2002 - Wake up (21 page)

My wife came strumping over. “Did you just do what I think you did?” she demanded, as she grabbed him crying from me. “Are you completely insane?”

Of all the things I look forward to sharing with my son as he grows up—reading, football, science—it strikes me that comedy is top of the list. The old silents of course, then Laurel and Hardy, The Marx Brothers. I’ll stock up on DVDs. Videos of
Fawlty Towers
and
The Young Ones
.

John J. will stare at them stony-faced, I suppose, wondering what it is that’s even meant to be funny, and feeling somewhat sorry for the old folks. As I did for my father chortling at the frantic antics of Alf Garnett,
Steptoe and Son
. Humour tends to age quicker than anything, doesn’t it?

§

Not as quickly as bad art, which ages in the act of creation, is born stale. Like many wives of successful men, there is in Lily, even as she and we and our budding family reap the material benefits of me and my brother’s struggles in the marketplace, a seething frustration and envy. I do my best to soothe it. I tell her she can have or do anything she wants. She doesn’t have to bring the baby up full-time—though she can do. Whatever she wants. Nannies, au pairs; child-minders, nurseries. We could afford it, I swear. There is a part of Lily that’s taken on board the modern injunction that one’s first duty is to oneself. But what is this self, exactly? Following the injunction has necessitated the creation, within people’s minds, of a new duality. It’s as if for Lily there is the one in charge, who makes decisions, lives a life, in the body; one who makes sacrifices for others, sure. She does have personality and will, to some extent, but in reality she is a drone whose only purpose is to protect a more important self, her invisible, sacred self that exists in a more refined and fragile dimension deep within the blunt habitual one.

I can see the future. All over this country there are women whose husbands earn the dough for the family, whose children are growing up and out and away, and who instead of using the expanding time at their disposal for a useful, remunerative contribution to society, find they have the leisure for art. Again, or for the first time; at last.

All over this country, middle-aged women poets, potters, painters (and their middle-aged male partner-patrons). Photographers, sculptors, batik silk-screening designers. What will Lily do when it’s her turn? How about
retablos
? Photos, bad snapshots, glued on to driftwood, and painted around and over. That might suit her, it’s an example.

Lily’s friend, Mira, is a poet. What Mira does is she focuses on some existing area of writing, like gardeners’ seed catalogues or travel brochures, collects a load together (‘research’, according to Lily) and fillets the advertising blurbs for notable arrangements of words. These she sets out on a page in the form more or less of poems. Which she puts her name to.

Mira commits a lot of time and energy to this enterprise, but she couldn’t get these poems published. Well, she had one or two appear in magazines, but no publisher wanted to bring out a book of them. So what Mira did was she started framing her poems and hanging them on walls.

In response to my bemusement Lily explained, simply, “It’s conceptual poetry.”

Mira’s success was immediate. A couple of years ago our town’s one hip art gallery displayed an exhibition of her work. A thin catalogue was printed, hey presto, Mira had her first book published.

“I still don’t get it,” I admitted to my wife. To be honest, I couldn’t even work out whether the poems said, or were even meant to say, anything about seeds or travel or what have you. “I mean, she hasn’t written a single original word, has she?”

Lily shrugged. “Wake up, sweetheart,” she advised me. “We’re in the third millennium. Is there anything original left, do you imagine?”

No, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. Not at all. It’s not as if artists are superior beings. The opposite, actually: the average painter or novelist has a higher insulin percentage than most people. He or she suffers an increase in random connections between different brain areas. Caused by a gene mutation. Left to itself, evolution will probably select artists out.

No, I think it’s wonderful. What better way for people to spend their time? If the husband’s strivings in the world of Mammon have earned this leisure, why not use it? Let us each do what we do, and do it on each other’s behalf, that’s what I say. That’s my philosophy. Let the baker bake bread on my behalf. Let the estate agent buy and sell houses so that I don’t have to, let a Filipino factory worker solder micro-boards so the rest of us need never think about how our computer works, it just works. Let me and my brother sell spuds for everyone and let the artist explore existence for us all. So I think it’s wonderful: let the ladies paint.

