by Tim Pears
In the late autumn Richard’s people came to us each week, and a couple of other gardens in the village, and did little other than bag up leaves. It was a major operation; a minor industrial process. There was one guy with a kind of hoover that blows instead of sucks leaves into swirling piles, a girl all padded up against the cold with a wide rake, another chap with wooden paddles with which he embraced huge armfuls of leaves that he then put into black bags. They bagged up the leaves and took them away.
This infuriated Lily. All last autumn, I’d come home on a Thursday and she’d tell me, ‘Those gardeners put the dead leaves in plastic bags again!’
‘It gives them work,’ I’d say, and change the subject, because I didn’t want to waste time talking about it. (I mourn the falling leaves only because in winter you can hear the drone, even in our village; the traffic drone all the way from the ring road, and the motorway.) I knew, somehow, what happened to the leaves: Richard’s gang took the leaves away and added them to a huge pile of other clients’ leaves on Richard’s land. The leaves turned into compost. In the spring Richard’s gardeners put the compost into green bags, and he sold the compost back to his clients. I don’t know how I knew this; I didn’t realise that Lily didn’t know it. All she knew was that they took our leaves away somewhere, instead of making a compost heap in a corner of our garden.
Richard came to collect his money one Saturday and I overheard the conversation that ensued between him and my wife. Richard explained what happened to the leaves, just as I have. And I could tell, from the lilt in her voice, that Lily thought he was joking.
‘Green bags. Of course. How much do you charge?’ she asked, playing what she assumed was a respectable stooge in this comedy.
‘Five pound a bag,’ Richard said, and she laughed.
I assume his intelligent eyes helped prolong her misconception; he’s got those eyes that tell you a person enjoys the absurdity of this life. Richard was also, on the other hand, a serious man.
‘When they already paid you to take the leaves in the first place. How many bags do you produce each spring?’ my wife asked.
‘Reckon about a thousand or two,’ Richard said. ‘It’s top quality.’
‘That’s … how much?’ she asked.
‘Let’s say it’s a few thousand pounds,’ he frowned.
‘Oh, that’s good. That’s very good,’ she said. ‘You should do it.’
‘We do do it.’
‘No, really.’
‘Yes, we’ve been doing it for years now.’
There was a long pause. When Lily spoke again, I could hear her voice was stretched like an elastic band. ‘You should put our leaves on a compost heap in a corner of our garden,’ she said.
‘It’s ugly,’ Richard told her. ‘Rich people don’t want that in their garden. I’m sure your husband wouldn’t want that.’
I smiled to myself. So I’ve made it, I thought, I’m rich. If our gardener says so, I must be.
‘People’s idea of what’s ugly can change, though, as their understanding changes,’ my wife argued. ‘As the idea of a compost heap, of the process that’s taking place inside it, becomes attractive, so the outside literally alters its appearance to us, and becomes more attractive, too.’
‘No,’ Richard said. ‘I agree with you. You can say that, and I can say that. But rich people aren’t like you and me.’
Now, either Richard somehow guessed that Lily was an aristocratic bohemian before she married me, and still felt herself ill at ease in the role of a merchant’s wife, and he was bold enough to take her into his confidence in this way, despite the risk of offending me, her husband, or indeed herself; or else, owing precisely to the oddity of having this conversation at all, he overlooked the fact that she herself was one of his clients.
Anyway, the gambit worked. I heard, to my amusement, my wife say, ‘You’re probably right, Richard.’ Her tone of voice suggested she even felt flattered by what he’d said. ‘At least the leaves are being recycled. You deserve some reward for that.’
Recently, with this baby son with whom we’ve been blessed, my mind has once again been tuned to the digestive process, the flow of food. Which is just a little bit mind-boggling. Look at it this way: my wife, impregnated, ate and drank as usual, a little more maybe, and as well as food sustaining her there grew inside her a foetus, a baby. Her uterus expanded, pushing her bladder and intestines into corners of her torso.
John Junior fed via the umbilical cord but excreted in the normal way; yes, he peed and shat into the amniotic fluid in which he floated, which effluence was gradually broken down, filtered through and expelled from Lily’s body.
After nine months my wife gave birth. And her body, as well as still taking what it needed for itself, stopped passing the goodness of what she ate on in the form of oxygen, salts, nutrients through her placenta and umbilicus, into a baby inside her womb, but rather transformed it into milk. To be suckled by the infant from her breast.
