2002 - Wake up (12 page)

That was that. We got together, and Lily promptly announced her withdrawal from the beautiful game.

“I thought you were never going to say anything,” she said. “I’d just about given up.”

“I thought you enjoyed it,” I said.

“I was beginning to,” she admitted. “But let’s face it, football’s cold and wet and muddy and dangerous. I mean, wake up, man. It’s a pointless activity.”

§

Lily fell in love with me. Not immediately, no, not at first sight. Hardly. Rather, over a short period of time after the first time we made love. I wish I could explain it but I can’t. It’s not the kind of thing you ask someone, even when they’re your one and only.

“Tell me, Lily, how did it happen? How did your feelings for me develop, exactly?”

You can’t do it. So I don’t know. It was a mystery. A miracle that I understood was taking place with each date we went on, each conversation. This beautiful woman invaded my solitude. She stared into my eyes, and dazzled herself. This amazing stranger was asking me to kidnap her. She was falling in love.

§

Ten years together, five years married. That’s an achievement.

§

I wonder whether John Junior will play football. I hope he grabs the joy from it that I have. Improvising patterns with the movement of one’s own and other hurtling bodies and sliding in the mud. I suspect that the only people who really appreciate this earth are footballers and gardeners. And potato growers, obviously. The alluvial land around the River Severn, grade one, or over in the Fens where you can find thirty feet of topsoil full of nutrients and not a stone to be struck. Or grade-two land in Herefordshire, where with the import of cheap fruit in the seventies and eighties farmers ripped their orchards out. That was when we came in; just as we’d done in Cornwall after the wholesale markets there shrank to nothing, and offered farmers a lifeline.

§

When Lily and I met we fell mutually in unrealistic love; we didn’t know each other at all. She smuggled the smells of the world into my flat in a town in the English Midlands, threw them into the air in the kitchen. Lily already had the ability to conjure up meals for half a dozen friends out of a quick trip to the market. She’d stagger up the steps of my flat like a rucksacked mountaineer in training, lugging her own weight in veg, and haul it into the kitchen, there to reenact a battle scene at the cooker and a naval disaster in the sink. From this mayhem there’d appear upon the dining-room table the most delicious four-, five-course meals, served by a ladyship so serene she gave the impression they must have been prepared below stairs by an army of hirelings. With flowers, candles, napkins improvised from loo paper, with designs felt-tipped fresh upon them. Our guests were spoiled.

The next morning I’d creep early from bed and before leaving for work soak burned pans with crystal soda, scrape cutlery, wipe plates and bowls, dry up, scour the cooker and mop the floor. And while I was washing up I marvelled at this woman of the world and why she’d deigned to share herself with me. Her protean creativity, her generous energy, her competence: enchanting. What she’d done was utterly beyond me. Me and cooking don’t mix. My main problem is I panic.

Everything about Lily delighted me. I reckoned I could spend my whole life watching her move, speak, stand still. Lovemaking would always be this good, this unhurried frenzy. But then you wake up one day and life has done a backward flip: the endearing intimacies you shared have become hideous.

“Another thing,” she said towards the end. “At night when you piss.”

“I try not to wake you,” I interrupted. “I tiptoe to the bathroom. I sit down.”

“You always wake me,” she said. “And when you piss at night, you fart. Always.”

I thought about it. It was true. “You can hear that?”

“How can I not hear it? I mean, is it something about sleep, about lying down, that means gas collects in your rectum?”

I shrugged. It seemed possible she was bluffing, having heard it once one sleepless night.

“It’s disgusting,” she winced. “I wait for it. I can’t help myself. I wait for that little…exclamation.” She shook her head, as if at the sheer unfathomability of the fact that she’d wound up with me.

As for the alchemical meals Lily produced, I began to tire of getting up early the next morning to tidy up. But she hated me to wash up before guests had left, when I did so once or twice she gave me the hardest time, so I’d do it after she’d gone to bed. I’d stand there at the sink dead-eyed with drink and sodden fatigue, thinking of work the next day and cursing the woman for creating Armageddon in our kitchen every time one of her friends dropped by, when who had to clear it up? She threw a meal together and I picked up the pieces after midnight.

Did I say end? That was the end of the beginning. Every couple has to go through that, I suppose. You’ve got to work through it if you’re going to stay together.

