2002 - Wake up

by Tim Pears; Prefers to remain anonymous

  “You don’t have to ask Miss or Sir to be excused,” Lee said. “They gave that up this term. You just leave.”

  Lily was indignant. She tried to rouse the boys to action, to assert their right to freedom from such blatant propaganda.

  Glint shrugged. “It doesn’t bother me,” he said. “I had all that Coke shit, but hey, I prefer Pepsi.”

  “Look,” I told Lily. “Greg sent them there, as he vowed he would, but he saw what the facilities were like, so he joined the PTA; he was soon invited on to the School Board, and the next year he was elected Chair of the Governors.”

  “Good for him,” she said.

  “Yes, and he threw his energy into corporate sponsorship. He got his friend Terry Leckfield, you’ve met him, that bald guy, the new job of School Marketing Broker: on a percentage deal, no salary, no commitment from the school. And hey presto.”

  “I don’t like it,” she said.

  “Neither do I,” I said. “The first local partners bought advertising rights on the school railings, and public address announcements at football games. What their money paid for, at a time when other schools all over this country were losing playing fields left, right and centre, was a new soccer pitch with a stand and floodlights.”

  She grimaced. “I’m just not sure,” she said.

  “Of course you’re not,” I said. “How could you be? But deals are made by people who don’t dither. You know what?”

  I stopped talking, so she shrugged irritably at me. “Yes? What?”

  “We were those first local corporate partners. Spudnik provided those facilities.”

  She looked at me. Looked into me. She closed her eyes and looked away. “You people,” she said.

  §

  The thing I have to remind myself about Lily is that she can argue remorselessly if she’s in the mood, but as long as I concede particular, trivial, points, and not the whole argument, as long as I bide my time, in other words, and don’t try to shout her down or turn my back or change the subject, I’ll be surprised. What Lily wants is to express not a point of view, exactly, but her right to have a point of view. Usually this is enough to more or less satisfy her: once she’s expressed sufficient opinion—often well-informed—Lily will quite suddenly say, “OK! Have it your way! As long as you know what I think.” I am the opposite. I’ve no need of discussion, in fact I’d rather do without explaining myself. I’d rather be left to work out what to do, and do it.

  §

  I have never imagined that my wife fell head over heels in love with me. Did I say she did? Pure fantasy, if so. No, as I got to know her better, I became convinced that Lily loved someone else, has regarded someone else as her soulmate, someone she can’t have for whatever reason. Which means for her that it’s not possible to love anyone else equally. This is just a hunch, I don’t even have a clear candidate for the position of lost love: it could be one of the lovers she’s mentioned as we’ve shared our pasts, or it could be a secret or even an entirely unrequited affair.

  I believe my wife has reconciled herself to this, to a life without extraordinary love. Maybe it’s the memory of the ‘person, of what they had or might have had, that sustains her; or maybe it’s more a simple acceptance of life as it is, to be seen through and made the most of. She met me playing football, there was’an agreeable tension between us. Conversation kicked and sparked. I had what looked to her like a reliable supply of money, we were each eager for children. In fact, I think we both surprised ourselves at the felicity of our meeting, the fit of our coming together—a warm handshake eliding into a deep kiss, a shag, an embracing hug—that amounted to something oddly solid, substantial.

  §

  The European Commission recently issued a directive allowing companies to apply for patents on human genes, microorganisms, and any plant or animal derived from a microbiological process.

  “If these patent laws were available when chemists first identified the elements,” Lily told me, “those chemists, or their patrons, could have patented them.”

  “Surely not?”

  “Everyone in the world would then have had to pay a royalty for the right to breathe in oxygen.”

  I laughed. “Sounds like someone wants to play God.”

  Lily looked at me with what appeared to be real affection. “Exactly,” she said.

  “But what do you want?” I demanded. “I mean, you people. What do you want?”

  “Why can’t we accept ourselves as we are?”

  “What are we?” I asked her back.

  Lily smiled at me. “Beautiful, flawed beings,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s right.”

  “We’re not perfectible.”

  “Of course we are,” I said. “Eternally so.”

  §

  I’m nuts about my wife. Did I mention that, already? Call me uxorious, I just happen to think she’s gorgeous, and I’m not alone. The only one who thinks she isn’t is herself. She believes she has lopsided breasts. She stands in front of the mirror and says towards me, “Look. You see?”

  “You have lopsided eyes, darling,” I tell her. Am I going to lie? She thinks she’s put on weight, too, and she has: she used to be scrawny. I get older, the more I like something to get hold of. The more woman I like. The more flesh.

  There’s been a bone of contention between Lily and me recently: over the baby. She wants Jacob in bed with us at night. I don’t disagree—it’s a great idea! I know some men feel the child as a literal wedge between them and their spouses but really, such jealousy is incredibly immature, isn’t it? Me, I find the presence of this fat little human being, with his warm skin, not to mention my wife’s spreading figure, has brought an amplitude of sensuality. An increased eroticisation of the marital bed, somehow. Let’s be honest, can any woman suck one’s finger like a baby? No wonder some women come when they breastfeed. Feeling his limbs connecting ours, watching his extraordinary suck on my wife’s nipple, my carnal desire for her intensifies.