Except for one thing. A single objection.
Why impose their work on other people?
That’s all. Why do they spend yet more of their husbands’ earnings on frames, glass, publicity leaflets, the booking of exhibition space? Why do they issue invitations to their friends rather than their enemies, as well as gullible members of the local media, to a Private View? At which some of the sweeter or wealthier of these friends will pay an exorbitant price for some hideous painting that it would be a kindness to take to the local tip on the way home and put out of its misery. But not only can the friends not do that, they will, having committed this initial error, continue to pay for it, for they’ll have to hang the painting at home, won’t they? And not in the attic or the bathroom, no, but in pride of place on their living-room wall, for ever. For as long as their friendship lasts.

Why do they do it? Exhibitionism, I guess, a kind of striptease by women without confidence in their bodies, which in my opinion may well be luscious in a child-born way, far more agreeable than their half-baked pieces of pottery or ludicrous drawings.

Men on the whole are less wanton, less shameless. More circumspect, aren’t they?

§

But my wife is a striking woman. Fine bones. Strong bones. Lily’s going to look good right through her middle age. Wears her blonde hair cut short. She’s a lesbian, actually: she doesn’t really like men. If we are with another couple or two, for example, at dinner, she invariably addresses and pays attention to the women present. She doesn’t on the whole take men that seriously, I don’t think. She’s at ease in the company of women. When Lily realises that a man is being mildly flirtatious with her you can see her radar go on the blink for a second, she’s all at sea, then she’ll either make the effort to awkwardly respond or more likely move, turn away.

Lily identifies with other women, and identifies herself as a woman rather than as a human being who happens to be female. She doesn’t feel sexually attracted to women, and I suspect this has been an unwitting disappointment to her. She likes sex, and she rarely turns me away, and I sense a resentment of her own attraction to me, as a man; to men as a sub-species.

§

I like to watch my son attempting to come to terms with his reflection. In the bathroom, whenever I change him, I hold John Junior up in front of the mirror, and introduce him to himself. Sitting at the computer with him on my lap: before switching on, I talk to his reflection in the grey screen. Show him his watery image on the surface of the pond when we take a stroll in the garden. Bring to his attention, his awareness, the ghostly reflection of himself in windows.

The bathroom is actually our godsend, our fall-back position. It seems all parents have one. The place or particular activity in which a grizzling infant may be pacified. A drive around the block to send a sleepless baby off. Or a certain hold, soothing the babe in enveloping arms. For us, it’s the bathroom: our boy is happy there. He doesn’t mind having his nappy changed anyway, but it’s the mirror, surrounded by my wife’s make-up bulbs, that entrances him. He is fascinated by his reflection, by the narcissistic boy who stares back at him.

Three in the morning, our son’s cheeks are red, his ears ache and his gums hurt from teething; the boy is lost in pain, whining like a grinding machine, and his poor mother who usually soothes him is exhausted. Then I scoop him up and say, “Hey, mate, let’s go see the wee chap who lives in that mirror in our bathroom.”

One glance at that little guy and our son’s sobs abate. With clutching breaths he pulls himself together, staring at the baby staring back at him. I move him towards the glass. He reaches out a hand: the other kid reaches out towards him. He touches the glass. Eyes wide. This strange person. I don’t know if he gets it yet. I don’t know if we ever get it.

“‘’IP HERE’S NOTHING wrong with you,” the doctor said.

J. “And yet your symptoms are real. I’ve considered everything else. There’s only one avenue left.”

“Lead me along it,” I told him.

“It’s possible,” he said, strangely tentative, “that this is some kind of allergy.”

I laughed. “I’m forty-five years old. Don’t you think an allergy would have revealed itself by now?” The doctor began to speak, but I cut him off. “I’m sorry: I don’t believe in them. They’re not for me. I have the constitution of an ox, I can eat and drink, and breathe the molecules of air, that any man can, keep them down and thrive on their contents. No. It can’t be an allergy.”

The doctor frowned at me. “A hostile response.”

“One must be certain of some things, Doctor. This, for me, is one of them.”

“It’s almost as if you were allergic to the very suggestion. Classic symptoms: your face reddened, pulse quickened, perspiration.”

