Wake Up

by Tim Pears

  ‘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 not? 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 tackler, 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 Clint 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. Inst
ead 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.

  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 100 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 w
ears 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.