not when you’ve got a brain tumour.’

There was a slim chance Jeffrey had made that up to discountenance me – it was the sort of thing he did – but he looked furious with me for my unthinking flippancy and I couldn’t risk challenging him.

I blew out my cheeks. ‘Sheesh,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’

‘Yes, sheesh,’ he repeated.

‘Well, you’re looking well, anyway,’ I said, after a decent interval. Though that too appeared to anger him.

He was taller and slimmer than me, a drainpipe man ambiguously foppish in an Alexander McQueen jacket with metallic lapels worn over a striped T-shirt and ripped jeans. Was he dressed up or dressed down? The secret to his style was that one never knew. He wore the lightest of mascara, so light I might have imagined it. His hair flopped about even more than mine did. At the moment of his kissing me he had flicked it out of his eyes so that it caressed my cheek like a whip made of feathers. The flick had petulance in it. Could be difficult if crossed, the gesture said. Then the kiss of the feathery whip.

Did he kiss-flick his women like that? Did he kiss-flick his men?

He always told me about his women, describing them in embarrassing detail, enumerating the things they did to him – it was always what
they
did to
him
– but I wondered whether he made them up, not to disguise his true interests but to help me see there were alternatives to Vanessa. It was an unspoken family fiction that I regretted my marriage to Vanessa and would escape her if I could. Though our father was a hobbled dormouse – or at least had been until dementia freed him into intermittent licentiousness – we entertained the fancy (by ‘we’ I mean my mother, Jeffrey and me) that Ablemen men were macho bastards who took no shit from anyone, least of all a woman. That I took shit from Vanessa needed some explaining and I wasn’t going to explain it with reference to the feelings I had for Poppy. Not in Wilmslow. So I let them think I was simultaneously afraid of Vee and deeply sorry for her for being married to me. Which left them to suppose I could be won away eventually by stories of women no less beautiful than her, no less statuesque than her, but a hell of a lot more accommodating.

As though such a combination of virtues could anywhere have existed . . .

Jeffrey had found a new pub he liked on Alderley Edge, though what he really liked was powering down the lanes of Cheshire in a car that was built to rip up a racetrack with me next to him evincing terror.

‘Problems with your exhaust?’ I wondered.

‘It’s meant to sound like that.’

‘Why?’

‘Ha, ha!’ he said. It wasn’t laughter. He actually said the words. Separately. A ‘Ha’ followed by a ‘ha!’

‘Is that an answer?’

‘Was yours a question?’

He was unable to believe I didn’t covet his car.

He told me how quickly he could get from zero miles an hour to a hundred and fifty.

‘Don’t give a shit, Jeffrey,’ I said.

He told me something about the steering.

‘Give even less of a shit, Jeffrey.’

He shook his head and said ‘Ha, ha!’ again.

‘Next you’ll be telling me you don’t know what we’re in,’ he said.

‘Let me tell you something, Jeffrey – I don’t know what we’re in.’

‘Is this a writer’s thing?’

‘What we’re in? Well, no writer I know has anything like this.’

‘No, is pretending not to care about cars something writers do?’

‘I do care about cars. I care they don’t crash when I’m in them.’

He lowered the roof with a button and hit the accelerator. The wind blew wonderfully through his hair, mine remained plastered down by fear.

‘Ah,’ he said, tapping me on the thigh, ‘isn’t this wonderful? Admit it, it’s fucking lovely.’

Even when Jeffrey didn’t say ‘admit it’, the command was implicit in all our conversations. In Jeffrey’s view I was in denial. Denial about my marriage to Vanessa, women, cars, the success Jeffrey had made of the business, fashion, Wilmslow, money – in short everything I had and wished I didn’t, and everything that Jeffrey had that I wished I did. ‘Admit it’ meant admit you want to be me. That I was the person I wanted to be, doing the thing I wanted to be doing, was not something my brother could conceive.

As it happened, though no thanks to his intelligence, his scepticism was well founded. I might not have wanted to be Jeffrey but I hadn’t particularly relished being me for the last four or five years. This was not my era. The times were out of joint etc. I was permanently constipated. I had a criminal record with Oxfam. They were giving me too many stars on Amazon – no one wanted to read someone as good as that. Even Poppy – who I definitely did want – would have been an easier proposition had I been someone else. Not her daughter’s husband, say. Though you have to ask how much, in that case, I would have wanted her.

None of which, of course, was I willing to admit to Jeffrey Cutie Pie.

A funny thing about this getting me to ‘admit it’. Jeffrey wasn’t the only one. Vanessa’s working assumption was that I lied about everything and would never be well – free of constipation, free of solipsism, free of self – until I came completely clean. Bruce Elseley was trying to get me to admit I was plagiarising him. My agent wanted me to admit I was secretly a thriller writer. Sandy Ferber wanted me to admit I couldn’t wait to be the god of the thirty-second app. Mishnah Grunewald had wanted me to admit I was in denial about being Jewish. And there was someone else – the royal novelist and biographer Lisa Godalming who wanted me to admit I was a closet reader of the soap histories of Tudor monarchs she pounded out for Radio 4 listeners and only
pretended
not to give a monkey’s whether Richard the Twenty-Seventh could or could not sire an heir while reforming Parliament and remaining a Catholic.