Zoo Time (30 page)

I bridled at stereotype. I’m not sure why.

‘Let me rephrase the question,’ he said quickly. I expected him to ask me if I were rich in learning or in love. Rich in spirit, rich in the things that mattered. I was wrong. ‘How much do you earn per book?’ he asked.

My mouth fell open even wider. Wide enough, I thought inconsequentially, to fit a two-bore rifle.

‘We’ll discuss this when we know each other better,’ I said, unable to imagine a time when I would want to know him better than I already did.

But he caught me a few days later. ‘Now we’re friends,’ he said, ‘I want to ask you something.’

‘Not how much I earn?’

‘Bear with me,’ he said.

‘No,’ I said.

The following week he bought me a coffee and a cinnamon pastry without my even asking for it. ‘I know this isn’t something even good friends are meant to talk about,’ he said, ‘but writing’s a business like anything else, isn’t it? I want to know what I’m making these sacrifices for. I’m earning nothing. I’d do better stacking shelves at Waterstones. But will it improve? What can a novelist expect to earn?’

I looked at the cinnamon pastry and sighed. ‘Depends on the novelist.’

‘I know that, but give me a ballpark figure. How much did your last book make?’

‘I don’t write thrillers, Garth.’

‘Tell me. I’ll make the adjustment.’

‘How much did yours?’

‘Two thousand two hundred and sixteen pounds. There you are, I’m not ashamed to tell you.’

I smiled a wan smile at him. ‘That’s not a lot,’ I agreed.

‘And you?’

The truth of it was, I couldn’t tell him. The etiquette of discussing royalties with another writer apart, I couldn’t upset him. I wasn’t exactly coining it in, but I’d have had to be in a bad way not to be doing better than Garth. It would have been heartless to rub his nose in just how much better.

So I lied. ‘A bit more than that,’ I said.

‘How much more? Five thousand?’

I tried to calculate what he could bear to hear. ‘A bit more than that.’

‘Fifty thousand?’

Where was he on the scale of endurance?

‘Not so much.’

We settled in the end on a figure closer to the lower of the figures we’d been discussing. I plucked it from the air. Twenty. Let’s say twenty.

Now that we’d got there he looked faintly contemptuous. Twenty thousand pounds! Was that all a book of mine pulled in? I could see he regretted saying he was fan of such a nobody. For a moment I thought he was going to take back what was left of the cinnamon pastry.

It occurred to me to hit the insolent little bastard with the truth and watch his knees buckle, but my humanity prevailed. Three years later I read that he’d changed genres and sold the rights in his new novel to Disney for a million pounds. And that before it was even published. I kept away from the British Library just in case he had bought it, but he got his hands on my telephone number.

‘Guy,’ he said, ‘it’s Garth, I guess by now you’ve heard?’

I wasn’t sure how best to play it. Say yes and give him the satisfaction of knowing that I’d been living with the knowledge, or say no and have him tell me.

‘I’m busy this minute,’ I began.

He didn’t hear me. ‘A fucking million pounds, and that’s before we talk book royalties.’

‘I’m pleased for you, Garth,’ I said.

‘Meet me for lunch,’ he said.

‘No,’ I said.

He did this once a week for three months. ‘Meet for lunch,’ he’d order.

‘No,’ I’d say.

Now here we were on a tilting Pendolino together. He’d been in Manchester giving a reading at the university. ‘I won’t normally talk for under a thousand,’ he told me, ‘but I make an exception for students.’

I pulled a deprecatory face.

‘You think I shouldn’t have?’

‘No, no. I think you’re right to.’

‘But?’

‘There is no but.’

‘I hear a but coming.’

‘No, yes, well, I’m surprised you’ll take a thousand.’

‘Why, how much do you get paid?’

‘I’d rather not say,’ I said.

‘Come on. Fifteen hundred? Two?’

‘Five,’ I said.

‘Five thousand a talk? Christ.’

‘Sometimes seven and a half.’

‘Jesus.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘Highway bloody robbery, isn’t it?’

He fell silent after that. He pulled a hardback novel out of his briefcase and began self-consciously underlining passages. It was one of his own.

‘Good?’ I asked him.

‘It’s my first. No one took any notice then, now it’s a bit of a cash cow, to be honest, what with film rights . . .’

I reached over to see the title.
Death of a Dead Man.
‘Haven’t read this one,’ I said, my voice empty of curiosity.

‘I’m surprised,’ he said, ‘to hear you’ve read any.’

I smiled at him. ‘I haven’t,’ I said.

Before he could get back to underlining his own prose I asked after Lulu.

‘Leaking.’

‘I didn’t mean the boat, I meant the woman.’

‘Also leaking. Leaking my money.’

‘Expensive things.’

‘Girlfriends?’

‘Boats.’

‘Amen to that. How’s your . . . ?’

He couldn’t of course remember her name.

‘I don’t have a boat. Oh, you mean Vanessa. Blooming. Just finished a novel. Spielberg wants it.’

Before he could ask a question I leaned across and laid a finger on his lips. ‘Can’t say,’ I said.

It was such a good journey back from Wilmslow I briefly forgot all the terrible things Jeffrey had told me.

29

Dying from the Brain Out

I decided to break the news gently to Vanessa.

‘My cunt of a brother’s got a brain tumour,’ I told her.

‘Jeffrey?’

‘What other cunt of a brother do I have? Jeffrey. Yes. You remember him?’ I made a fist and put it to my temples, to suggest a grenade about to go off and blow Jeffrey’s brains out.

‘Jeffrey! My God!’ She opened her eyes wide, did a dramatic actress stagger, collapsed into an armchair and wailed.

