Zoo Time (6 page)

Everyone was. You wrote or you were nothing.

‘Just fucking finish it, Vee.’

‘Just fucking finish it!
Just fucking finish it!
What the fuck do you think I’m doing? Get out of my life and I’ll fucking finish it.’

I was lucky I wasn’t a dead man myself.

You know you’re in deep shit as a novelist when it’s not only your heroes who are novelists having troubling finishing their novels but your wife is a novelist having trouble finishing hers.

But since the novel as a living form had had it, why did it matter what either of us was doing?

A fair but stupid question, such as someone visiting from another planet might ask. Life as a living form had had it – life with purpose, life driven by idealism or belief, life that was more than shoving down expensive grub in restaurants that were booked up two years in advance unless you knew the right people, as I did – but we still lived, still made our reservations, still sat at our favourite tables eating food we could no longer taste and could barely afford. Don’t look for logic. The worse things get, the more attached to them we become.

I called the waiter over. ‘André, another bottle of Saint-Estèphe.’

He returned with the wine list. He was sorry, no more Saint-Estèphe.

No more
. It was the catchword of the times. Everything was running out. No more of anything. I thought of Poe’s great poem of ecstatic madness – Quoth the Raven, ‘Nevermore.’

‘What did you say?’ Vanessa asked.

I was starting to talk to myself. ‘Nevermore,’ I said.

She thought I was describing our marriage. ‘Bring it on,’ she dared me.

On the way out of the restaurant I noticed an unfinished bottle of Saint-Estèphe on a vacated table. I looked around to see if anyone was watching. Everyone was watching, there was nothing else to do
but
watch – but what the hell! I grabbed the bottle by its neck and knocked back the dregs.

The novelist as drunk. I hoped readers of mine had seen what I’d done. Then I remembered I had no readers.

‘They call me mellow yellow,’ I sang.

‘No, they don’t,’ Vanessa said.

On the emptied street, Vanessa paused to give a pound coin to a tramp. Not any old beggar or derelict, not a drugged-up Soho layabout or a
Big Issue
seller, but a tramp of the old school, wind-burnt face, long white beard, trousers ripped all the way to his groin (so better dressed than most of my profession), a who-gives-a-monkey’s indifference to whether anyone noticed him or not. He was sitting on a wooden bench outside a pub, writing in a reporter’s notebook.

‘He looks just like Ernest Hemingway,’ Vanessa whispered admiringly, reaching into her bag.

‘He seems to be writing longer sentences than Ernest Hemingway’s,’ I whispered back.

I wanted to see what he was writing but couldn’t, with decency, get close enough. I felt slightly shamed by him, such profound concentration, such fluency of the hand, no need of a computer. Was he the last of the pen-holding,
plein-air
novelists?

In so far as she was capable of doing anything discreetly, Vanessa discreetly plonked her coin in front of him. He didn’t look up or otherwise acknowledge her. I knew how he felt. There was a sentence he had to get right, and nothing else existed.

Vanessa took my arm. She was trembling. All acts of generosity on her own part moved her deeply. I even wondered if she was going to shed a tear. (
Were
going to shed a tear?
Was
going to shed a tear.)

As we walked on, the sound of a coin hitting the pavement and then rolling into the road followed us.

Vanessa jumped. Anyone would have thought she’d heard a gun go off. I jumped with her. We were all keyed up. A car’s exhaust backfired and we feared another publisher had taken his life.

‘If you’re thinking of going back and picking it up for him, I wouldn’t,’ I said. ‘That didn’t sound like a fall to me. It was too violent. I’d say he threw it.’

‘At me?’

I shrugged. ‘You. Us. Humanity.’

I was secretly impressed. Not just the last of the
plein-air
novelists, but the last of the idealists for whom only art mattered.

A question that was sometimes asked: What had a woman as beautiful and confident as Vanessa, who could have married a rock star or a banker or a presenter on breakfast television – who could, for God’s sake, have
been
a presenter on breakfast television – seen in me?

The answer I invariably gave: ‘Words.’

In the century of the dying of the word there were still women who lusted after men to whom words came easily. And vice versa, of course, though the men who didn’t have words themselves were less likely to value them, and were certainly far more frightened of them, than the women. Give a man a word or two more than the common and he’ll always find a woman to revere him. Fill a woman’s mouth with words and she’ll scare the living daylights out of the other sex. Nothing but bags of nerves, the other sex. Every man I knew, a quivering wreck the moment a woman spoke.

Something else that was dying – men.

As both a reverer of words in men and a woman whose own words put men off – I’m talking about the words that flowed from her, not the novels she was never going to assemble from them – Vanessa considered herself lucky to have found me. She never said as much to my face, but I understood that to be the reason she had married me in the first place, the reason she had stayed with me and the reason she once flattened a young reviewer whose name was all initials and who had spoken ill of my prose style.

There’s loyalty for you. But when I thanked her for it afterwards she denied it had anything to do with me. ‘You qua you deserve all you get,’ she said. ‘It was your gift I was defending.’

‘I am my gift,’ I told her.

She coughed and quoted Frieda Lawrence at me. ‘Never trust the teller,’ she said, ‘trust the tale.’

‘That’s D. H. Lawrence,’ I corrected her.

‘Oh yeah!’ She laughed wildly.

But her point remained the same, whichever Lawrence she was quoting. The initialled reviewer had traduced the tale, the fragile thing of words spun only incidentally by me, as the farmer only incidentally grows the wheat. (And stolen from Vanessa, anyway.) That was why she trod on his spectacles: so that he would know how it felt to be the word, the wounded logos, kicked when it was down.

