Zoo Time by Howard Jacobson Read Free Book Online Page B

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 The idea of Damien Clery carting around a whole barrowload of unpublished comic novels from publisher to publisher and being ejected before he made it past reception was even more frightening than the speed with which he was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.
    It wasn’t just back list that was a black hole. Front list was no better.
    I have said: I was one of the lucky ones. Francis Fowles believed in me, for no better reason, I sometimes thought, than that we were both short. In my experience literature is a tall man’s business – not fiction, maybe, but every other branch of the profession – so there was an automatic, unspoken confederacy of the short between us. Francis’s enemies – publishers he had once persuaded to pay too much, writers he refused to take on, other agents whose writers he stole, literary editors who hated him because they hated everybody – called him ‘the Dwarf ’, but he was by no stretch of the imagination dwarfish, his roundness simply made him appear smaller than he was, as my gauntness made me look