2002 - Wake up (11 page)

We had tests. We gave samples of everything we could, and it turned out they reckoned it was me. I had weak motile velocity. Low sperm count. Insipid fertility. They tried various treatments. One time they incubated some of my sperm inside a dead mouse until it could be used in IVF treatment. A vain palaver that was. It is odd, though: I’m quite sure if Lily knew what we’d go through and how far we’d go, she’d never have got us started.

§

She cooks me potatoes, Lily, she knows I appreciate it. There’s an Italian souffle she makes of potato mashed with butter, milk, eggs and parmesan, with another whole bunch of mozzarella and fontina put in the middle. She bakes it in the oven until it’s got a crispy brown crust, and serves it with a rocket salad and this pesto made from grinding parsley, toasted almonds and olive oil, with parmesan stirred in. Last time she doled it out the nephews were here. I said, “Don’t waste this on them, Lily. Give these tykes a burger or something.” But they’re not as stupid as they look. They enjoyed it too.

I once told Lily how the poorest Irish used to keep a thumbnail long, for peeling their boiled potatoes as they ate them. Now, if Lily spots a guitar player, with fingernails on one hand kept long, she’ll nudge me and whisper, “Must be an Irish musician.”

§

In the nineteenth century people dug their spuds up from their allotments in October and stored them by clamping: piling them on a raised piece of ground and covering them with straw and soil, with vertical stalks of straw for ventilation.

I told Lily about that and she tried clamping some potatoes in her vegetable garden: she reckoned it didn’t store them too well. She keeps Richard and his crew out of her organic plot, where she grows beetroot, carrots, onions, leeks, cabbage, artichokes, and herbs and so on. Me, I keep out of it, too. I see her bent over the soil.

“It’ll be bad for your long back, darling,” I tell her. Lily doesn’t appreciate how odd I find the whole business: I just can’t shed the idea that fruit and veg should come into the kitchen straight from a warehouse in the yard.

Lily wouldn’t allow Richard to use
Round-up
around the trees he planted beyond the orchard; the poor chap had to hack at the tough grass there and put mulch mats down. I tell her she reminds me of the Victorian horticulturalists. There was one fellow called James Clark, who worked from his home and his greenhouses in Christchurch, Hampshire. Clark had a commercial relationship with the Sutton seed family, who bought and marketed his many successful varieties of potato—one of which, Epicure, is still grown today, amazing when the average life of a variety then was still less than twenty years. Another was his Magnum Bonum of 1876, a white, kidney-shaped late maincrop, with a floury texture and blandly sweet flavour, that became this country’s biggest-selling potato and remained so for the rest of the nineteenth century. It grew vigorously, withstood blight and yielded well year after year, until towards the end of the century it became susceptible to virus infection and seed stock degeneration, and finally dwindled.

§

We were talking last week. “Salmonella. BSE,” Lily was saying, shaking her head. “Foot and mouth. Two a penny imports.”

“The British livestock industry’s on its knees,” I said. “If our arable farmers are hobbled in the race for new high-yielding crops, you can wave goodbye to agriculture in this country.”

“So accelerate organic conversion,” she said.

“The highest-yielding organic potato in the latest national trials was one
Spudnik
developed with our Scottish boffs,” I protested. “But we’re talking about what is all and ever will be a small niche in the market.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because most people want cheap food. They don’t give a damn what’s in it or where it comes from. You told me yourself.”

“What did I tell you?”

“That people on this planet are the dregs who refuse to become enlightened. The signs are all around saying,
this is all you have to do
, but they resolutely ignore them.”

“What? That is so totally different, John.”

“Anyway, organic farming can’t feed everyone, that’s why.”

“Then there are too many people,” my wife said.

How can you argue with that? I mean, what can you say? All you can say is, yes, you’re right, darling. Of course there are too many people on this little island. On this little planet. There were three billion in 1960. Six billion now. Before our son’s fifty years old he’ll be surrounded by twelve billion unique individuals.

“Oh, wake up, man,” Lily said, as she does whenever she considers me obtuse. Usually embellished: “Wake up, why don’t you?” It’s a line of hers that ends up just where it came from, an ambiguous spot midway between a partner’s private joke and spousal putdown.