  At the same time, it’s true, a baby is a cute contraceptive. But why get upset about it? It doesn’t take a man a minute to relieve his libido.

  No, the point at issue is not us, it’s him: John Junior doesn’t seem to me to sleep as well beside his mother as away from her. If I take him to a spare room and only bring him back to Lily for feeding (yes, me with a draining day ahead, do I need this, people ask, such disruption? Surely we could afford a wise gnarled nanny; a nubile au pair; a housekeeper from a poverty-stricken country, ugly and devoted? Those shadow occupants of wealthy homes? I’m sure we could) then John Junior will sleep still and silent for three hours between feeds—as does Lily.

  When he spends the whole night beside his mother, however, John J. snuffles and snorts in his sleep, half-wakes and, smelling her milky breasts there, demands feeding. She is woken, and feeds him. I tell her he’s sluicing fresh milk down his gullet to only half-digested milk in his stomach. She does agree that he only sucks plentifully after three hours’ sleep or more.

  Most of Lily’s friends leave their babies to cry in their own room at night until they realise there’s no point in crying and lie down again. Sleep training. Obtain decent nights for themselves so they can get back to work or, as my wife puts it, get back to paying their mortgage. She knows how unlucky they are, how lucky she is; which she resents, of course, but that’s another matter. She doesn’t need or want to get back to work.

  Sleep training, then, is the prevailing orthodoxy, and Lily fights it. She says our son wants to be close to us, that separation is cruel: it answers the parents’ needs, not the baby’s.

  “We’ve spent a million years sleeping together,” she claims. “We must be mad to have stopped.”

  She quotes anthropological examples at me. Dwindling tribes whose parents hoick their kids on hip, in sling, all day long, and bundle up en famille at night. The examples are almost archaeological, the reason for which Lily unwittingly alludes to even as she cites them. “Indulgent parents
,” she says, “babies who are listened to. They make gentle societies.”

  “I believe it,” I say, omitting to point out that her gentle, isolated tribes are forever disappearing. The empires of our age are harsh towards their children. Look around. We’re aggressive, and successful. I say nothing. I don’t want John J. to grow up a lout; let our sons and daughters share our beds, I tell Lily.

  §

  John Junior loves to kick: in the bath, or lying on his back with his naked legs in the air. And his hands, the way he moves his fingers in the air sometimes, he makes me think of a pianist flexing his fingers. About to play.

  §

  A letter arrived amongst the post I took up on Lily’s breakfast tray the other Saturday morning, addressed not to her or to me but to our son. It was a copy of one he gets sent regularly to remind his guardians—us—that he’s overdue his immunisation. Less than five months old and he should have had a skinful of jabs by now: three single-dose injections for Hib and three triple doses for diphtheria, whooping cough and tetanus. Pincushions, his dimply upper arms and fleshy outer thighs! Not to mention three doses of polio vaccine administered by mouth, revolting drops on his tongue.

  My wife is adamant in her refusal of all persuasion from the medical establishment—including, she claims, her GP threatening to strike us as a family off her register.

  “She practically accused me of child abuse,” Lily said. “But the fact is she’s paid a bonus when she reaches a target of babies immunised in her practice.”

  “That’s serious pressure,” I said.

  “She’s afraid I’d influence other parents, too.”

  “A virus of resistance.”

  “Look,” Lily told me. “While I’m breastfeeding him, he has my maternal immunity. To measles, mumps and rubella at least. And chicken pox. It’s because I got those childhood ailments that I can protect our son from them.”

  “Honey,” I said, “diseases that once crippled and killed countless children have been eradicated in this country.”

  “Yes, through clean drinking water. Proper drains. Decent diet. You told me yourself how potato consumption abolished scurvy.”

  “Come on. Partly through a comprehensive childhood immunisation programme.”

  Lily nodded ironically. “Sure. Last time there was a campaign to immunise all children up to the age of sixteen with the measles and rubella vaccine—all kids, mind, even those who’d already had their supposedly full series of jabs—to prevent a forthcoming epidemic.”

  “Yes? What about it?”

  “Eight million doses were administered.”

  “That’s a lot of children. It sounds like a comprehensive amount to me.”

  “Supplied by a single drug company. It turned out the entire batch just happened to be approaching its sell-by date. It had to be used, or thrown away.”

  My wife munched her toast, sipped her tea, between sentences. Our son was at her breast the whole time. She’s amazing. I sighed. “Where on earth do you get your facts from, darling? Don’t tell me. That homeopath friend of yours? Or what’s her name—the astrologer?” About large corporations, pharmaceutical ones in particular, Lily is valiantly cynical. Oh yes, of rational, provable science she’s relentlessly sceptical. Only the flakey stuff does she take at face value.