I’d read about people wailing but I’d never with my own ears heard a wail. It was the tragic equivalent to Jeffrey’s comic ‘Ha, ha!’ ‘Oh, oh!’ she said.

It seemed to me I had to pace my responses. And not to offer it as my opinion that the whole thing was just Jeffrey playing dead again to get me into trouble. ‘I didn’t think you liked Jeffrey,’ I said, after a while.

‘He was the one who never liked me. But that’s not the point. No one in your family did, and I don’t wish the poor boy ill.’

Poor boy!

Was that why? Was there someone else’s bed he hoped to be carried into, white as his own ghost and winking all the while at me?

And if he was a poor
boy
to Vanessa, what was he to Poppy?

‘Is that true that he never liked you? I thought he liked you a lot.’

She didn’t rise to that. Gave not a sign.

She wanted to know whether it was malignant. I hadn’t asked. I assumed anything that grew in your brain was malignant. Wasn’t the brain itself a malignant organ? Wasn’t Jeffrey’s, at any rate?

‘Call him,’ I said. ‘I’ll give you his number.’

She didn’t rise to that either.

The news had a profound effect on her. She sat around for days, looking into space, sometimes shaking her head as though in an argument with an unseen foe. She didn’t eat. If I wasn’t mistaken she even did some writing.

‘You’d better get yourself checked over,’ she told me.

‘Do tumours run in families?’

‘Don’t ask me. Just do it.’

‘I’ve already got a colonoscopy booked.’

‘They won’t find a brain tumour looking there.’

‘That’s what I’m hoping.’

Instead of turning on the radio or putting on headphones or in some other way blocking out the sound of me when she went to bed, she sat up and initiated a conversation. I couldn’t remember how long it had been since we’d talked in bed. Talked, not brawled.

‘Everybody’s dying,’ she said.

She sounded so fatalistic I wondered how her mother was. ‘Oh, she’s fine. She’ll go on for ever. She’s probably the only one of us that will.’

A thought occurred to me. ‘You?’

She dodged the question. I didn’t read anything into that. She’d always wanted me to think she wasn’t long among the living. And she was a highly suggestible woman. A brain tumour was now just a matter of time.

‘What’s it for, Guido?’ she asked.

‘Oh –’ I was about to tell her but she interrupted me.

‘Apart from the books and the fame, what’s it about?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘That’s why you have to have the books and the fame.’

She gave me a long, penetrating look. ‘Lucky you, then,’ she said, ‘for having both.’

‘And for having you,’ I said.

‘Oh, me.’ She flicked her fingers, as though that was all it would take for her to be gone. Already the tumour had started.

It suited her to be talking about death. Her tears apart, I’d never seen her so blooming. But I decided against rolling on top of her.

The next day – as though in fulfilment of the lie I’d told Garth Rhodes-Rhind – she took up her novel again.

I did the same. But without my alter ego, Little Gidding. Gid the gadfly was, to employ Jeffrey-speak, so over. Jeffrey too, but in another sense entirely. And I could give Jeffrey immortality of sorts, no matter that it wasn’t the sort he prized.

He was the way forward for me, anyway. A hero for our times. He went both ways where Little Gid went only one. Jeffrey was dying from the brain out, Little Gid was merely stillborn. And Jeffrey had outraged decency, betraying his brother, perhaps betraying his brother twice over, and in combinations even my imagination had to race to keep up with. Poor Little Gidding, like me, hadn’t got beyond popping his tongue down his wife’s mother’s throat.

Should it all turn out to be the lie I had now convinced myself it was – well, that was even better. Heroes are meant to be liars nowadays. Lying’s the great cliché of the novel. Like
story
. Have your hero start his
story
– the false prick – with the promise that everything he tells you is a pack of lies and you’ll cream off however many readers are left out there.

The literary lie is what you’re reduced to telling when invention is no longer prized, when fact is thought better of than fiction and publishers print the words ‘Based on a true story’ on the jacket of a popular novel. The literary liar is art’s last desperate cry for attention.

Did I really want to go in the direction of the unreliable narrator, when there’d never in the history of literature been a good narration that
was
reliable?

I didn’t know what I wanted. I was aflame with possibilities. And I was jealous of Jeffrey, whatever he was up to. Jealous of him for dying. Jealous of him for lying. Jealous of him for not lying. And jealous of him for lying with my wife stroke mother-in-law.

Good. Jealousy works for some men. Especially if they’re writers.

My jealousy was inseparable from my renewed creative excitement. I had only to picture Jeffrey with either of the women I loved and before I knew it I had written a chapter. What would happen when I got around seriously to picturing him with both of them God alone knew.

In my dying world, Jeffrey was tomorrow. I had it in my power to write the seamiest novel of an admittedly exceedingly tame century.

I no sooner saw him as my hero than my constipation eased.

30

Murdering Time

A month or so later –

‘So that didn’t last long,’ Francis said.

‘It wasn’t a good enough idea.’

‘Not the idea. Your ma-in-law.’

‘Oh, that’s still a goer.’

‘Pity, I was hoping –’

‘Hoping what, Francis?’

But he couldn’t even be bothered to frame a lewd suggestion. We were clapped out.

He looked at his watch.

He used to look at his watch every thirty minutes. Now it was every five.

We were lunching in a new club in Soho. Clubs were like authors’ magazines – the worse things got, the more of them appeared.

After he’d checked his watch, he checked the room. We were all doing this, looking to see who else was there. Though there was no one whose company we sought, anyone had to be better than the person we were with. We were murdering time. Now was no good. What happened next had to be better. And we’d think the same about whatever happened next, whether or not anything did. Life was some place, some time, some person, else.