Zoo Time (29 page)

‘This is the frontier life I’ve always longed for,’ she said.

She’d never mentioned the frontier life when we’d lived thatched-roofed in Barnes or when we moved into the three-storey house in Notting Hill Gate. (At this stage Poppy was still living with us. She decamped to Oxfordshire only after we got back from Australia, for reasons of what I suppose you’d have to call decency.)

I registered surprise that the frontier life was what she’d always longed for, but Vanessa was proof against my ironies. ‘I never used the word to you,’ she said, ‘because I knew you wouldn’t know what it meant. You’re such a townie.’

A townie, me? I reminded her I came from Wilmslow. ‘From the window of my bedroom, Vee, I grew up seeing cows.’

‘Describe a cow.’

‘Sheep, then.’

But since she was so enamoured of it, I left Broome to her. She returned the van and hired the most machismo jeep she could find. She loved the architecture and engineering of outback vehicles, the bull bars and the big tyres, the cans strapped to the roof, the noise the doors made when you flung them closed, the red dust on everything. For the two weeks we were there she became a well-known personality, driving at speed through the town, honking her horn and waving at the friends she’d made. She bought a new wardrobe of khaki shorts and ankle boots. She spoke in Aussie slang. At night she went out and drank with the Aborigines, the sound of whose laughter and brawling could be heard a hundred miles away.

‘This land is their land,’ she said.

‘
Land?
That’s not one of your words.’

‘It is now. They’ve taught me. It’s in their blood.’

‘Vee, what’s in their blood is alcohol.’

‘And whose fault’s that?’

I knew the answer. The white man’s. Vanessa wanted to stay and make things right for the black man.

‘Let’s not go back,’ she said to me one night. She’d been out drinking and doing God knows what else and was coiled around me like a snake around a wildebeest. ‘Let’s never go home. We can have a life here. Don’t you feel the wildness of it? How can we go back to west London after this? Smell the night.’

I smelt it.

The warm smell of camel hide or even elephant, blood, lizard, eucalypt, jacaranda – the sultry smell of pain and everything you applied to pain to soothe it, including after-sun lotion. But then the smell of more pain still.

‘Listen to it.’

I listened. Though the sea was not moving you could hear it. The sound of muffled silence, a roar as from another planet. And the sounds of creatures killing or being killed. And the Aborigines screeching their terrible disinherited laughter. And Vanessa whispering in my ear.

She was right. How could we go back?

‘What about your mother?’ I asked.

‘Up to her. She can stay with us or she can go home on her own. She’s perfectly capable. Just you and me. What do you say?’

For a moment I thought she was going to shoot her hand uncontrollably in the direction of my freshly proved manhood.

I lay quiet, listening to Vanessa’s excitement.

‘Well?’ she said. ‘What’s to lose? You can write anywhere and this would give you a subject that’s not yourself at last. And me too. I could finish my book here. This is what it was always about anyway. I understand that now.’

‘Your book was always about
Broome
?’

She bit my ear. ‘Don’t be a smart-arse, Guido. Not here. This is our chance to put all that smartness behind us. Start again. What do you say? Start again where life is real. No more book launches. No more publishers’ parties. No more running out to get the papers to see the reviews and then going ballistic.’

‘I’ll think about it,’ I said, remembering ballistic.

‘Don’t think, just do it.’

She was right. I hailed her courage. She was right for me as well as her. The great louche and ribald writers I admired would all have leapt at a life here, however brief. Gone mad in the heat, roared drunken through the streets, shot goannas in their gardens, and written scorching books about the experience. Maybe she would stay. Maybe she
should
stay. But not me. I lacked the courage. Unruliness was my goal, but unruliness in Wilmslow, not the far north of Western Australia where there were still creeks from which no white man had ever drunk. Did I say Vanessa lay coiled about me like a snake around a wildebeest? Some wildebeest!

I still shook with the transgression of the week before, or however long it was, when I’d put my hands on Vanessa’s mother and kissed her till my tongue ached. How much wilder did a man have to be?

And we weren’t done with each other yet.

Done? We hadn’t started on each other yet.

I’d blown my chance the night of the tarantula. Blame words. Words had always got me into trouble. Breaking for breath, and with my arms still encircling her, I’d said – cute bastard that I was – ‘So there are monkeys in Monkey Mia after all.’

Spell broken. Poppy, I should have known, was of that generation of women who let themselves go only on the understanding that it is not alluded to while it is happening. They let their hair down somnambulistically, so that in the morning they won’t remember. Only draw attention – ‘This good for you?’ or ‘I’d rather fuck you than your daughter’ – and the trance is shattered. That’s how fine the veil is that covers their modesty.

And I had ripped it.

‘Go!’ she said, and that time she did not relent.

So I went back to the van and found the note from Vanessa on my pillow.

Had the tarantula been a ruse? A rubber spider to get me out of the way so that Vanessa could slip away to the boat and its seedy crew a second time, the night being too beautiful to miss, blah blah . . ?

Did she regret she’d allowed things to progress that far?

Poppy, I mean. Vanessa was on the back burner of my jealousy. I’d deal with what I felt about her later. One pang at a time. And anyway, what Vee had done, she’d done. She was a great masticator, when it came to herself, of anterior ethics. Anything she had done in the past – even yesterday – she chewed up and spat out. Christ, Guido, that was
then
. Get over it. But with Poppy the question still had future in it. What did she think? What would she go on thinking?

I studied her expression when she didn’t know I was watching her. If her conscience was troubling her, she didn’t give any sign of it. She still slipped her hand into her daughter’s arm when they were out and about; they still strode together side by side, elevated on their cork heels, their heads turning in unison whenever someone unexpected passed them, though little was more unexpected on the streets of Broome than they were.

