Zoo Time Read Online Free PDF Page B

thriving. I was in my forty-third year – ancient for a twenty-first-century novelist, and certainly too ancient to go on appearing on any of those lists of writers under whatever that I had once graced – but I could have passed for someone ten or twelve years older. I’d let my gym membership lapse, upped my wine consumption to more than two bottles a night, and stopped trimming my eyebrows or having my hair cut.
    Anyone would have thought I didn’t want to see out. (Which in point of fact I didn’t.)
    But more worrying was that no one wanted to see in. I was like a garden no one gave a monkey’s fuck about.

5
    Me, Me, Me
    Make allowance for the self-pity intrinsic to a dying profession. In truth, Vanessa gave sufficiently a monkey’s fuck as to say she thought I needed a holiday. And never mind that she’d been saying I needed a holiday, needed to be off, needed to be somewhere else, needed to be somewhere she wasn’t, for the nearly twenty years we’d been together.
    ‘A holiday from you?’
    ‘From your work. From yourself. Be somebody other for a while.’
    ‘I’m always somebody other. Being somebody other is my work.’
    ‘No it isn’t. You’re always you. You just give yourself different names.’
    I sighed the marital sigh.
    ‘Don’t make that noise,’ she said.
    I shrugged the marital shrug.
    But she was flowing. It was exhilarating, like being swept away in a warm river. ‘Get away from yourself. And if you think you need a holiday from me as well, then take one. I won’t stand in your way. Have I ever? Look at me. Be honest with me.’ She slipped her hand between my thighs. ‘Be honest with yourself. Have I ever?’
    In the excitement I forgot the question. ‘Have you ever what?’
    She withdrew her hand. ‘Stood in your way.’
    ‘No,’ I said.
    ‘Thank you for being honest.’
    I waited for her to slide her hand back. Wasn’t that how a wife was meant to reward a husband for his honesty?
    ‘But this isn’t a green light for one of your literary flings,’ she went on. ‘I’ll know. I always know. You know I’ll always know. You get soppy with me on the phone and shitty garage flowers start arriving twice a day. In which case enjoy yourself, just don’t expect me to be here when you get back.’
    ‘ If I get back . . .’
    That might sound like a man looking for a way out. But I wasn’t. I loved Vanessa. She was the second most important woman in my life. What I was looking for was something to write about that somebody not me wanted to read about. If she left me I’d have been heartbroken, but at least heartbreak is a subject. It’s not abuse but it’s still a subject.
    ‘Don’t threaten me with empty threats,’ she said. If I was running low on ideas she was running low on humour. Not that jokes had ever been her strong suit. She was too good-looking to be a joker. At forty-one she could still walk on seven-inch heels with blood-red soles without her knees buckling. And you need serious concentration for that.
    ‘Come with me,’ I said, picturing us strolling arm in arm down some Continental promenade together, she towering over me in her sado-spikes, men envying me her legs. Our stopping every now and then for her to stoop and slide her hand between my thighs. Men envying me that.
    ‘I can do fine on my own,’ she reminded me.
    ‘I know you can do fine on your own. But life isn’t all about you. I don’t do fine unless you’re with me.’
    ‘You, you, you.’
    ‘Me, me, me.’
    ‘And where would we go?’
    ‘You choose. Australia?’
    Now that was picking a fight. We’d been to Australia the year before, to the Adelaide Festival – where else? – in the hope I might get a book about a writer going to the Adelaide Festival – where else? – and had very nearly come unstuck. The usual. Fan of writer in need of a fillip (fan is even called Philippa: get that) tells how she’s trembled over every word writer writes whereupon writer checks the coast is