2002 - Wake up

H
ow am I going to tell Greg? I’ll tell him when I get to work. I’m driving, around the ring road. I don’t
have
to go to work, today or any other damned day; we own the company. What’s the point of owning your own business if not so a man can stay at home when he doesn’t feel like going to work?

Someone died.

I love going to work. Owning the company’s a veto. I’ve never invoked it. And neither, for that matter, has Greg.

But isn’t a man allowed once in a while to do things a little differently?

It’s not that I want to stay at home. It’s not that. No, I think I’d rather just keep driving around the ring road. Ease back, relax. Let the present drift.

§

I remember we were driving, Lily and I. A year ago, just the two of us. In a hire car, night was approaching, we’d booked a room in a remote hotel for a long weekend and were headed there.

A man leaves the obligation, the ambition, of existence behind even for a weekend and the weight falls away. A filling station passed us by, but there was plenty of fuel in the tank. We’d nattered on the plane, Heathrow-Rome, and now were silent. Lily put her hand on my thigh. I drove.

The landscape widened: no more villages, sporadic dwellings. We began to run low on petrol, the roads became quieter, and at a certain point I realised that the garage we’d passed was quite probably the last one. The fuel-gauge needle drooped through the final quarter of the tank.

Darkness gathered. I was lying just now, by the way. It was Birmingham-Glasgow. It was Scotland. There’s nothing wrong with Scotland. I’m no cheapskate. It wasn’t some cheap weekend deal. Actually, it was, now I think about it; Lily spotted it in a Sunday travel section.

Dusk fell. Entering forestry land, the needle dipped into the reserve. I estimated that we were some forty miles short of our isolated hotel, where they’d either have their own supply of petrol or be able to obtain some. A red light came on, indicating, I assumed, some twenty-five miles’ worth of gas. Trees shouldered the road in the dark. Lights from remote homes dwindled to none.

Fraught up in my anxiety and annoyance, Lily’s voice startled me. “We should have filled up at that last petrol station,” she said.

I ignored her. Anger ran silent as rain through my veins. What did I do? I put my foot down, didn’t I? I drove faster. I knew how stupid it was, that I should have eased off the accelerator, cruised at forty, the better to conserve whatever meagre fuel remained in the tank. Instead I raced towards our destination, thus to reach it before the fuel ran out. I couldn’t help myself.

“You do this, John,” Lily said. “This is one of your quirks, isn’t it? Seeing how empty you can let the tank get before filling up. Seeing how much petrol you can fit in in one go.”

I was concentrating on the road ahead, but even when you can’t see them, you can tell when someone’s shaking their head.

Lily was shaking hers. “Even in a hire car. If you can put off stopping to fill up until you’ve got the needle below empty, you score a small victory. Over whom? How, exactly? Why? Sweetheart,” she said, “it’s an obsessive compulsive disorder. You should get it seen to.”

She was right. I
do
do that, and I’d just done it again, and I do other mental things too. Like, I get snagged on certain numbers. On threes of particular objects. Driving, I go through phases of counting off what I see in threes. One, two, three bungalows. For a few minutes at a time. One, two, three women drivers. One, two, three telegraph poles. Everybody does this kind of thing, though, don’t they?

Lily said, “And then something like this happens. I mean, wake up, sweetheart. I know this is going to be a walking weekend, but I hadn’t planned on starting tonight.”

But the thing is not the petrol, no, it’s not the failure to fill up with petrol. It’s putting my foot down on the accelerator. Lily hadn’t noticed that I was doing this, or perhaps she had but didn’t twig what an obtuse response to the predicament it was. There we were, driving into pitch-black wilderness, running on empty through the looming pines, and I was using up gas as fast as I could.

This behaviour was untypical, by the way. I ought to make that clear. Unlike me. Like my brother, yes, sure; the kind of kneejerk you expect from Greg. But I’m not like that. I’m cool and rational. That’s me, anyone would agree.

Yet there we were, hurtling towards an infuriating crisis.

And that is what they’re doing, isn’t it? It’s what human beings have been doing ever since they came out of the forest, they’re just doing it faster than ever. Speeding. We’ve scampered across the surface of this planet, and gone tripping into space. Now we’re exploring the infinity within. What are we doing? Are we out of control? I wish I knew. Where are we going? No one knows. All I know is, someone’s got to get there first.

What are we doing? I suppose we’re growing. We’re growing into ourselves. Am I right? Maybe I’m wrong. Oh, people don’t understand.

§

I’ll turn off the ring road next time round. For the moment I’m easing along at fifty-five miles per hour. Hey, what’s this guy doing up my behind? Lorries, they come looming up on top of you and leave it till the last second. Then swing out on some invisible pivot. Go on. Go past, friend.

I’m cruising. Lorry driver, what a job. Why would anyone do that? Why? Because he’s got responsibilities, that’s why. He’s got a family to support. And that woman in the Metro, there: is she a mother? People have kids.

§

I’ve got one. People thought I couldn’t, didn’t they? Well, I have now. How about that? How strange and beautiful a thing.

Gangrene

Irregular, dark, sunken areas on tubers.

Skin initially stretched tight, becoming wrinkled.

Internally large cavities; distinct boundary between damaged and healthy tissue.

Bacterial wet rots can follow.

W
e’re stop-starting around the ring road. I’m normally out of the village by seven-fifteen and beat the rush hour. How odd it must be to do this every day, to play these shadow dodgems. To lurch and brake and stall, create motional syncopations. An improvising, automotive orchestra.

But what am I doing? I really ought to get to work. I need to talk with Greg. Tell him the news. Tell him everything. And I will. I’m not scared of my brother. What am I, some quaking youth? Hardly. An anxious old man? Hold on. No, it’s just rather fun, jerking to and fro in the ring-road rush hour.

