Free Zoo Time by Howard Jacobson

eyes to Chester Zoo. What next?’
    I happened to know there was an annual transport festival in the east Cheshire town of Sandbach, held in commemoration of Sandbach’s long history as a manufacturer of commercial vehicles. We’d once dressed the Transport Queen in the family boutique, free of charge, to show her unbounded gratitude for which she’d let me undress her again at the back of the Foden trucks showroom when the carnival was over. I was fifteen at the time. She was nineteen. I disgraced myself. But now that I had become a successful writer she was writing to me, inviting me to try again.
    Fame!
    ‘Well, there’s a start,’ Quinton said when I mentioned this to him. ‘Love among the autoparts.’
    ‘Don’t you think it’s a bit small time?’
    ‘I most certainly do. And hurrah for that. You’ve put the monkeys of Wilmslow on the map –’
    ‘Chester.’
    ‘Chester. Now do the same with the beauty queens of Middlewich.’
    ‘Sandbach.’
    ‘Wherever.’
    ‘I’m not sure I can write another novel from the woman’s point of view,’ I said.
    ‘Then tell it from the man’s.’ He roared with rattling laughter. At the idea of a man having a point of view? Or at the idea of my being one?
    But his was a persuasive personality. So I did as he suggested, delved into my own erotic history, researched the Foden steam lorry, and told the tale from the point of view of a man with a blazing red provincial penis – Sandbach man, as libidinous as a cage of unmasturbated chimpanzees, breathing in the fumes of the trucks for which the town was famous.
    I never found out what Quinton thought of it. Had it killed him? Had the sheer unforgiving, unremitting straightness of it finished him off in the cold? True, he wasn’t morally particular about those he represented. Three wife-murderers, don’t forget. But Sandbach man could have been a step in the direction of unreconstructed, non-Nordic hetero-proletarianism too far.
    Who knew what Quinton thought, or even if he thought anything? Maybe he’d only ever taken the manuscript away to line his boots.
    I went ahead with its publication agentless anyway, suggesting to Merton, who had published my monkey novel, that as no one could now prove otherwise, we take the killer route on the jacket. This book is dangerous . Think twice before you read it – especially at altitude .
    But Merton no more liked putting the word ‘dangerous’ on the jacket of a book than he liked putting the word ‘hilarious’. ‘Another life-changing masterpiece from the prize-winning author of Who Gives a Monkey’s? ’ was what he plumped for instead.
    People compared me to John Braine and Alan Sillitoe. Tuesday Night and Wednesday Morning meets Room at the Bottom . Which was a comedown, I thought, from Apuleius and the Marquis de Sade. Though one reviewer did say that he thought the screams of chimps on heat were following me around the north-west of England, while a second (who turned out to be the same person, reviewing me under another name) wished I’d stuck with the territory I knew best – the monkey house. In a third review, for the London Magazine , again under another name, Lonnie Dobson, aka Donny Robson, aka Ronnie Hobson, delivered his most deadly verdict. ‘In his debut novel Guy Ableman made an entirely unsuccessful job of imitating a woman; in this his second, and we can only hope his final novel, he has made an entirely unsuccessful job of imitating a man.’
    Shortly after publication I ignored poor frozen Quinton’s advice and moved to London. At first, this pleased Vanessa and her mother who were city girls at heart. But gradually they began to wonder if they’d done the right thing. In Cheshire they had the air of louche women who’d been expelled from somewhere else and were only waiting for their reputations to catch up with them and they’d be off. In the city, everyone looked like that. They were still a sensational pair, but they didn’t bring the