While our baby, for his part, as well as learning instantaneously at birth to fill his lungs with air and breathe, had to change the way he ate from a tube coming into his stomach to a nipple at his mouth, and milk down his throat. Which he accomplished impressively, I might add.
I’ve contemplated it, this process, as I’ve witnessed it these last weeks, and let me be honest, I still can’t quite come to terms with it. The audacity, and ambition. How outrageous its inventiveness.
* * *
‘Did he say John Junior?’ my wife beseeched our make-believe companion, when she overheard me call Jacob this. ‘He called him John Junior? That is so laughably … American.’ She turned to me. ‘And so predictable.’
‘And yet so apt,’ I smiled.
Our son sleeps, utterly vulnerable. Wholly dependent upon us. Yet he is never so self-enclosed, so autonomous, locked in there in his dreaming mind.
Our baby sometimes sleeps with his mouth open. In the sunstream you can see all these motes of dust; I wonder whether there are microscopic animals there too. I think of my chubby son floating, a whale, his mouth open, the dust like krill.
Wart Disease
Irregular shaped, warty galls
on shoots and eyes of young
tubers.
Do not confuse with severe
infections of powdery scab.
MONDAY 11.30 A.M.
THERE’S A filling station coming up.
I will explain to Greg and he will understand. Insert the nozzle. Breathe those fumes. Why do men love the smell of petrol? I like to fill the tank, then squeeze more in to round up the price. Does everyone do that?
I’ll tell Greg that ten million children a year die from infectious diseases that could be prevented with vaccines.
I drive around the ring road in a silent Merc. I forgot how much I enjoy driving. Greg updates our cars annually, I believe, and I just ask for the same model if it’s available. So that it’s as if I’ve had the same car for years but the engine just keeps getting quieter, the chassis smoother, the sound system cleaner every year.
These two natives who died, through no fault of mine or Simon’s, did so for a noble cause. This is what I want to say. It may need reiterating.
Three years ago AlphaGen devised an experimental process for cholera, using bananas. They splice a strand of cholera DNA, via electrical pulses and simple bacterial cells, into the DNA of Agrobacterium, which naturally infects bananas. It’s allowed to attack a banana cell, to which the cholera DNA is thus introduced. Hey presto: the banana cell begins to create proteins like those found in a cholera bacterium.
This banana cell is cloned and grown into a mature banana plant, whose fruit contains not cholera, quite, but rather cholera-copy proteins. When a person now eats such a banana their body responds as if it’s been invaded by cholera bacteria: their immune system produces appropriate antibodies. Which will protect them against real cholera, should it come along.
Many things are getting faster, by the way, did I say th
at? Not just cars. My wife, for example, plays the piano. She’s speeding up, I swear it. The well-tempered clavier? I hear Lily playing Bach at breakneck speed. The frenetic keyboard.
My wife and I met when I gave her a lift: she was hitching in a lay-by outside Stourbridge and I stopped the car. Lily reckons this is already a historical manner of meeting, since people don’t hitch-hike any more, do they?
Now that we have a baby, we have a baby seat for the car. He’s strapped in the back seat – and so is Lily, to sit beside our baby son. Yes, I can tilt the rear-view mirror and there she is, my pale English rose. Who when she’s run down looks wan, listless, skinny. Nerves stretched, strung-out veins, too elongated for the heart that beats inside her. Etiolated. No rude red cells let into the bloodline for thoroughbred generations. Until me, I swam across the moat.
But that’s not the whole story with Lily, oh no. Get her into an argument, or a dance class, bring a little colour to her cheeks, she can be vaulted to Olympian stature. With her cropped blonde hair, her imposing height, her lean athleticism. I do adore her. I want to squeeze her and hug her and hurt her.
And I would say, now I think about it, now that I’m deprived of the experience, that driving long journeys with Lily sat next to me these past few years constituted one of the joys of my life. No, really.
Driving in the dark, talking. I wouldn’t be surprised if it transpired that man had invented the motorcar for the purposes of conversation. And, yes, OK, as a place also in which to listen to music, drenching the interior of the vehicle with a wash of sound. That, too. Plus the funny thing is, it’s dance music that sounds best in a cruising saloon, isn’t it? I mean, you’re not just sat down, you’re strapped in, for God’s sake! You can’t move! You can’t dance! Yet deep funk, rollicking Cajun, whatever – West African guitars, you name it. Hypnotic dervish trance, the seventeenth-century Terpsichore of Michael Praetorius, no less … they all sound magnificent through a good system in a smooth silent car. They sound like they were made to be played there.