§

What I’ve come to realise is that Lily’s vehemence is insubstantial. It’s all display. She buzzes around you but actually there’s no sting. Her parents both died within a year of our marrying. Pure coincidence. They, especially her father, whom Lily adored, had that languid arrogance of the upper classes. What they had hardly any left of was the money. It’s the money that allows these people to get away with their charm. When I was introduced to them her father poured drinks and we stood, more side by side than face to face, G and Ts in hand. He bore an eye-patch.

Papa chinked the ice in his glass and said to me, “Food, isn’t it?”

“Isn’t what, sir?” I said.

“The, er, your, er…Family business, eh?”

“Potatoes, sir,” I said. “Spuds. We grow them, we buy them, we sell them.”

With each verb he winced, then smiled weakly.

By the time the inheritance reached Lily there wasn’t any; the poor girl was penniless. But the assumption that the menial needs of life would be taken care of had been bred into her. So that she starts off telling me how things are with this vehement self-belief, until it’s as if some trigger in her brain is pulled, the reminder that actually she has no money, she has no power. The trigger I only have to wait for. For then, almost without being aware of it, Lily simply retreats. Shuts up. Steps aside.

§

Our baby son is fat and healthy and it’s hard to resist smooching him. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t resist; I indulge myself. Me and my boy canoodle. “I’m putty in John Junior’s hands,” I told my wife the other morning. “Cos he’s a putti in my hands.” A weak pun, but with a cultural allusion, at least, that I assumed Lily might appreciate. “Jacob,” she said. “And it’s plural.”

“What?”

She turned away, mumbling, “Nothing.”

“No, what?” I said. “Come on. What’s plural?”

I guessed she had corrected me—and was now retreating from so doing. She couldn’t help herself, the over-educated bitch. In that case, I couldn’t help myself either.

“I said, what’s plural?”

“It’s not important.”

“Tell me.”

“Darling, just that ‘putti’ is plural. The singular is ‘putto’, actually. That’s all.”

§

First thing in the morning I lie with my son beside me and make notes, calculations, plans. My brain functions well before dawn, with a first cup of tea. I’ll be on the bed in the spare room having brought John Junior there after his last feed, at 5 a.m., so that his mum can get some undisturbed sleep. Undisturbed by my snoring, his snuffling and squeaking, her restless men.

John Junior moves in his sleep: the first substantial ambulation of my son’s life. He does a sly shuffle off his sheepskin, a turn over on the mattress, until you realise that he’s reached you. I mean, you set him down a foot or two away and suddenly he’s up against you. And why riot? He’s friendly. He likes people. He appreciates the reassurance of a human being’s pulse, the touch of our skin, our body heat.

§

How did I say I met my wife? Hitch-hiking? Surely not. I don’t pick up scroungers, I’ve never been that desperate for company. No, we met playing football, Lily and I.

I might have said before that I used to play, half a lifetime ago, for a team in a local league. My only hobby. A mediocre full-back, that was me. A clean and decent tackier, willing to take the ball off the keeper and play it out from the back. Defence as the first line of attack, and all that. I loved the game, the combination of physical and mental, destructive and creative in the same unfolding moment. I appreciated the comradeship, too. I rarely went boozing with the lads afterwards, I don’t mean that beery camaraderie. I was usually straight back to work. But the intense fellowship on the pitch.

Being a father’s like being a footballer again: always carrying some niggling injury. Lifting and bearing a small baby in awkward postures. Then, the twanged muscles were in your legs—now they’re in your back or shoulders. Anyway, I quit in my early thirties. Which is to say the game quit me, it spat me out. When you turn all of a sudden slow and cumbersome, this activity you loved becomes embarrassing. You cannot justify it. Kids go galloping past you. You foul them out of spite. The manager selects you on sentiment. The very ball changes its nature; this once-friendly sphere becomes volatile, difficult to anticipate; before you know it, it’s beyond you. You are in the process of being discarded. So you retire.

