2002 - Wake up (13 page)

Glint’s a pain but last week he deigned to explain that it wasn’t his fault, he was obliged to develop an attitude. It was essential for survival on the streets, he said. “You gotta look right,” Glint told us in his gravelly voice. “Or they rag you. I can’t be messing with that.”

Attitude. A vacuous and admirable quality. I imagined it was more than youthfulness, this, that we are inside an era in which virtues and vices have exchanged and mutated. Naivety is a vice. Being a poor dancer another. Failure to decipher on first hearing the garbled lyrics of popular song.

§

While the boys stayed in our house yesterday Lily and I took the baby for a walk, a stroll around the village. We are settling in. We’d been living here for about five minutes when some old biddy knocked on the door and asked whether we’d like to offer the use of our lawn for the summer fete, as the previous occupants had, and would my wife, furthermore, consent to open the fete? Lily spent the next few days sniffing and snooting at the class-ridden traditions of English social life by which villages, this village in particular, were still clearly strangled, and how mad we were to have moved here. It was the background she’d managed to escape and she resented me, the
nouveau riche
who’d seduced her, dragging her back into it. But I could tell that in some way she didn’t want to acknowledge she was tickled pink, and that summer—last year—with eventual good grace my wife, visibly, elegantly pregnant in a specially purchased Donna Karan grey cotton trouser suit, made a short speech and cut a ribbon and declared the church fete open.

§

We’d first visited the village together when we came to one of the concerts they have in the church here. Lily’s the musician. She plays the piano. Me, I like music in films. The Mozart in
Amadeus. Chariots of Fire
. That’s where I appreciate music.

The choirmaster in this village church, it turns out, is an enthusiast who four times a year—on the Saturdays before Palm Sunday, Whit Sunday, All Saints’ Day and Advent Sunday, according to the programme—persuades musicians of international renown to play. For free. The Allegri Quartet it was that first time we went. Since then, such as Nigel Kennedy, Evelyn Glennie. All proceeds to casting a new bell or digging a well in Africa. The medium-sized Norman church gets packed, sold out months in advance, and the atmosphere is really quite odd. The whispering acoustic that churches possess may not be perfect for classical music but it makes for, you know—yes, I’ll say it: a holy ambience. Why not? Let all churches become concert halls, that’s what I say. Non-denominational musical chambers. Jazz joints, heavy-metal dives. Nightclubs, cabarets. Clear the pews and let the organ’s pomp fill the nave! For pensioners’ tea dances! Rock ‘n’ roll hippodromes, world music jamborees. Techno discotheques for our doomed and deafened youth.

Let there be epiphanies we can all own up to. Because, of course, if we’re honest, these four concerts a year in our village church are stymied by a polite, a pious holding back in the manner and the attention of the congregation. That is to say, I mean: the audience. The memory of worship in the place needs to be exorcised once and for all. The religion needs to be cleanly transcended.

Anyway, during the interval on that very first visit we joined a procession to a big house in the village for refreshments, and Lily and I found ourselves whispering to each other, “I’ll take that house.” A Regency mansion here, an Edwardian farmhouse there. “You can have that one.” Even the brick-built bus shelter looked like it was probably a listed building. The council estate where the skivvies lived was tucked neatly out of the way. We spotted a
For Sale
sign posted outside the Old Rectory, and Lily said, “Sweetheart. We could share this one.”

I said, “Be serious. Do you want me to tell you how much they’ll be asking for it?”

But the next day Lily got details from the estate agent and the house was a lot cheaper than I’d told her it would be. I’d snared myself. It was
in need of modernisation
i.e. it was falling apart. It is beautiful, though, isn’t it? People see this place, they think, that guy has made it big time! Ah, I should never have let Lily persuade me. We were already investing all our money in our child. I had to swallow my pride and go beg a bigger mortgage. And don’t talk to me about repairs!

The fact that there’s a primary school, led by an energetic young Head, with pre-school activities like a music group and an infants’ gym, still thriving in the village, convinced us, planning a family as we were. Yes, we talk about education already. At cross-purposes, on the whole. The other day I gave Lily my opinion that by the time our son starts school, teachers will be redundant, replaced by software designers. Kids will learn everything on computers.

“We’ll still go to PTA meetings,” I said, enjoying myself. “It’ll be the Parent Technician Association.”

