Wake Up

by Tim Pears

  I am plain. Neither ugly nor handsome. Forgettable. I’ve tried on occasion the usual methods for improving my visage. Moustaches. Beards. The last, a few years ago, was a bushy one I briefly lurked behind. Lily disliked it. She said kissing me must be like cunnilingus without the fun, and promptly stopped doing so. Instead of going directly to the bathroom and shaving it off, however (which I was anyway considering myself, having hid behind it long enough) I kept the beard a little longer.

  You think I need you to kiss me? I mean, how can a man be capable of such not merely petty and selfish but clearly self-defeating obstinacy? I know how, and why. Because a man can’t allow himself to be pushed around. Because once he lets a woman gain the upper hand, it’s over.

  Greg grows fuzzy holiday beards. I tried one of those Amish-style ones once. A line of wire around the jawline. The Solzhenitsyn look. I don’t know why I tried. It looked ridiculous on the aforementioned and it looked even more ludicrous on me. Off it came.

  No more beards for me. I get sharp haircuts now. I go to Graziani’s, a barbershop in town where cool young men go – the kind of barber I myself never went to as a young man. I’m not even sure they existed in those days, did they? I tell the guy, Number two clippers around the sides, cut square at the back and flat on top. They finish off the sideboards and around the ears with a real razor and warm foam, and they gel the hair, combing it backwards. If I’m going to be middle-aged, I reckon, I want a little dash.

  I haven’t lacked women. My brother and I had, from our early twenties, wealth and the patina of wealth in our social circle. Chuck a bit of cash around and you get the peripheries, as Greg called them: girls drawn to cars, decent tailoring, and in my case the sheen of pampered flesh. Massages, facials, manicures. Shaves (which reminds me: our father never knew how to shave properly. Bits of grey stubble remained scattered across his chin like a cornfield). Expensive eau-de-colognes. They made me feel good and I also knew what they signified: I soon discovered that in a restaurant or hotel bar I could approach a woman and she’d discern that patina. Whether what attracted her was money – I’m taken care of here – or power – I can relinquish myself – didn’t concern me overmuch.

  And because I understood this, I didn’t care. I could be relaxed and stand-offish. And this arrogance is the most attractive trait of all. I’d approach a strange woman in a sideways manner, with a throwaway word, and all my signals – voice, look, posture – gave off this unmistakable message: you want to fuck me? You want to fuck me, you little harlot? Well, I don’t know, maybe I’ll fuck you. If I think you’re worth it.

  Few women resist this invitation, even from a plain, forgettable man like me. Why? Were they weaned too early from their mother’s breast, prised loose from the maternal hip? It’s sad, pathetic. Don’t get me wrong, I love the game, it’s given me huge happiness in my life. Or maybe it’s just that in casual sex, where we’re closest to the animals we once were, and still are, it’s obvious that a woman can be persuaded to buckle beneath the man astride her. Once she is vanquished, then she can assert herself. Once he has conquered, a man may submit.

  Stem Canker

  Variable-sized black or brown

  surface particles on tubers,

  easily detached from skin.

  Brown lesions may girdle the bases of stems,

  causing wilting and rolling of leaves.

  MONDAY 2.30 P.M.

  YOU GO round and round, you can go on for ever. As long as you keep your wheels on the ground. As long as you keep with the camber, and work with the centrifugal force; otherwise gravity can turn against you.

  I’m not afraid of my brother. He’s not my keeper. Greg’s not my conscience. I just rather like driving a while longer than usual on a Monday morning. Afternoon, even. I can see why people become chauffeurs. They glide through space, past other people. As long as you stay calm, and let the world slide by, what’s the problem?

  A lot of fuss about nothing. That’s what I just told Simon Wright on the mobile. ‘I’ve thought about it, Simon,’ I said. ‘I’ve been giving it some thought, and I don’t see how we can allow the random demise of two natives to jeopardise our endeavour.’

  Simon still sounded as fazed as he did eight hours ago. I felt like I was talking him down from a high spot. ‘If this gets out, we’re finished,’ he said. ‘If the Salesians there find out.’