Things dying can have a voluptuous beauty. Only think of the dying of the day or the dying of the summer. So it was with the word. The sicker it grew, the more livid it turned, the more people of an over-refined and morbid disposition fell in love with its putrefaction.

Would I be around to see it finally pass away? I wasn’t sure, but I could imagine the scene, like the burning of a Viking hero at sea – the sky, as bloody as a reviewer’s nose, painted by J. M. W. Turner; the last of the verbalising men looking into the self-combusting sun, hoarsely mouthing their goodbyes; the women tearing their hair and wailing. Foremost among them, atremble in lacy weeds such as those she’d worn to see off poor Merton, my Vanessa.

Magnificent in mourning.

6

Party’s Over

Mourning. We were all doing it. The trick was not to let it get you down.

After Merton died I thought it would be a good idea to see my agent to talk about what next. A living writer needs a living publisher.

Over the phone, Francis wondered what the hurry was. I could hear the alarm in his voice.

Like Merton, he dreaded the prospect of a new book. Knowing writers were coming to see them, some agents had taken to locking themselves in lavatories rather than have a manuscript handed to them personally like a subpoena. That was how far the situation had deteriorated. A good day now was one in which no one gave them anything they had to find a publisher to sell to.

But at least I
had
an agent. ‘So who’s representing you now?’ other writers would ask me when we met at literary parties. We called them parties but they were more like wakes. Except that at a wake there’d have been more to drink, and fuller sandwiches. Maybe even sausage rolls. I evaded the question. Give another writer the name of your agent and he stroke she would try to steal him stroke her off you.

Sometimes I’d lie. ‘I’m going it alone now,’ I’d say.

‘Can that work?’ Damien Clery wanted to know.

He was the author of slightly camp, light-hearted social comedies set in cathedral towns – Trollope in a tutu, one reviewer had called him – but was better known for having jumped his agent from the other side of the desk and broken his nose. Since then, no agency would touch him. No publisher either. For the last four years he had been living off a charity administered by the
Scrivener
. I found him frightening, not by virtue of his violence of temper but the very opposite. He was the sweetest, mildest-mannered novelist in London. He had golden curls, lovely lilac-coloured eyes, and spoke melodiously. But you never knew when he would turn feral – a word I begrudged him because Mishnah Grunewald had used it of me, though I had never touched an agent’s nose.

‘It works fine, Damien,’ I confided, ‘but it means you have to do a lot of legwork. You have to deposit the manuscript on a publisher’s desk by hand. No point posting it. They won’t read it. You need to make personal contact.’

‘They won’t let me near. There are photographs of me in the reception area of every publishing house in the country. Security has me out before I can even ring the bell.’

‘Ah,’ I said, backing away.

‘I suppose I could get somebody else to deliver for me.’

‘That might work,’ I said. ‘Though they’d still know it was you from the name on the typescript.’

‘Not if I changed it.’ He gulped down a full glass of wine at terrifying speed and then had another idea. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘you wouldn’t be prepared to drop off some manuscripts for me?’

I backed away further. ‘Would have done so gladly,’ I lied, ‘but they know me too, remember.’

‘Yes, but you could say you were delivering for a friend.’

‘I could. But I wouldn’t be comfortable doing that if you changed your name. Once it came out that you weren’t who you said you were, we’d both be blackballed.’

‘I am
already
blackballed,’ he said, as though that were my fault. He looked me up and down with his lovely lilac eyes and shook his golden curls. He’d remember me, I was to understand.

Manuscript
s
, he’d said. That was the alarming part.
Some
manuscripts. So how many of them were there? A rejection of a single manuscript can turn the gentlest of us angry. The idea of Damien Clery carting around a whole barrowload of unpublished comic novels from publisher to publisher and being ejected before he made it past reception was even more frightening than the speed with which he was dispatching wine. When he blew his top next there was no knowing the damage he would do.

I was pleased with myself, at least, for not giving him Francis’s name. If anyone was going to punch my agent on the nose, I wanted it to be me.

Convince me, Francis’s expression always said these days. Give me a good reason for attending to your proposal.

I’d been toying for some years with the idea of writing a revivifying sequel to
Who Gives a Monkey’s?
.
Who Gives a Monkey’s About Who Gives a Monkey’s?
was one idea, or maybe just
Monkey’s Revisited
.

Francis breathed hard whenever I suggested this, as though it was a conversation he wasn’t sure his heart would allow him to survive. ‘Move on,’ he always said, pouring himself water from a cooler.

He no longer poured me a glass.

I often wondered whether Francis’s lack of enthusiasm for a sequel could be attributed to his not having been my agent for the original. My first agent – Quinton O’Malley – went missing on the Hindu Kush with the manuscript of my second novel in his backpack. His body was never recovered, though pages of my manuscript continued to be found scattered over a wide area for years after. Had Quinton lost his bearings and gone stumbling through the ice with my manuscript wrapped around him for insulation, or had the novel itself sent him mad? The question, to tell the truth, wasn’t much discussed. A literary agent going missing was too common an occurrence to attract speculation. And neither the Afghani nor the Pakistani police was much bothered to investigate.

Whatever his motives, I didn’t doubt the soundness of Francis’s advice. Most agents were telling their clients the same thing. Move on. Meaning move on from doing what you used to do, from hoping what you used to hope, or from hoping anything; move on from the fantasy that words could make a difference, could make a better world, or could make you a decent living. In some cases it simply meant move on from the idea of being represented by your agent. It wasn’t just Damien Clery who was in trouble. Half the fiction writers in the country had been shown the door by their publishers; the other half made phone calls to their agents that were not returned. Writers needed silence but not a silence as profound as this.