Zoo Time (43 page)

‘Even though
she
is saying word for word what
I
say?’

‘Even then, Vee. Even then.’

Myself, I found the whole thing mightily affecting. Their falling out, but also the reason for it. The novel, the screenplay, the film, the work – call it what you will. The imagining . . .

Daughter and mad mother alone in the outback, hoping to see the monkeys at Monkey Mia. No Guido Cretino in sight. Just the two women, brawling and affectionate in a manless, monkeyless landscape. No mystery why the film was modestly successful with audiences of mothers and daughters. They saw their own psychology. And psychology is psychology, no matter whether you’re sitting in a cinema in Notting Hill or the West End or, finally, in Western Australia where Vanessa later put in a surprise appearance at a film festival. A surprise to me, that is.

Vanessa’s handling of the audience’s slow realisation that the mother wasn’t suffering from Alzheimer’s but a brain tumour (for which my brother Jeffrey should surely have been given a credit) was exquisite. Little by little one realised that the attribution of dementia was a kindness dreamed up by the daughter. We’ll pretend you’re dotty, Ma, that way neither of us has to face up to the terrible fact of what’s really going on inside your brain.

I say ‘Vanessa’s handling’ because I felt I could detach her touch from de Wolff ’s. His hand was clumsier, more allusively filmic, as when the mother’s failed hopes to see what was nowhere to be seen conjured up memories of Rizzo’s thwarted longing to make it to Miami in John Schlesinger’s
Midnight Cowboy
. Or when the crazed refrain, ‘Are there monkeys in Monkey Mia?’ half echoed the simple-minded Lennie’s unbearable ‘Tell me about the rabbits, George’ in Lewis Milestone’s
Of Mice and Men
.

The film was drenched in sadness anyway, to whoever’s talents one attributed it. But you can’t please everyone, and
Are There Monkeys in Monkey Mia?
did not please Poppy.

41

Tell Me About It

I had my own uneasy moment. It came around about here in the script:

Exterior. Night.

A caravan park in Shark Bay.

DAUGHTER:
Maman
, look! Did you see that?

MOTHER:
No, what are you showing me?

DAUGHTER:
A falling star.

MOTHER:
I missed it. Will there be another?

DAUGHTER:
There might. It was beautiful. Strange to think it fell millions of years ago.

MOTHER:
How do you know that?

DAUGHTER:
It’s just something one knows.

MOTHER:
If it fell millions of years ago, how can it be falling now? A star can’t fall more than once.

DAUGHTER:
No, but what we’re seeing isn’t now, it’s then.

MOTHER:
What are you talking about? What’s then?

DAUGHTER:
We’re watching what happened millions of years ago.

MOTHER:
Is this the Big Bang theory?

DAUGHTER:
No, I think that’s something different. This is about the speed of light.

MOTHER:
Will we see the monkeys tomorrow?

DAUGHTER:
I’ll ask. I’m not sure. But we can row with the dolphins.

MOTHER:
I’ll have another drink.

DAUGHTER:
Do you need one? Do you
really
need one? Look how lovely the sky is. You can almost feel nobody but you has ever looked at this sky. Have you ever seen so many stars?

MOTHER:
Yes – when I met your father on the Isle of Wight. When I was a girl. And there were more stars then.

DAUGHTER:
There couldn’t have been,
Maman
. Maybe the skies were clearer in those days.

MOTHER:
What do you mean there couldn’t have been? If stars keep falling out of the sky there must be fewer of them than there were. Why do you contradict me all the time?

DAUGHTER:
Look! – there’s another.

MOTHER:
There you are – one less.

DAUGHTER:
I think someone’s waving to you.

MOTHER:
Where? Is this another one of your falling stars?

DAUGHTER:
There. From that boat. Look – he’s waving his arms about.

MOTHER:
I know what you’re doing – you’re trying to distract me. Let’s have drinkies.

DAUGHTER:
Wait a little longer. Wait till dinner.

MOTHER:
He does seem to be waving at me. Lend me your lipstick.

DAUGHTER:
Your lipstick’s fine. You look beautiful. You look so beautiful he’s fallen in love with you from all that way away.

MOTHER:
How do we know it’s happening now and not a hundred million light years before? Maybe he waved before the Ice Age.

DAUGHTER:
Maybe he did. But he hasn’t fallen into the sea. He’s still waving.

MOTHER:
How do you know he isn’t waving at you?

DAUGHTER:
I can tell. It’s you he’s smitten by. It’s always you they’re smitten by. Have you forgotten?

MOTHER:
When was any man last smitten by me?

DAUGHTER:
You
have
forgotten. Only last week, in Perth. A jeweller proposed to you.

MOTHER:
You’ve made that up.

DAUGHTER:
Why would I make it up?

MOTHER:
To make me believe I’m losing my mind.

DAUGHTER:
Why would I do that?

MOTHER:
So that you can have me put away. Life would be better for you with me out of the way.

DAUGHTER:
If I wanted you out of the way I could have fed you to the dolphins this morning.

MOTHER:
You wouldn’t have got away with that. You want them to declare me senile, so you can get that power of attorney you’ve been after for so long.