Two people have died, out of twenty-four who took part in the trial. I don’t see how it’s possible to prove they died because they took part. We accept that smoking can cause lung cancer. My father smoked forty a day: Dad died of cancer, but it’s possible he would have even if he’d never smoked a single cig. Wasn’t it his stomach, too? So they can’t be sure. No, I think Simon’s overreacting.

§

I’m forty-five years old. As those excitable optimists we fund at AlphaGen assured me on my last birthday, I’m in the middle of my life. Indeed, they ventured, such was the accelerating pace of certain colleagues’ research out digging in the gene fields, there’s real hope that I may remain in this hypothetical median for years to come. Whatever, and allowing for their geeky humour, I am surely in my prime.

I said this same thing to Lily. “His prime,” my gentle wife hiccuped. “In the life of your libido?” she demanded. “Oh, of your professional life, you mean?” Then, turning to an imaginary figure who took up residence in our marriage a year or two ago and seems to lurk in a corner of our bedroom, Lily said, “We’re dreaming of another million, and we’re in our prime already.” She turned back to me. “Sweetheart,” she said. “Wake up, why don’t you?”

§

Nineteen weeks ago a child was born to us. In the morning Lily sleeps in alone while in the spare room Jacob dozes beside me. Then he is peaceful, but much of his life he spends besieged, by storms that brew up within him. Like last night’s torrid bout of teething: he woke and cried, but with his eyes tight shut, neither fully awake nor asleep. Tears escaping from his scrunched-up eyes. Wailing. I have to jolt him out of this state, and the best way seems to be to whisk him to the bathroom, there to hold him in front of that mirror with lights around it. The light opens his eyes, and he is surprised by the sight of himself, and then of me, holding him. And he may forget the pain his teeth are causing him, at least for long enough for camomilla, or in a dire case baby paracetamol, to take effect.

Our son’s tempestuous, untamed body. After feeding, he possets a runny goo over his—and his mother’s—clothes. Then he hiccups. He pees, and poos. Sometimes he jumps with an electrical start, tossed on the flux, the nervous whirlpool, that is his body.

§

Greg and I were a partnership from the beginning, from the day I joined him on two legs. A person might not have thought so back then. As a baby, Dad maintained, Greg used to beat up our mother. Pulled her hair, poked her in the eye. Even as a tiny sprog, he headbutted her, squeezed her sore nipples, kicked her in the stomach. Mum was never free of bruises. Yet he couldn’t bear to be apart, to be separated from her, for a second; Greg clung to his mother like an angry chimp. She couldn’t put him down even to perform her ablutions: had to undress him and herself together and share every bath she took; had to use the toilet with him on her lap. Imagine that.

And neither would nor could Greg sleep unless attached to her, preferably spreadeagled across her chest, while Mum lay back at a forty-five degree angle. Greg spread his arms wide beneath her breasts, red cheek pressed to her breastbone, his tummy resting on hers, his short, stout legs tapering down to twitching feet. Ankles tensing and untensing. His toes plied her pubic hair, dug around her muff.

Is there one word to describe my brother as a baby? Frantic. The extraordinary thing is that he managed to project the aura of a victim, of someone wronged. Greg lay open-mouthed across our mother’s generous body as if crucified.

“You been beating up Mum again?” Dad would say when he spotted another bruise. My brother gazed back at Dad over Mum’s shoulder with placid disdain.

The first recognisable emotion Greg expressed was that of jealousy. Of our father; and then of me when I appeared. He clung on to Mum all the more, forced her to wean this unwanted rival in weeks. When our sister was born, a further two years on, my brother’s sense of grievance intensified. People might agree it was my turn for a streak of sibling spleen, but no: Greg grabbed all the rage that was going. He was furious. For months his tantrums were storms you just toddled out of the way of. I remember them well.

The curious fact is, though, that I felt no envy of Greg’s place so tenaciously held. Really. I accepted my older brother as he was.

Greg was infuriated by Melody’s arrival, but eventually he came to his senses and joined the rest of us in our disbelieving, protective attitude towards her.

“My one-shot wonder,” our father used to call Melody. I had no idea what he meant back then. “Our one-shot wonder girl.” He’d look at Greg and say, “I still don’t know how I prised you and your mum apart for long enough for one one-shot wonder.”

§

We grew up, my brother and I, and our undeserving sister too, in the stink of rotting fruit and vegetables. And I’ll never forget this: that once they begin to rot, fruit and veg may smell very different. One sickeningly sweet, the other putrid. But you can’t tell, because when they rot together the whole mess smells the same. Mildewed oranges, limp lettuce, soggy plums, they aspire towards the same putrefaction. Lily says that with minimal intervention our father could have had a crumbly, odourless, compost, but she can’t imagine what it was like. Decomposing tomatoes, rank cabbage, all around you all the time.

Did we have to endure this? Yes. Why? Because our father was chaotic and overworked, gone from the house before dawn, returning at odd moments through the day, lurching into the yard with a beep of the van’s horn that ordered anyone who was around to run out and help load up. But mainly because it was his policy to keep the produce a day too long. It’s a critical question when dealing with perishable goods: do you throw stuff away as soon as it’s lost its bloom, chuck your capital on the dung heap, in the hope of attracting more customers drawn to the pristine quality of what you sell? Our father couldn’t bring himself to do that, poor bastard. He took the other option: to drop prices. Week-old carrots only so much, soft pears half-price. It was a perfectly valid approach: he had mean customers who came to his stall expressly to buy the cheapest veg on the market; one elderly hunchback I remember, and the stale stink of his tobacco-smoked coat, who relied on our father to cater for his taste in overripe bananas.