  ‘Keep calm,’ I told him. ‘What we have to decide is simply this: whether we stop it getting out, or let it get out but in our version.’

  ‘Oh, John,’ he said. ‘We never should have done it.’

  ‘Don’t say that, Simon,’ I said.

  ‘We should have done something else.’

  It’s the first clinical trial with human beings, after five years working with rodents. If people were told how much AlphaGen had to splash out on lab mice during that time they wouldn’t believe it.

  The trial has been carried out in stealthy conjunction with an expedition to the Venezuelan rainforest headed by a Professor of Biological Anthropology.

  ‘We couldn’t get any more respectable than that,’ I reminded Simon. Or responsible, you’d have thought.

  Norwalk Virus causes acute gastroenteritis. In developing countries, the rapid and severe diarrhoea is a prominent cause of infant mortality. The virus is spread by contaminated food, and from person to person. It’s also known as Traveller’s Sickness. Montezuma’s revenge. The galloping trots. Lily once told me she’s had it on four continents.

  ‘A person hasn’t lived, sweetheart, until they’ve had the runs in an Indian latrine, with pigs snuffling below them—’

  ‘Tell me more, darling,’ I interrupted. ‘Another time, maybe.’

  There’s no vaccine available for Norwalk Virus.

  Twenty-four supposedly healthy adult volunteers from the same village took part in the trial. They were given cubes of peeled, raw potato: four of them wild-type, twenty a transgenic version, into which Norwalk Virus-copy proteins had been engineered.

  Blood and stool were collected. Subjects were observed for evidence of vomiting, cramps, diarrhoea – from the raw potato, not the antigens. Transgenic vaccines, unlike live ones, don’t make people sick. It’s another aspect to their beauty.

  Let’s not forget, they were well paid for volunteering, these people. They were given tools, clothing, utensils.

  * * *

  Our baby is teething. He drools. Blood vessels in John Junior’s face fill, his cheeks are bright red. He chews his hand, my fingers; biting them with his gums, for relief from the pain. If you peer into his open mouth, you can see the white tooth lurking like a fin beneath the surface of the gum.

  Through a combination of the appetite that makes him ever eager to draw edible objects i.e. all objects, towards his mouth, and the attempt to assuage the discomfort of teething, our son often jams his fists, grunting, into his mouth. It is a fine imitation of James Caan (who I imagine got the idea from a baby) as Sonny Corleone in The Godfather. Which is confusing for me, since I already suspect when occasionally I glance at our son that those trumpeting breastfed baby’s cheeks of his are a joke, that he’s stuffed them with cotton wool as an infantile homage to Marlon Brando as Don Vito.

  I’m now beginning to fear that one of these days I’ll come home and find the lights dimmed low, and there he’ll be sitting in the shadows like Al Pacino and speaking his first words to Lily: ‘Fredo, you’re my mother, I love you. But don’t ever talk about the family in front of strangers again.’

  And that’ll be that, really. Next thing you know, Beryl, our cleaning lady, will invite Lily out for a fishing trip in a rubber dinghy on the village pond; the picture cuts to our baby son lying on his mat, while you hear the distant thud of a gun.

  But seriously. When he smiles, my son, especially when he’s clearly uncomfortable, it’s heart-melting. The corporeal condition is such a restriction. Look at his cradle cap, his pulsing fontanelle. See the skin raw in the folds of flesh at his neck, armpit, kne
e.

  I’ll have changed his sopping nappy, wiped up his early-morning poo, washed him, massaged his limbs, dressed him. Brought him through to the spare room. Read to him from his little cardboard books – Peter Rabbit, Spot – that he prefers chewing to perusing. Let him fiddle with his toys. Then he’ll have grown tired, and I give him my finger to suck on, and he drifts back into sleep, lying to the right-hand side of me. Then I begin to calculate. To make notes. Sometimes John J. keeps sucking away on my finger for ages, in his sleep. I try to pull it out but suction promptly grips it, and I relent. What a picture: this father lying with knees bent up, a pad on his lap, a biro in his right hand, writing, his left arm laid across his abdomen and the little finger of his left hand in his baby son’s mouth.