DAUGHTER:
I only mentioned it last week.

MOTHER:
It shocks me that you mentioned it at all.

DAUGHTER:
Only for your sake. I want to be in a position to look after you.

MOTHER:
I don’t need looking after. Why do I need looking after?

DAUGHTER:
Because you’re forgetting things. You’ve forgotten the jeweller in Perth. You’ve forgotten there are no monkeys in Monkey Mia. One day you’ll go out and forget your name.

MOTHER:
You’re worried I’ll spend your inheritance.

DAUGHTER:
There you are, that’s something else you’ve forgotten – I don’t have an inheritance.

MOTHER:
Blame your father for that.

DAUGHTER:
Maman
, I blame no one. I am happy. I could not be more happy. Look at the night.

MOTHER:
Darling, do you know there are times when I see so much of me in you I could cry? It’s as though we are sisters.

DAUGHTER:
There it is. There’s what’s wrong. We aren’t sisters. You’re my mother.

MOTHER:
So act like it, is that what you’re saying? If you want me to act more like your mother, don’t you think you should act more like my daughter and stop pimping for me?

DAUGHTER:
Pimping! When have I ever had to pimp for you? You’ve pimped successfully for yourself as long as I’ve known you. There wasn’t a man I brought home you didn’t make a pass at . . .

There . . . right there.

Though I knew from the novel that I had nothing to fear, that I had no part to play in this, that the generalities of the terrible rivalry between mothers and daughters left me out and let me off – that where such mighty opposites were pitted against each other, my petty and unconsummated sinfulness did not merit so much as a walk-on role – I held my breath in the cinema fearing she might tell it differently this time and I would finally be exposed.

But she didn’t and I wasn’t.

So was Vanessa entirely unsuspicious of me? Did she not guess? Did she truly know nothing? Was she being, for her own reasons, discreet? Or didn’t it, in the bigger scheme of things, matter a jot to her?

An alternative reading presented itself. There was nothing
to
know?

42

Luss

Three weeks after the premiere she left me. ‘Make this easy for me, Guy,’ she pleaded. ‘Let me have my chance.’

What’s making it easy? Making a fuss, to show you care, to show your heart is breaking, or making none?

I made none, unless you call a flurry of tears a fuss.

I think I wept as much over the nature of her appeal as I did over the fact of her going. No man likes to think he has stood in another person’s way – any person’s way – let alone the way of someone he loves.

‘Take it,’ I said. And then wept a little more over my own words. They had such a ring of stoicism about them.

I had one final request. Would she slip her feet into her highest shoes while I sat on the bed and watched? There is no more arousing sight than that of a woman with beautiful legs stooping slightly, stiffening her calf muscles, angling her toes towards her shoes, and then wiggling her feet into them. The height she then attains when she straightens up can be arousing too, but nothing beats the metatarsal tension in that split second before entry, especially if the shoe is just the slightest bit close-fitting.

She obliged. ‘Just one more time,’ I said. And she didn’t begrudge me that either.

I didn’t ask about de Wolff. I couldn’t take him seriously as a threat, though undoubtedly he was one. Sexual competition more often than not assumes a melodramatic form; rakes, lechers, seducers, femmes fatales, belles dames sans merci – what are any of them but figures that stalk the stage of our own lurid terrors? Quite frankly I am ashamed to have introduced so obvious a character. But what to do? Life shames every writer and once you start leaving life out you get magic realism. If de Wolff hadn’t existed I’d have had to invent him – and that’s the truth of it. I like to think that somewhere out there I have similarly stalked the stage of other men’s inadequacies. Brought other men out in cold sweats. Andy Weedon, maybe, without going so far as to give him an idea for a book. What goes around comes around. If Vanessa had chosen to throw in her lot with de Wolff for five minutes (I certainly wouldn’t have given them any longer than that), it only proved that all human life was farcical. ‘I can see his knob,’ Poppy had mouthed to me giggling – not a word I care to use, but there was no other – as she was led off to his boat and the night stars fell from the skies. She knew how ridiculous it all was. So I wouldn’t so far demean myself as to mention his name to Vee in the solemn hour of our parting. I bowed my head before the inevitable absurdity of things and offered to move out. Let de Wolff have my bed. He was a figment, knob or no knob. When I returned there would be no sign that he had ever lain between my sheets. Vanessa thanked me but said it would not be necessary. She would be the one to go.

That shocked me more than her initial announcement.

‘I’m so lonely I could die,’ I said, the day she left.

‘No you won’t,’ she said, kissing me on the cheek.

I held on to her for ten full minutes.

A month later I received a brief email from her in Broome. She was writing another book with a view to turning it into another film. About Aborigines. A subject, she reminded me, in which she had always taken an intense interest and would have pursued much sooner but for my obstructionism. She hoped I was busy and happy, writing about whatever I was writing about though she didn’t for a moment doubt that it would be myself. She thanked me again for making it so easy. Life had closed over peacefully, she felt, and it was as though ‘we’ had never been. Did I, too, feel that, she wondered.