“You’re playing,” I said. “Please. Don’t bother.”

“I’m serious,” he said. He paused, looked away, out of the window, then back at me again. “We’re probably talking about something that only recently entered your environment.”

“I can’t think what. Do you want me to think about what? Could it be linked to research, is this what you’re telling me?”

“No, I wasn’t thinking that. Although, funnily enough, I was just reading an article. You may have seen it. They found that people allergic to Brazil nuts could develop an allergic reaction to a genetically engineered soybean that contained one single gene inserted from a Brazil nut.”

“Yes,” I nodded. “I heard about that. But it’s also possible the technology could be used to cure those people of their allergy.”

“Oh,” the doctor said softly. “Right. Yes, maybe. Anyway, apart from that, the fact is, some people are allergic to other people.”

“Really? Are you kidding? To other people in general?”

“To people, to persons, in particular. When we talk of the chemistry between individuals, we’re often describing more than we realise.”

I nodded. “An interesting thought.”

“Let’s go through it again: how long have you had these symptoms?”

“Well, as I’ve told you, I’ve felt a general physical unease for a year or two. Tragic. It took me until I was forty to feel entirely comfortable in myself, you know, inside my skin.”

“Yes,” the doctor agreed, though he’s certainly younger than me. “An unexpected blessing of middle age.”

“But an ironic one: you accept the body just as it really does begin to go. You leak. In the cold your nose runs. Wet farts escape when you twist. After a piss you continue to dribble. Your body’s letting go. A knee burns after tennis. Which reminds me of my favourite joke, Doctor.” I put on a
Pathe News
voice: “We were short of a doubles player at the club. I asked a chap if he’d like to join us to make up a four, and he said, “I’m a little stiff from badminton.””

The doctor stared blankly at me. As if ready to diagnose the joke.

“I said, “We don’t care where you come from. Feel free to join us.””

“Yes?” the doctor prodded.

“Right,” I said. “So, the contentment was short-lived. Two or three years of this corporeal ease, that was all.”

“And specifically. What brought you to me? When?”

“Well, it was, what, three, four months ago, wasn’t it? That the symptoms began in earnest.”

The doctor had been hoping to nudge me at my own speed towards his hunch, but by this point he obviously felt that we’d wasted enough time. “John,” he said, “I ask you only to consider this possibility: that you are allergic to your son. That he is the one making you ill.”

I hesitated. “Are you serious?”

“To a degree, certainly. I may be speaking metaphorically, I’m not sure. But most men when they have a child find themselves gratifyingly anchored in the ocean of life. Or secured in the free flow of time, if you like, finding (or perhaps better, being given) through their child their place in the succession of generations. They are steadied, relieved, placated.”

“Yes. Sure.” The doctor was giving me an if not memorised at least certainly well considered speech.

“Some men, it seems, and one can say especially those with powerful egos, men of power, find having a child has the opposite effect; one naturally exacerbated the later in life it happens. Unlike most people, they were already secure. They saw themselves as great rocky islands in the ocean of faces, of humanity, floating around them. It is having a child that, on the contrary, casts such men adrift. Confronts them with the reality of life’s cycle, or procession, and their inescapable imprisonment within it. The child’s birth forces an acknowledgement of mortality which, if it is not faced consciously, may erupt in other ways.”

The doctor paused, looked down, held a hand up with forefinger erect and looked back at me. “In conclusion,” he said, “
most
men gain significance through having a child, while it inflicts upon a
few
a feeling of profound insignificance. You may be one of these.”

My hands trembled. I clasped the arms of the chair, and smiled. “Thank you, Doctor,” I said. “That’s most interesting.”

M
y hands tremble on the wheel. There’s Barrow-bush. Windmill Down. St Hugh’s. I shouldn’t have drunk a styrofoam cup of tea at this lay-by last time around. I don’t want to stop again. Is there a bottle or a bag here I can use? We should keep something in the car for gridlocks. Having a full bladder while driving’s very specific, isn’t it? You can hold an enormous amount. And when you get out, finally, and unzip by some trees, you find your prick’s shrunk. It grows back to normal as you pee, what seems like a pint or two of liquid; more than you ever remember drinking, anyhow.