§

Lily is an extremely competent woman. Travellers tend to be. I’m always telling her, “Darling, you can cook in eleven languages. This is delicious.”

She does the nicest thing: she cooks us potatoes in ways they’re prepared around the world. It’s a present she gives me. The other Saturday, Melody and her husband, Bill, dropped by; they were there when I got back from tennis. Lily invited them to stay for lunch, I gave Melody a Vermouth, poured Bill a pint of beer. He wears polo-shirts, tucked into his belt: they stretch, ever tighter, over his paunch. I ply the fat oaf with beer any chance I get, just to help him get even fatter, which is really stupid because what I can’t stand is the idea of him spreading himself over my sister.

You’d think Melody might drift through to the kitchen, to chat with Lily, but the fact is they’re wary of each other, my wife and my sibling. They’ve each confided, “John, I don’t think Melody⁄Lily likes me.” Which is absurd. What do they think, these women? That they’re in competition?

Lily was gone a few minutes, then called us through for potato peanut soup. “I discovered this in Ghana,” she revealed. She garnished the soup with spring onion, unsalted peanuts, and thin strips of deep-fried plantain. It was creamy from the pureed potatoes, hot from crushed red chillies, and nutty.

Melody tasted with her eyes closed and said, “There’s ginger, isn’t there? There’s ginger.”

§

Perhaps there was no catastrophe awaiting Melody in adulthood, but one thing has always diminished her: the reflection of her childhood. For no kind of life could fulfil the promise of the golden child, the favoured one.

For Melody, the rare beauty of her age in our community, heroic status was necessary. A Helen, an Atalanta. How this could translate into modern life, I suppose, would have been through fame as a model, a singer, a dancer.

I suspect it’s almost impossible for us to believe that beautiful people cannot see themselves. Many women may, it’s true, build up through reflections in mirrors and other people’s behaviour a perpetual self-image. But Melody’s simplicity militated against her acquiring this extra sense. When in adolescence she did realise how people looked at her, with wonder and hunger and envy in their eyes, it provoked less a willingness to see herself as others saw her than a wary retreat from any centre of attention.

So that it’s impossible to say whether the way Melody’s life developed was as disappointing to her as it was to those who know her. Hers has been an ordinary life. In her early twenties she married a colleague in the Town Planning department, where she worked as a secretary. Bill Sutcliffe. A man who has risen tenaciously through the cut-throat world of council bureaucracy to become Assistant Chief Inspector of Works. A responsible citizen, a good father to their three children, a dutiful husband. Who, far from being grateful every day for his good fortune, gives the impression that he’s as oblivious to Melody’s beauty as she is herself. He takes my sister for granted, and she does not object.

“P
eople call it Sudden Adult Death Syndrome,” the doctor told me.

“This is precisely what I’m worried about,” I said.

“Actually, it’s not a syndrome at all. Merely a phrase with which to categorise a whole bunch of unexplained deaths.”

“Right. Which is exactly what worries me.”

“One moment someone’s fit and well, the next they’re dead. Two hundred people a year, that’s what we’re talking about. In a population of sixty-five million? Please. You may as well fret about spontaneous combustion.” The doctor chuckled. “Or being hit by a falling block of ice. If you want something to fear, why not make it more dramatic, at least?”

“All right. You’ve made your point,” I nodded. “Very humorous. But what’s the likeliest cause, do you think?”

With a frown and a sigh, the doctor gave a shrug that said, as politely as he could in his position, Who cares? “Some kind of heart-rhythm disturbance. Probably.”

“You see?” I said. “It does happen.”

“We all of us have moments of arrhythmia. The heart rights itself immediately. It’s harmless, believe me. And other possible causes have been put forward. Epilepsy, if I remember right. Undetected brain defects. No pattern has been identified, you see. If you don’t mind me saying so, paranoid hypochondria doesn’t suit you. It doesn’t fit your health consumer profile.”

“I agree,” I said. “I was just thinking, that’s all.”

“Now, tell me about this ache,” the doctor said.

“The ache in my bollocks.”

“Oh. You didn’t mention where it was.”

“I didn’t? It’s an occasional mild throb.”

“Where?”

“If I try to locate it exactly, if that’s what you’d like me to do, I’d say that if I have two balls, one floating more or less above the other in my scrotal sac, the ache emanates from one of them. The lower one.”

