Zoo Time (36 page)

‘To walk,’ I said. ‘And when I was little to collect seashells and make sandcastles. New Brighton. Blackpool. But I haven’t as a grown man sat on a beach with a book.’

‘Then you don’t know what you’re missing.’

Like the monkeys.

She stretched back in her chair, lithe and muscular, simultaneously old enough and young enough to be her own granddaughter, as though to show me what else I was missing. There were tussocks of black hair under her arms, like the growths you see in the ears and nostrils of elderly dark-skinned men who are too busy or serious to bother about removing them. But it wasn’t seriousness Flora McBeth was showing me I was missing, it was the spirit of play.

I wondered what would happen if I dropped to my knees and nuzzled my face into these dark spaces beneath her arms. Would she keep me in print?

It was faint-heartedness that stopped me, not distaste. I would have liked to communicate that to her, tell her about Poppy, make it clear that I found older women far more attractive than younger ones, but affirmations of non-fastidiousness never come out right. ‘An old body holds no terrors for me’ would have been an honest account of my erotic principles, but I could hear it being taken in the wrong spirit.

‘So what’s the quality people look for in beach reading, Flora?’ I asked instead. I had a feeling that I had torn the skin behind my ear and that it was bleeding.

‘Readability, darling, what else?’

‘And what is that exactly?’

‘Readability?’

‘Yes.’

She brought her arms down and laid her hands flat on the table. The tussocks of black hair were mine to admire no longer. I was undeserving.

‘If you don’t know what readability is, darling,’ she said, as though this might be the last conversation we would ever have, ‘you are beyond help.’

On the way out of her office I bumped into – actually banged against – Sandy Ferber, wearing the expression of a man whose entire family had just been wiped out in a tsunami. He chose not to recognise me. When I say ‘chose’ I mean more than made a quick, instinctive mental decision. I mean chose from his soul, chose as though his genes had been deciding to take no account of mine for however many millions of years they’d been gestating in the womb of humanity.

I didn’t exist for him. Person to person, I could have dealt with that. I sometimes wondered whether I had ever existed for my mother. And Poppy was beginning to let me know that I didn’t exist for her either. But writer to publisher, this was hard to swallow. Without being fancy about it, to publish is to bruit abroad, to proclaim publicly, to achieve notice for. Flora had made the word publish mean its very opposite. To be published by Flora was to be put out of circulation, made secret, obliterated. Flora’s outstanding achievement was to win obscurity for her writers, many of whom had been celebrated before she got to work on them. But Sandy Ferber’s ignoring of me went further: in Sandy’s eyes I was not even there to be expunged. I was non-app man. The wordy past.

He too wore a black suit, but where mine was a mourner’s, his was the deceased’s. In reality this did not reflect our professional relationship:
he
had been hired to bury
me
. But his bones rattled when I banged against him, and I still had flesh on mine.

On the spot I decided to cast my vote for life. I would leave Scylla and Charybdis. Had I been bolder I’d have left the day Merton shot himself. You have to know when the writing’s on the wall. I felt light-headed. New book, new publisher. The world lay all before me.

I called in to say goodbye to Margaret.

‘I’ve had it, Margaret,’ I said.

To my astonishment she knew exactly what I meant. Were all Merton’s authors doing this? Was I the last?

She came from behind her desk and put her arms around me. Strange to say, I smelt Merton on her. I didn’t doubt that they had done this countless times. ‘I’ve had it, Margaret,’ he would come in and say, and she would get up from behind her desk and put her arms around him.

So had they been lovers?

The question was irrelevant. I knew what she felt. She felt she had failed him. ‘I’ve had it, Margaret,’ he had said, and she had not taken the full measure of what it meant, not understood what desperation the man-haters and the word-haters drove him to. And so she was trying not to make the same mistake with me. ‘I’ve had it, Margaret,’ I said, and in silence she held on to me for dear life.

35

Too Late for the Apocalypse

New book, new publisher.

Light-headed, did I say I felt? Optimism doesn’t last long in my business. New book, new publisher was all very well, but what if the book took longer to finish than I hoped; and what if, by the time I had finished, there were no publishers left to publish it?

Needing to see Francis urgently and the day being mild, I strode in the direction of his office, bought an unnecessarily complex cappuccino from a nearby Carluccio’s, sat outside with it and, knowing that Francis didn’t like anyone dropping in on him unexpectedly, rang his number. His line was permanently engaged. As like as not disconnected so that no one could get through to him. In my self-absorption I hadn’t noticed that Ernest Hemingway was sitting two tables away from me, writing. One unwashed testicle was visible through his ripped trousers. It lay on his seat like an exotic fruit that had fallen off his plate.

Antonio Carluccio, the mushroom king, had long ago sold his chain of inexpensive Italian restaurants – how did I know that? because chefs and restaurateurs are the inverse of writers: people know about them and love them – but that still didn’t make this branch a hang-out for dossers. The management would have been well within its rights to move him on. He wasn’t eating or drinking anything. And his appearance might fairly have been considered detrimental to trade. I certainly would not have wanted to eat spaghetti and meatballs at an adjoining table. And yet there he sat, unmolested, an unfailing reproach to all novelists of faint-heart, flipping over the pages of his reporter’s notepad as though he feared his time was running out.

Was he invisible, I wondered, to everybody but me? Was he the ghost of serious writing – all that now remained of us? Was he Ernest Hemingway himself, come back from the dead, to stir the conscience of a public that didn’t even notice he was there?

I was too far away to see what he was writing. And I couldn’t exactly ask.
How’s the novel going? Have your sentences got any longer?

I tried to catch his eye. ‘I see you,’ I wanted him to know. ‘I applaud you.’

But he was beyond person-to-person contact. People didn’t interest him. The world didn’t interest him. He had stuff to write.