That’s the end of real football, but it needn’t be the end of everything. You can join a veterans’ team, you can coach kids, you can play five-a-side in the Council Sports Hall with florid-faced overweight mates on a Wednesday night. Or you can join in a kind of community kick-around that took place on a Sunday morning on the local rec, a couple of hundred yards from where I used to live, off Beardsley Lane. Who started it I don’t know, and there didn’t seem to be an organiser. But around ten, ten-fifteen on a Sunday morning, a motley assortment of individuals would congregate on that marshy green patch by the canal, just past the playpark. There were men and women and kids. I seem to remember now that it was my nephew took me, yes, I was looking after little Glint for the weekend and I yanked a carrier bag containing mouldy boots and shinpads out of the cupboard under the stairs and went along with him and one of his little buddies.

There were twenty-odd people altogether, of the widest array of age and ability imaginable, and I played indulgently. I wanted anyone who knew about football to see that here was a once-fit and talented player nobly fulfilling familial obligations. No sliding tackles, no swerves around children, no easy headers for me. I let mothers dribble past me, I passed the ball to the smallest child on my team. I took a couple of gentle pots at the opposition goal, shots so devilishly flighted that they invited spectacular saves from a pint-sized keeper, diving to push the ball around the pile of clobber standing in for goalposts.

I’ll admit the truth right now: I went back to that rec kick-around almost every Sunday for the next couple of years. Why? Because I haven’t ever enjoyed football more than I did there. I’m not saying it was better than the real thing, no, but it was just as good, in its peculiar way. And it was football. It was as if what I loved about the game, putting thought into action in this physical activity, was still at the heart of the experience, but it was now of an intriguingly different nature. Instead of creating with and struggling against more or less equal athletes, one had an additional set of calculations brought into the equations being made in one’s head, through the vastly differing ability of each participant. Instead of going for a loose ball at the same time as an opponent and thinking only, “I’m going to get there first,” you had to weigh up the sex, size, speed of the approaching figure, as well as assess what kind of game they were having, what a boost to his or her confidence it might be for a fat, slow eight-year-old child to nick the ball off me.

My future wife turned up, she must have come with someone. I was thirty-five, Lily was ten years younger. A lean blonde in shiny leggings. She got picked for the other team from me, immediately placed herself in the centre-forward position, and proceeded to take no interest or part in the game until the ball came rolling towards our goal, whereupon Miss Twinkletoes came to life, revealing quick feet and thought, and tried to boot it in. She was nimble, with a woman’s low centre of gravity, able to change position, to readjust the alignment of her body in response to bobbles and deflections. In short, she scored goals. She enjoyed herself, and kept coming back, improving each week. As for me, I continued to manoeuvre myself on to the opposing team, and I man-marked her, ever tighter. I also spoke to Lily on and off through the game.

“You’re too slow. You’ve put on weight since last week:”

“Leave me alone,” she said, but I stalked her around the pitch. I marked her so tight no one could see I was holding her cycling shirt, or whispering in a crowded area, “I know what you’re going to do. You’re too predictable.”

“Piss off,” she said, trying to elbow me away, but it only took Lily a couple of weeks to get a dialogue going. I let her outpace me, kicking the ball and rushing after it from the halfway line towards a small boy taking his turn in goal, with me flailing behind, easing off the pedal so as not to catch her, until from three yards she thumped the ball home.

“Who’s slow now?” Lily crowed in my face as she jogged back past me.

Or I made to take the ball off her with legs bowed so that she couldn’t help nutmegging me, shrieking, “See you around, fatface.”

It wasn’t always easy. Other times I nicked the ball off Lily’s foot as she was about to score an open goal. As our combat developed, I shoulder-charged her adroitly, knocking her off balance and over; not enough to hurt her, I don’t mean, just enough to bring her blood up. To let her know I was there. Hey, she could dish it out herself:

I’d run off with the ball, chuckling, and she’d chase me. Kick my ankles as hard as she could. But yes, I bundled Lily into puddles, mistimed tackles so ineptly that I took her by mistake instead of the ball and we slalomed across sloshy grass. We performed, it seemed to me, a muddy and delicate tango of courtship one late, wet English spring. When the ball was out of play we needled each other, until I felt bold enough to ask her for a drink afterwards.