“A dull ache, you say?”

“A mild throb, yes. Unpleasant, but only, I think, because of where it is. We’re nowhere more vulnerable, Doctor, than there, wouldn’t you say? What do footballers protect? The eyes? The brain? No.”

He examined me. His analytical, lifeless medic’s fingers felt my scrotum, fingers that prejudged nothing. Fingers somehow exasperatingly non-committal. Fingers that refused to discover and squeeze an unfamiliar shape with trembling excitement, as if to say, “Got it! Found it! Here it is!” And, by implication, “We can cure it!”

No. Not at all. He just held my testes in his dull hand as if weighing them; thoughtful, disengaged.

A
man alone drives his car, around the ring road. As each sign and roundabout becomes familiar, recognition scores a groove. However satisfying this is, though, it can’t be right. Because a vehicle is made for progress. Transportation from here to there, this place to that. The point of a car is its forward movement; it wasn’t designed for prevarication. Soon, then, I shall turn off, divert myself, to work.

§

The other day we had some of Lily’s friends round. Before dinner, of a dozen vegetable curry dishes, Lily had made a snack of small rotis: potatoes mashed with chillies, cumin, turmeric, fresh coriander, rolled in flour and fried. Served with a coconut and mint chutney. I brought a bottle of vodka from the freezer and poured some clean cold shots.

“A man could live on your starters, Lily,” one of our guests said.

“Hey, that’s my line,” I told him. This chap, Jerry, was a painter. Later, during the meal, they were talking about art, and Jerry set off on a long riff about the consequences for painting of mechanical reproduction i.e. of photography. Its realism had not only mocked and ruined figurative painting, as we all knew, but the mechanical speed of which it was a part, hurrying people ever faster through the twentieth century, had made it finally unbearable for western citizens to sit still, posing for a painting, for the hours necessary to do a decent job.

“People are twitchy,” he said. “Not just in their minds, either; in their very muscles.”

“You’re right,” Lily said. “A hundred years ago everyone had the patience to pose for a painting.”

So what was a modern figurative painter to do? Jerry asked us. Why, use photographs, of course. “Most women can be persuaded to strip and parade themselves for half an hour: long enough to shoot a roll or two of film. Photography they understand,” he said, “they accept the glamorous voyeurism of the photographer half-hidden behind his camera. But the painter’s frank, open gaze? No, sir, by that they feel threatened, offended, abused.”

And so the poor painter with his palette of colours built up over millennia is left alone in his studio with a clutch of sweaty photographs, pathetic chemical reproductions from which to infer the subtle musculature, the texture of flesh. The infinitely variable pallor of skin. The shifting concavities and convexities of a human body.

Jerry shook his handsome head. “Technology’s ultimate, sardonic triumph over art,” he moaned.

I didn’t say anything. Poor sap. People who bemoan the speed and direction of the traffic get caught up in it eventually, and choke on other people’s fumes. Or else they sit it out at the side of the road, going nowhere. The only place to be is out front, isn’t it?

§

The nephews dawdled over yesterday. I was outside, conversing with the men installing our security system, when they came loping down the drive. Gangling, awkward strangers. Glint, I swear, walks with a scowl. Like those rappers he admires on MTV. Each generation comes up with new ways of walking.

Teenagers are like babies, with the same sudden speed of brain growth. It’s why they look grotesque to those who love them: their physiognomies are literally being forced into new shapes.

It was lovely outside, so Glint drew the curtains and the boys holed themselves up in a gloomy corner of our sitting room, watching TV and playing the mini-discs they bring with them. Lee, when he is allowed by his brother in their ruthless sibling jungle to put on his discs, still likes music with traces of melody in it. Some of this hip-hop stuff is listenable, inventive even, to my duff old ears. But there’s one kind of techno Glint plays, gabber he calls it, that, when one is unwittingly besieged by it, is the aural equivalent of being hit. It’s the opposite of background music, it’s foreground music, it’s a wall in front of you. The listener is removed behind it, steps into the background himself. It makes Lily march into the room and yell, “Please turn that noise off!” And he does. It gives her a sore head. It gives everyone a headache, including Glint, though smoking and drinking and sniffing glue give a person a headache and he doubtless does those, too. Maybe that’s what being a teenager is all about: learning to cope with different ways of giving yourself a sore head.