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.
4
“People call it Sudden Adult Death Syndrome,” the doctor told me.
“This is precisely what I’m worried about,” I said.
“Actually, it’s not a syndrome at all. Merely a phrase with which to categorise a whole bunch of unexplained deaths.”
“Right. Which is exactly what worries me.”
“One moment someone’s fit and well, the next they’re dead. Two hundred people a year, that’s what we’re talking about. In a population of sixty-five million? Please. You may as well fret about spontaneous combustion.” The doctor chuckled. “Or being hit by a falling block of ice. If you want something to fear, why not make it more dramatic, at least?”
“All right. You’ve made your point,” I nodded. “Very humorous. But what’s the likeliest cause, do you think?”
With a frown and a sigh, the doctor gave a shrug that said, as politely as he could in his position, Who cares? “Some kind of heart-rhythm disturbance. Probably.”
“You see?” I said. “It does happen.”
“We all of us have moments of arrhythmia. The heart rights itself immediately. It’s harmless, believe me. And other possible causes have been put forward. Epilepsy, if I remember right. Undetected brain defects. No pattern has been identified, you see. If you don’t mind me saying so, paranoid hypochondria doesn’t suit you. It doesn’t fit your health consumer profile.”
“I agree,” I said. “I was just thinking, that’s all.”
“Now, tell me about this ache,” the doctor said.
“The ache in my bollocks.”
“Oh. You didn’t mention where it was.”
“I didn’t? It’s an occasional mild throb.”
“Where?”
“If I try to locate it exactly, if that’s what you’d like me to do, I’d say that if I have two balls, one floating more or less above the other in my scrotal sac, the ache emanates from one of them. The lower one.”
“A dull ache, you say?”
“A mild throb, yes. Unpleasant, but only, I think, because of where it is. We’re nowhere more vulnerable, Doctor, than there, wouldn’t you say? What do footballers protect? The eyes? The brain? No.”
He examined me. His analytical, lifeless medic’s fingers felt my scrotum, fingers that prejudged nothing. Fingers somehow exasperatingly non-committal. Fingers that refused to discover and squeeze an unfamiliar shape with trembling excitement, as if to say, “Got it! Found it! Here it is!” And, by implication, “We can cure it!”
No. Not at all. He just held my testes in his dull hand as if weighing them; thoughtful, disengaged.
5
A man alone drives his car, around the ring road. As each sign and roundabout becomes familiar, recognition scores a groove. However satisfying this is, though, it can’t be right. Because a vehicle is made for progress. Transportation from here to there, this place to that. The point of a car is its forward movement; it wasn’t designed for prevarication. Soon, then, I shall turn off, divert myself, to work.
§
The other day we had some of Lily’s friends round. Before dinner, of a dozen vegetable curry dishes, Lily had made a snack of small rotis: potatoes mashed with chillies, cumin, turmeric, fresh coriander, rolled in flour and fried. Served with a coconut and mint chutney. I brought a bottle of vodka from the freezer and poured some clean cold shots.
“A man could live on your starters, Lily,” one of our guests said.
“Hey, that’s my line,” I told him. This chap, Jerry, was a painter. Later, during the meal, they were talking about art, and Jerry set off on a long riff about the consequences for painting of mechanical reproduction i.e. of photography. Its realism had not only mocked and ruined figurative painting, as we all knew, but the mechanical speed of which it was a part, hurrying people ever faster through the twentieth century, had made it finally unbearable for western citizens to sit still, posing for a painting, for the hours necessary to do a decent job.
“People are twitchy,” he said. “Not just in their minds, either; in their very muscles.”
“You’re right,” Lily said. “A hundred years ago everyone had the patience to pose for a painting.”
So what was a modern figurative painter to do? Jerry asked us. Why, use photographs, of course. “Most women can be persuaded to strip and parade themselves for half an hour: long enough to shoot a roll or two of film. Photography they understand,” he said, “they accept the glamorous voyeurism of the photographer half-hidden behind his camera. But the painter’s frank, open gaze? No, sir, by that they feel threatened, offended, abused.”
And so the poor painter with his palette of colours built up over millennia is left alone in his studio with a clutch of sweaty photographs, pathetic chemical reproductions from which to infer the subtle musculature, the texture of flesh. The infinitely variable pallor of skin. The shifting concavities and convexities of a human body.
Jerry shook his handsome head. “Technology’s ultimate, sardonic triumph over art,” he moaned.
I didn’t say anything. Poor sap. People who bemoan the speed and direction of the traffic get caught up in it eventually, and choke on other people’s fumes. Or else they sit it out at the side of the road, going nowhere. The only place to be is out front, isn’t it?
§
The nephews dawdled over yesterday. I was outside, conversing with the men installing our security system, when they came loping down the drive. Gangling, awkward strangers. Glint, I swear, walks with a scowl. Like those rappers he admires on MTV. Each generation comes up with new ways of walking.
Teenagers are like babies, with the same sudden speed of brain growth. It’s why they look grotesque to those who love them: their physiognomies are lite
rally being forced into new shapes.
It was lovely outside, so Glint drew the curtains and the boys holed themselves up in a gloomy corner of our sitting room, watching TV and playing the mini-discs they bring with them. Lee, when he is allowed by his brother in their ruthless sibling jungle to put on his discs, still likes music with traces of melody in it. Some of this hip-hop stuff is listenable, inventive even, to my duff old ears. But there’s one kind of techno Glint plays, gabber he calls it, that, when one is unwittingly besieged by it, is the aural equivalent of being hit. It’s the opposite of background music, it’s foreground music, it’s a wall in front of you. The listener is removed behind it, steps into the background himself. It makes Lily march into the room and yell, “Please turn that noise off!” And he does. It gives her a sore head. It gives everyone a headache, including Glint, though smoking and drinking and sniffing glue give a person a headache and he doubtless does those, too. Maybe that’s what being a teenager is all about: learning to cope with different ways of giving yourself a sore head.
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.
2002 - Wake up Page 10