On and on, he went, writing at the speed of light and rolling his unwashed testicle around in his fingers as though it were a rosary.

I tried Francis again. This time I got his answer machine. ‘Please pick up, Francis,’ I said. ‘I’m finally done with S&C. I need to talk to you now. I’m just across the road. If you look out of your window you will see me. Pick up or I’m coming over.’

You need a bit of luck if you’re a writer in the age of the dying of the word. Mine came in the shape of Kate and Ken Querrey, the owners of Slumdog Press, a sensational new publishing house whose speciality was the debut novel. The Querreys had worked out that if you paid young unheard-of writers a small fortune for their first novel, that in itself was reason for readers, dreaming of writing their own debut novels, to buy the book. How and what the debutants wrote was irrelevant; the being plucked from obscurity was all that was needed by way of plot, the size of the advance all that was needed by way of denouement. That the rise of the debut novel was the cause of much bitterness to experienced writers whose debut novels were behind them needs no explaining; but most of us took consolation in the necessary brevity of the debut novelist’s éclat. They were like the
Latrodectus mactans
, the male black widow spider of North America – one fuck and they were dead.

I at least was still limping about, looking for another.

The Querreys, meanwhile, could practise fatalism and move on to the next.

I knew them vaguely. I had been at university with Ken Querrey who was said to be second in line to a baronetcy and I ran into him and his wife occasionally at literary festivals. Kate Querrey had even chaired an event of mine once, in the course of which she said I was one of those writers who had the courage to learn as they went along, which I took to mean I hadn’t learned much yet. But at least she acknowledged my existence. So when I saw them leaving Francis’s office, obviously on business – rather than having to drag his bulk around to publishers when there were matters that needed discussing face to face, Francis would entice them to his rooms with lavish finger food and a selection of the best malt whiskies – I saw no reason not to wave and invite them to join me for coffee. In all likelihood, they needed coffee.

We engaged in the usual literary small talk, who was hot, who was not, which of Francis’s authors they published (never heard of them), how, speaking of writers one had never heard of, things were going in the realm of the debut novel, and finally, how things were going in the realm of me.

‘You’re S&C, aren’t you?’ Kate Querrey asked, pulling a strand of hair out of her eye.

I say ‘eye’ intentionally. She had only the one. But she used it in a way that implied it did the work of three, darting it about to take in whoever else was sitting out at Carluccio’s, looking at the person I presented myself as being, and looking deeper into the real me.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘for my sins.’

Ken Querrey took no time understanding me. ‘Sandy Ferber?’

I nodded. The nod which said,
but not for much longer
.

Kate Querrey shuddered. Sandy Ferber – ugh!

In an ideal world the Querreys would now have leapt on me like out-of-print monkeys getting their revenge on Flora. Guy Ableman! What good fortune puts him in our way on the very day he decides to leave his old publisher? But if they were thinking anything along those lines, they kept the thought discreetly to themselves.

They’d been secondary-school teachers originally – or at least Kate Querrey had: no one was quite sure what her husband had been up to, only that he was second in line to a baronetcy – branching out into publishing on the back of an anthology of children’s writing they’d privately printed. Not the
Fetch, Fetch
school of children’s writing. The children whom the Querreys taught would never have seen a dog – except maybe in a stew. Addiction, abuse, gang bangs, consensual schoolyard rape – those were the lived experiences which the Querreys had encouraged their pupils to mine. Write about what you know, kids.

Ken Querrey wore a T-shirt with what looked like a rapper’s face on it under a Ralph Lauren leather jacket. Kate Querrey, a woman who seemed always to be on the point of falling apart, was wrapped, as though to hold herself together, in several layers of brown cardigan. How she was able to be décolleté under so much knitwear, I couldn’t work out, but no matter where I looked I couldn’t avoid her long, ginger, milky breasts. I wondered how Francis, a notorious breast man, had fared. Perhaps he’d kept his gaze fixed on her eye.

Since nothing was coming from them, I steered the conversation towards my new book. ‘But your speciality is the debut novel,’ I laughed, ‘and I doubt I can pass what I’m writing off as that.’

They looked at each other quickly. ‘Well,’ Kate Querrey said – more out of pride than encouragement – ‘we don’t only do that. We’re always on the lookout for breakthrough novels as well.’

Ken Querrey shaped his face into an interrogation mark? Had I broken through yet?

I threw them a who-am-I-to-say smile. The concept of the breakthrough novel troubled me even more than the concept of the debut novel, though they were, of course, in the nature of things incompatible. Breakthrough into what? Primark! Since I was stymied as to debut, I could see that breakthrough was my last chance. But it seemed to me I’d broken through sufficiently by becoming a writer in the first place. I was the son of fashion retailers. My mother took
Drapers
magazine and the
Sun
. My father had never knowingly opened a book. They had sent me to a nothing school (when they could have afforded to send me to a minor public one) in the hope that I would never knowingly open a book myself. I was a Jew – I know, I know, but I never said I was against using it when I needed it (call me a foul-weather Jew) – living in a Gentile country. How much more breaking-through was I obliged to do to stay in print? But I knew none of that was going to wash with a pair of ex-comprehensive-school teachers from Rochdale – the word was that Ken Querrey had taught there for a week – where breaking through in the sense I was using it meant licking cobblestones for a living when you were five years old, eating dog, sending your sister on the street to pay for your education and going up to Oxford with holes in your shoes.

‘The last person to know the value of what he’s writing is the writer,’ I said, flushing a little to hammer home my modesty. ‘But I do feel I’m going where I haven’t been before. Greater sickness and deeper despair. It’s about a man with a brain tumour –’ I was about to add that the brain tumour came about as a consequence of his drinking vodka through his eye when I realised just in time that Kate Querrey might have lost her eye doing the same.