“That is so typical of you people,” Lily said. “You don’t want to educate children, you want to programme them.”

“No, listen,” I said, but she didn’t.

“Just because you overcame a dismal early education, you think no one else needs one,” she said, knowing that Greg and I, meritocrats both, vowed long ago that we’d send our children into public education, not just primary but secondary level too. Though the truth is that my brother’s children are the result; his boys have set an example I don’t intend mine to follow. It’s a vow I’ll gladly renege upon when the time comes. Ever wonder why evolution is such a slow process? You only have to stand outside Glint and Lee’s school gates at half past three one afternoon: it’s because the ugly reproduce themselves at a terrifying pace. Retarding the species. The beautiful are content to swan around looking lovely when they should be buckling down to it, procreating with purpose.

“You know, darling, you may be right,” I told Lily. “Maybe he should have a classical education. The best schools we can afford. Latin and Greek. Rhetoric, debate. Uniforms and manners and punishment. Rough games.”

I know this is far from what Lily has in mind. She envisions liberal, progressive—if equally expensive—regimes. She throws names at me: Piaget, Steiner, Montessori. I feign the ignoramus.

“I don’t deny that public schools teach boys to think,” she said. “Look at them all, heads cut off from their bodies. They can’t do anything but think. Wake up, man. They’re even worse than that drug-dealing den Jacob’s cousins attend.”

At times like this I give up. Nod. Let her talk her nonsense. What does it matter? I’ve got other things to think about than fruitless disputation with my one and only. She’ll keep on yapping, she may in the coming months, years, become obsessive, send off for prospectuses from away-in-the-manager establishments, even visit one or two. But one day she’ll come round to my way of thinking. I shall prevail. That’s the way it is.

§

When I feel like it I’ll tell Lily that I share her horror of the Comprehensive, that of course I’ve no intention of letting our babe trudge in his cousins’ Adidas footsteps; of catching a school bus festooned with ads for Burger King, Toys R Us, Snickers; of drooping along corridors lined with signs for national brands and local companies, clutching books whose covers recommend Kellogg’s Pop-Tarts and Sky TV personalities.

Lee showed us his homework recently: a classroom business course that teaches students the value of work by demonstrating how McDonald’s restaurants are run.

Lily was aghast. “This is unbelievable,” she said, but that was the least of it.

The children start their day not with a school assembly, and the religious indoctrination of our times, but go directly to their classrooms and watch a news programme, current events for teens, interspersed with commercials. Then they turn on their monitors, which greet them with the words, “This computer was brought to you by Kentucky Fried Chicken. Have a nice day.”

“This is horrific,” Lily gasped.

“Darling,” I said, “how many comprehensive schools do you imagine have a state-of-the-art computer for every single pupil? How could they afford it?”

As he saw the effect it had on this female member of his audience, Lee continued his account; he was enjoying himself.

“The Nike swoosh is painted on the roof,” he said. “So that people in planes can see it. That paid for all our sports kits.”

Soda vending machines in the halls: that’s how it began. Coca-Cola paid for a new gym, an electronic scoreboard on the basketball court. Exclusive vending rights. You can never stamp brand loyalty too young. With the next contract they offered more money to the school if it exceeded consumption of a given quota of Coke products in a year. Machines were installed along each corridor, on every landing. Pupils were allowed, encouraged, to drink Coke in the classroom: one Monday morning they found can holders attached to their desks.

“You don’t have to ask Miss or Sir to be excused,” Lee said. “They gave that up this term. You just leave.”

Lily was indignant. She tried to rouse the boys to action, to assert their right to freedom from such blatant propaganda.

Glint shrugged. “It doesn’t bother me,” he said. “I had all that Coke shit, but hey, I prefer Pepsi.”

“Look,” I told Lily. “Greg sent them there, as he vowed he would, but he saw what the facilities were like, so he joined the PTA; he was soon invited on to the School Board, and the next year he was elected Chair of the Governors.”

“Good for him,” she said.

“Yes, and he threw his energy into corporate sponsorship. He got his friend Terry Leckfield, you’ve met him, that bald guy, the new job of School Marketing Broker: on a percentage deal, no salary, no commitment from the school. And hey presto.”

“I don’t like it,” she said.