  Our lives are haunted. There’s a haunting quality to our lives. We used to think it was something outside us. It is us, of course. The strangeness of the self, the frightening depths of the unknown within us, how much and yet how little we know of what we are made. Most of the time we sidle along, but now and then it happens: we spook ourselves.

  It’s clearest with new parents – that haunted look, composed of something more than the sum of hollowed eyes, sore heads, movement made awkward from muscles torn by the ridiculous positions in which they’ve been holding their baby and the quizzical cast to their faces indicating that obvious question: where did I go, my life is that of a drone, subaquatic, so what happened to the real, the authentic, the heretofore me? This haunted look, it comes from even more than any or all of these things, it’s just that like little pockets, sacs, of air, they attach themselves and help bring it slow, the submerged moon of the self, to the surface.

  Lily is a bohemian. I’m no Round Table, Conservative Club businessman. I don’t care what people think of me, as long as they voice their opinions out of earshot; behind my back. I don’t need to hear it. The company supports one or two charities in a discreet way. And I’m not one for politics. The mainstay of politics is meetings. You have to enjoy them. The secret of good business is to cut out as many meetings as you can.

  I don’t mix. I don’t seem to need friends outside the family. My first wife, Susan, Jesus, after our divorce I was just relieved not to have to attend any more of our own damn cocktail parties. But Susan, simpering between the canapes, is history. I don’t want to waste energy. Our brief marriage was neither good nor bad, there’s no need to dwell upon it. I left her behind.

  There are, however, occasions when one is forced to socialise with others of the merchant class. And then Lily stands out: a hippy dip between the blow-dried, blue rinse, four-wheel-driving, people-carrying, kids-to-school-run women. I rarely feel fonder of her. I love the New Age nonsense.

  Not that Lily accepts a one-way mockery. ‘I know a lot of what I do’s not rational,’ she tells me. ‘The tarot’s intuitive, I know that. The difference between you people and me is I acknowledge it. You and your brother, you simply don’t see how wacky, say, your marketing jargon is. When you talk about, what was it? The essential role potatoes play in an integral lifestyle experience? Please. Just because some tough-talking guru in a tailored suit told you that fluffy is the new paradigm.’

  Is Lily political? Of course she is. She shops as a radical activist. I can’t keep up with who what where she’s buying from or boycotting. Fair-trade coffee, cruelty-free shampoo. Organic free-range everything. No factory food, battery hens, child labour. She regards this consumer culture as poisonous, and revels in her consumer power.

  Lily hates supermarkets. She says the flicker in the fluorescent lighting threatens to bring on her incipient epilepsy.

  ‘You don’t have epilepsy,’ I told her.

  ‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘Wake up, sweetheart.’

  There used to be a shop in the village. It closed down years ago. Lily cycles around the lanes to local farms and farm shops.

  Radical shopping. Yesterday anything from South Africa was banned, or Chile, or France when those nuclear tests were being carried out; today it’s China and, I don’t doubt, America. America’s usually on the proscribed list. Living its life on the open frontier, still, taking potshots of course at the wetbacks trying to swim across the Rio Grande.

  It’s the same with holidays – where we can or cannot go – except that plans are complicated by Lily’s eye for a bargain and a special offer. Like air miles: you fly, you get air miles. The more you fly, the more air miles you get. So the more you fly. So the more air miles you get.

  Flying is itself environmentally irresponsible, of course, but wait: if, despite the strip lighting, you shop at Sainsbury’s you get given free air miles. You don’t shop in town, no, you drive round the ring road to the out-of-town supermarket, so you fill up the car, and you get more air miles at the filling station. It doesn’t stop. Everyone wants to get you up in a plane, burn hundreds of gallons of fuel, churn through the time zones. A huge plane that swallows you and plunges into the sky. You bank at NatWest, you get air miles. Lily buys a new vacuum cleaner, next thing I know we’re flying for free.

  Last year we took a ridiculous trip.

  I remember the first time I flew, accompanying a scientific expedition to Nairobi the long vacation after my second year at Oxford, people applauded after take-off. This is only, what, 1974. Some scattered palms clapped our relief, the captain, technology. It’s already a dead miracle, an event in which the miraculous, the act of 300 tons of plane taking off from the ground with us inside it, has been reduced to zero. And all we’re left with is the fear.