Had she mislaid what had happened? Had it vanished in alcohol, like so much else, like the spider on her pillow, like the monkeys she had hoped to find at Monkey Mia but had forgotten all about until I’d unwisely reminded her, like Vanessa into the night?

There were things I needed to know. Such as how a mother felt about borrowing her daughter’s husband? How treacherous it was from the mother’s point of view? Essentially, I meant. Never mind what a timorous society whose rules were made by women’s reading groups in Chipping Norton thought, how great a crime was sleeping with your daughter’s husband in the moral scheme of things? Did matrons discuss it laughingly with one another at the counter of the nail-care salon?

‘You had your son-in-law yet?’

‘Yes, you?’

‘Thinking of it. Any good, was he?’

‘So-so.’

Or did they tear their hair and await with trembling the vengeance of the gods?

Questions, questions. But from Poppy not a suggestion that she’d asked herself any of them. Did that make her a villainess of amorality, or a heroine? Did it make her anything at all?

While they turned heads on Cable Beach, flirting with musclemen or riding camels into the sunset – a camel each, Vanessa and Poppy, a hump apiece, think of that – I stayed indoors and googled Sophocles and Aeschylus. They were the boys with the answers. A man and his mother-in-law – how seriously did the gods view our transgression?

Nothing. No mention. Even Phèdre did no more than fall for her husband’s son from another marriage – and that didn’t come close.

Only the Roman dramatist Terence bore fruit –
Hecrya: The Mother-in-Law
. But that was a comedy, indeed something of a farce when it was first produced, losing its audience to a bunch of rope dancers performing on another stage. And I wasn’t looking for laughs.

We stood next to each other, Poppy and I, in the garden of the Mangrove Hotel one night, watching the Staircase to the Moon, a low-tide spectacle in which the moon seems to climb into the sky up the ladder of its own reflection from the mudflats of Roebuck Bay. People come from all over Australia, driving thousands of miles, just to see this. But I could barely look. Was I the stuff of tragedy or the stuff of farce? Was Poppy still in or was she out?

Had the Staircase to the Moon shed light on questions such as these I might have given time to observing it. Vanessa was talking to a gang of heavy-drinking men; dressed as she was, in her territory shorts and boots, and in wild spirits, her abandonment to heat and company was a spectacle in itself. I pressed my hand to Poppy’s thigh, fingers down and spread wide as though measuring a horse, exactly as she had finally allowed me to do the night of the tarantula. But she moved swiftly away from me. No plea to leave her alone. No reprimand. Just a step, as though to give a stranger space.

The matter was not raised the whole time we were in Broome. I didn’t press myself upon her. This might have been because I was sorry suddenly for Vanessa. She was not going to get her wish. For all her boldness, she wouldn’t stay without me. I couldn’t explain that. Perhaps her courage needed the complement of my fear. Perhaps she had hoped for Dirk to show up in his boat and he had forgotten her. He wasn’t exactly the sort of man who kept his word, assuming there’d been a word. Perhaps the frontier excitement had begun to wear thin. She stopped laughing and drinking with the Aborigines on the street. A wild man in a leather Stetson rammed the back of her jeep for the fun of it, yelled something about her tits, and then drove off. She overdid the sunshine. Things were biting her. As the days went by she was spending more time in the chemist’s than on the beach.

And I saw no sign that she was writing.

Only on the final night did she admit she was relieved to be leaving, though she made it sound like a capitulation to me.

‘You win,’ she said.

We were standing drinking and smoking on the balcony, looking out to the poisonous sea. Poppy stood beside her. Something in her expression seemed to echo that sentiment.
You win
.

Meaning what? That she could hold out against her hellish desire for me no longer? Or was she just pissed again?

28

How Much Did Your Last Book Make?

On the train back from Wilmslow I ran into Garth Rhodes-Rhind, the urban fantasist I’d befriended when he was down on his luck, not knowing where the next penny was coming from, or the next wife, come to that, the previous one having left him for a sixth-form prefect Garth had taught while working as a supply teacher at a comprehensive in Tower Hamlets. It was Garth Rhodes-Rhind who, later in his career and conjugal history, had thrown the ‘Launch on a Launch’ party on a yacht named
Lulu
.

At the time I met him he was a jobbing thriller writer who couldn’t give a book away. We met in the café at the British Library. He introduced himself and told me he was a fan. I didn’t believe him. Genuine fans never say ‘I’m a fan’. They name your books and tell you why they like them. ‘I’m a fan’ means I’m a star fucker, means I know your face but don’t ask me to know the title of anything you’ve written. ‘So which of my books is it you like?’ I asked him.

I didn’t actually, but I should have. The trouble is, even when you know what they mean when they say ‘I’m a fan’, you still like to hear them say it, so seductive is it to be recognised.

He was dark and brooding, overweight and unshaved. Unbathed, too, I thought. Unless it was simply unhappiness I smelt. And of course envy, but then all writers smell of envy.

He wasted no time in getting to the nub of his interest in me. He wanted to know if I was rich.

If I
were
rich.

My mouth fell open. ‘Rich? You mean rich already? Born rich? Rich before I lifted a pen?’ As though anyone any longer lifted a pen.

No, that wasn’t what he meant. He leaned forward and touched the lapel of my jacket. For a moment I thought he intended to feel it. But the gesture was placatory. ‘I don’t intend any offence by this,’ he said.

‘Offence?’

For an unembarrassable man, he looked oddly embarrassed all of the sudden. ‘I mean I don’t wish to stereotype.’