“Neither do I,” I said. “The first local partners bought advertising rights on the school railings, and public address announcements at football games. What their money paid for, at a time when other schools all over this country were losing playing fields left, right and centre, was a new soccer pitch with a stand and floodlights.”

She grimaced. “I’m just not sure,” she said.

“Of course you’re not,” I said. “How could you be? But deals are made by people who don’t dither. You know what?”

I stopped talking, so she shrugged irritably at me. “Yes? What?”

“We were those first local corporate partners.
Spudnik
provided those facilities.”

She looked at me. Looked into me. She closed her eyes and looked away. “You people,” she said.

§

The thing I have to remind myself about Lily is that she can argue remorselessly if she’s in the mood, but as long as I concede particular, trivial, points, and not the whole argument, as long as I bide my time, in other words, and don’t try to shout her down or turn my back or change the subject, I’ll be surprised. What Lily wants is to express not a point of view, exactly, but her right to have a point of view. Usually this is enough to more or less satisfy her: once she’s expressed sufficient opinion—often well-informed—Lily will quite suddenly say, “OK! Have it your way! As long as you know what I think.” I am the opposite. I’ve no need of discussion, in fact I’d rather do without explaining myself. I’d rather be left to work out what to do, and do it.

§

I have never imagined that my wife fell head over heels in love with me. Did I say she did? Pure fantasy, if so. No, as I got to know her better, I became convinced that Lily loved someone else, has regarded someone else as her soulmate, someone she can’t have for whatever reason. Which means for her that it’s not possible to love anyone else equally. This is just a hunch, I don’t even have a clear candidate for the position of lost love: it could be one of the lovers she’s mentioned as we’ve shared our pasts, or it could be a secret or even an entirely unrequited affair.

I believe my wife has reconciled herself to this, to a life without extraordinary love. Maybe it’s the memory of the ‘person, of what they had or might have had, that sustains her; or maybe it’s more a simple acceptance of life as it is, to be seen through and made the most of. She met me playing football, there was’an agreeable tension between us. Conversation kicked and sparked. I had what looked to her like a reliable supply of money, we were each eager for children. In fact, I think we both surprised ourselves at the felicity of our meeting, the fit of our coming together—a warm handshake eliding into a deep kiss, a shag, an embracing hug—that amounted to something oddly solid, substantial.

§

The European Commission recently issued a directive allowing companies to apply for patents on human genes, microorganisms, and any plant or animal derived from a microbiological process.

“If these patent laws were available when chemists first identified the elements,” Lily told me, “those chemists, or their patrons, could have patented them.”

“Surely not?”

“Everyone in the world would then have had to pay a royalty for the right to breathe in oxygen.”

I laughed. “Sounds like someone wants to play God.”

Lily looked at me with what appeared to be real affection. “Exactly,” she said.

“But what do you want?” I demanded. “I mean,
you
people. What do you want?”

“Why can’t we accept ourselves as we are?”

“What are we?” I asked her back.

Lily smiled at me. “Beautiful, flawed beings,” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “That’s right.”

“We’re not perfectible.”

“Of course we are,” I said. “Eternally so.”

§

I’m nuts about my wife. Did I mention that, already? Call me uxorious, I just happen to think she’s gorgeous, and I’m not alone. The only one who thinks she isn’t is herself. She believes she has lopsided breasts. She stands in front of the mirror and says towards me, “Look. You see?”

“You have lopsided eyes, darling,” I tell her. Am I going to lie? She thinks she’s put on weight, too, and she has: she used to be scrawny. I get older, the more I like something to get hold of. The more woman I like. The more flesh.

There’s been a bone of contention between Lily and me recently: over the baby. She wants Jacob in bed with us at night. I don’t disagree—it’s a great idea! I know some men feel the child as a literal wedge between them and their spouses but really, such jealousy is incredibly immature, isn’t it? Me, I find the presence of this fat little human being, with his warm skin, not to mention my wife’s spreading figure, has brought an amplitude of sensuality. An increased eroticisation of the marital bed, somehow. Let’s be honest, can any woman suck one’s finger like a baby? No wonder some women come when they breastfeed. Feeling his limbs connecting ours, watching his extraordinary suck on my wife’s nipple, my carnal desire for her intensifies.