  Lily had amassed enough air miles to fly around the world a few times. Also she was pregnant, she wanted to fly somewhere before being grounded with a baby. So what does she do? I’d mentioned this chap at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, a physicist who’d turned to money and whose work I’d read about, and Lily decided it’d be fun to build a holiday around my meeting him. She has the love-hate thing with America, of course. So she fixed it up and then she said, ‘Why don’t I invite your mother?’

  ‘My mother? Sure,’ I said. ‘And your old uncle … the gay Mister Miserable.’

  ‘Sebastian. Great idea,’ she said. ‘Why not the nephews, too? They’d love to go to the States.’

  ‘They would? To New Mexico? Brilliant,’ I laughed. ‘What a bunch.’

  What a fool, more like. Lily thought I was taking her seriously. She took me seriously! Next thing I knew, it was all organised; she’d rounded them up. Dragooned the most incurious, sedentary stay-at-homes among all of our combined blood relations, and there we were climbing into the sky in Economy.

  It was a philanthropic gesture. Lily figured it was our last holiday before children, and she wanted to share it. It’s the sort of generous gesture that maddens a man even while it makes him fall in love with his wife all over again. To share our last holiday with my widowed mother and her bachelor uncle, to alleviate the awful loneliness of modern old age, yes, but also I believe – in fact I know, because she said so – to give them, to force upon them, a glimpse of sunny post-modern American old age.

  Actually, you already have to be in good shape for modern travel: we should have put ourselves onto a fitness regime to prepare for the transatlantic trip. My mother and her uncle anyway. No, the slouching wunderkids, too. We had an easy start, at least. I got one of our drivers to ferry us down to Gatwick. That’s where the slog starts: you tramp a few miles along tunnels and corridors just to get to your plane. Tall human beings like Lily and myself fold our legs and squeeze into our seats. Then you’ve got ten hours of thrombosis-inducing immobility, alleviated only by turbulence, wary assessment of your fellow passengers, and the bowel throbs of fear. In Chicago O’Hare, our port of entry, there’s a long hike to baggage reclaim, and then the shuttle tram from Terminal Five to Three. Thence a flight to Albuquerque, where you get off the plane and walk across one floor and down an escalator, straight across another floor and down another escalator, and so on and on until you lose count of the floors you’ve walked directly ac
ross and the escalators you’ve descended because you’re thinking that you’re trapped in an Escher drawing, no building could be the shape your progress suggests it must be unless it was made from Lego by an autistic child.

  The truth is, for every four hours in the air, crossing the troposphere at five hundred mph, you spend five hours plodding through labyrinthine airports.

  Most of our fellow passengers were old, spending their sensibly invested savings on travel, broadening their minds by having a look at airports around the world. It struck me how cruel it was, actually, a practical joke; the conspiracy of some coterie of international airport architects (which must be a pretty small club when you think about it, and so quite capable of well-planned sadism) to force these senior citizens to haul their hand-luggage and duty-free for miles around air-conditioned hangars, to tramp the binless-clean, glass-sided corridors, succumbing to stroll fatigue, sitting down on dispersed benches, dropping like flies. Stragglers are picked off by wheelchair-toting, tip-hungry valets, by surly hunch-shouldered golf-cart drivers beeping and flashing the spent, decrepit losers in this game back, doubtless, to a Gate from which a plane will drag them prematurely home.

  That’s what I thought. And then I realised: I’d fooled myself by focusing on one or two arthritic old stoics limping to a standstill. For they were the minority, the exceptions. Most of the white-haired, wrinkled and eager-eyed travellers were slim and sprightly. They were twice as fit as me.

  ‘Come along, Mum,’ I chivvied as she crawled along. ‘We’ll miss our next connection.’

  ‘Don’t take any notice of him,’ Lily countered, offering Mum her arm. I’m always thrown by how well they get on, those two. Lily has a mystifying amount of patience for my mother, while Mum feels she’s being treated like a proper lady every time Lily opens her mouth. Plus they’re always colluding against me.