What is it? Is it the movement of a car across the earth, the roll that with music becomes an otherworldly glide? Or is it a person’s eye, the way that with a soundtrack the landscape you see is vitalised; the visual experience is augmented and becomes supra-cinematic? Or is it something else entirely, the fact that our lives have speeded up so much that only when hurtling through space at seventy miles per hour in this tin can are we able to relax sufficiently to actually stop still? And listen to music as music needs to be listened to?
But above all the car was invented as a chamber more conducive than any other place to intimate conversation.
What other joys? The letters Lily’s written me when we’ve been apart. She used to travel. It was worth being apart for the pleasure of envelopes with exotic stamps and her scrawl; of other physical traces of her – scent, a smudge – on the paper inside; of her mind in words. Her affection for me expressed. She was all in the air then, a kite of a girl, I tied her down; I anchored her. I don’t plan us to be apart again, and miss already those letters I expect to receive no more.
Happiness. And? John J. The way he loves to stand already; nineteen weeks old, even when he’s bored, tired, fractious, help him to stand and he smiles, all pleased with himself. My son. His monumental little head.
And his birth. It’s a story.
But driving with my wife. Those soul-baring, pain-sharing conversations in the dark that meander down into each other’s deep waters. You can find the hidden shelves of misery, the fear of the black depths. Rising. Bubbles and light. Driving in the dark. And when we’d talked ourselves out, each drifting back into our own mind spaces as the car cruised along a motorway. Me steering the car. Lily’s hand on my thigh. People would know what you mean. They’ve had that too. I miss it.
For no more. I am now alone up front, at the head, at the lonely prow of our vessel, sole navigator and pioneer. Lily’s stuck in the back with our gurgling child. We are a family. We drive.
To tell the truth, it’s a relief. Conversation with the same person gets exhausting, doesn’t it? Marriages talk themselves out, just run out of gas. There’s that awful moment, isn’t there, when you think, this is so great, we can sit here in utter contentment without having to even say anything. Because you realise immediately, oh my God, we’ve nothing left to say to each other. This nothing balloons in front of you and between you, and for ever for the rest of your hemmed-in lives.
But what can you do? Can you keep something back in reserve? Of course not. You can’t stop talking. Except that yes, actually, you can. You can have a kid.
* * *
Lily and I celebrated our fifth wedding anniversary this year. We got married in the Register Office with just Greg and Lily’s friend Mira as witnesses, then we had a ritual devised by Lily in a barn on her parents’ property. Jesus, what a mish-mash it was! A Sufi love poem, something by Donne, the Beatitudes and platitudes from Kahlil Gibran. We were prayed for by this woman priest and blessed by that Hare Krishna monk. Music provided by bohemian pals of Lily’s. A circus. I let her have whatever she wanted. I mean, I put up a good deal of resistance, of course. How can a woman enjoy what she’s won if she hasn’t had to fight for it? You have to know when to give way. What do I care what kind of wedding we had?
Lily was a traveller. A hippy. The Near, the Middle, the Far East. She spent winters in Goa, Bali, an island in the Gulf of Thailand, came home for spring laden with jewellery and trinkets she sold to shops here and there. The first years of our relationship Lily stayed with me through the summer and took off again in the late autumn. I decided she was mine for keeps early on, but it took Lily longer to accept it. This man, this reserved, ambitious businessman, pulling her down, pegging her back. At the same time, her body was settling, and the urge to bear children grew stronger: bearing children made more and more sense to her, as the thing to do with her body. She’d seen enough middle-aged women still out there on the road, lined, brown, hollowing out. They disgusted her, she once told me. Frightened her. Lily knew she couldn’t carry on the feckless life.
We spent years trying to have a child.
As it became clear that this wasn’t happening of its own sweet accord, Lily turned methodical. She worked out the precise breakdown of her cycle, bushwhacked me around the flat. Clutching a stop-watch, she’d demand ejaculation.
You oblige over-eagerly at first. Till you realise this is what it’s like making love with a religious fundamentalist. It’s no fun; you soar off into reluctant reveries. But that was just the start of it. We’d been married two years when Lily got pregnant, only to lose it after a few weeks, and this miscarriage made her more determined than ever: for the next year or so I enjoyed conjugal relations with a mad scientist.
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.’