  “We all got measles when we were kids, John. Didn’t we? Chicken pox. Don’t you remember? One of the problems with this whole thing is these vaccines wear off—and people are then contracting what would have been mild childhood diseases as teenagers, or adults. When they’re not mild at all.”

  “It’s a complicated subject,” I kind of allowed. “You know what we need, don’t you?”

  “What?”

  “It’s clear. Safe vaccines.”

  Lily frowned. “I suppose.”

  §

  Yes. That’s right. Safe vaccines. We’re going to supply them. We’re going to make real money. We are. Simon and I have planned the future. At the moment you take your child to the clinic for a vaccine for measles, mumps, rubella, the nice cruel nurse administers a jab in your little one’s thigh, making him or her cry, leaving a lump under the skin. The defilement. No longer. Have a spoonful of mashed potato. Here, child, eat a chip, I see government contracts. Honours. Money.

  What do you know, I may even get around to doing some of the renovation that crumbling millstone of a house of ours desperately needs.

  §

  While day slowly dawns outside I can be found lying in the spare bed beside John Junior with a mug of coffee. Smooth Colombian. I need it, I’m yawning, when John J.’s had a bad night. And you don’t know what a bad night is until you’ve had a baby. It’s one of the banal revelations awaiting. There are others. To be honest, I wouldn’t mind apologising to those acquaintances over the years who’d say of their crying infants, “I wonder if she wants a feed now?” or ‘Does he want to have a walk in the sling?”

  I’d think, How can you not know, you idiot, isn’t it straightforward enough for you? How much more simple could it be than this tiny blob of primal needs? He⁄she⁄it needs to eat and excrete and sleep and, yes, to be caressed and held and entertained. I mean, if the babe’s unhappy you have a limited number of choices. Choose!

  Or the odd occasions I’ve waited to go for a walk with someone with a toddler, I’ve stood outside fuming to myself, For Christ’s sake, we said we’d leave at ten, it’s half past already, what are you people doing in there? Get the kid, put it in the buggy, let’s go!

  Now I know better and I’d like to say sorry, I really would. I want to pop back in time and find those people in their hallways, wrestling with nappies and clothes and recalcitrant limbs, and hats and strollers and aching shoulders, and say, “Hey, I know that was me standing outside cursing, me the single man, the callow bachelor, in case you picked up the vibe, but the real me is here now to apologise for him, he knows nothing.”

  Or the years Greg came in to work hollow-eyed, unable to converse the way we had before his kids came: disembodied and distracted. Now I know. That nights can be eternal, hours become epochs, ages of sleeplessness. In the night, however torrid it is, you know you’ll have to drag yourself sluggish through the next day. This thought is with you, and with hundreds, thousands of fellow parents all over the country walking around their living rooms in an endless soothing circuit, or bumping the baby up and down stairs, or administering fingers dipped in fennel, or pushing their pram along the streets, or driving around the block, or standing helpless above the cots of their colicky, gripe-stricken, squalling beloveds.

  Short-tempered men are forced to dig into their unknown selves, to mine hidden reserves of patience deep in their characters. Selfish women who thought all sacrifice was a sign of weakness find themselves called upon to give, and are surprised by a thin sediment of joy lurking at the bottom of exhaustion. How many fail, and cast their children loose and unprotected into the storms of the life ahead, but not all, no. In the dead of night, invisible in dim bedrooms, unnoticed by history, such heroism, such sacrifice, is being offered. And what do you know? It’s my turn now!

  But how long a night lasts with a baby. The blanket of night becomes subdivided—the hours separate from one another—into chunks of specific activity: John J. sleeps a couple of hours, then wakes, and feeds for forty-five minutes. Sits up wide-eyed and playful for one hour, becomes tired, dopey but fractious as he creeps slowly back to the edge of sleep over the course of half an hour until he drops off in my arms, on Lily’s shoulder, one or other of our fingers in his mouth. He then dreams peacefully for an hour before beginning to fret in his sleep, and this is the worst time, the worst of the mini-epochs of the night: when John Junior grunts and groans, brings his knees up to his chest, snuffles and grumbles, shakes his little head, brings clenched fists up to his face. It’s impossible to sleep beside him. We lift him up, put him on our chests, move him on to his side, his back, his front. Nothing really helps much, except the welcome splurt and rumble in his na
ppy. Until finally he wakes, and so begins the next cycle.

  Whereas once anything less than seven hours’ uninterrupted unconsciousness left one unnourished and grouchy, now the night breaks up and sleep comes in rich nuggets, each one filled with the nutrients of oblivion. Woken by the baby’s wail you check the figures on the luminous alarm clock and say to your wife, who has herself been woken moments earlier by her tumid breasts, “Two thirty. That’s over three hours.” And you can feel the bounty of all those two hundred minutes of deep sleep in your loosened head, swollen limbs, rested cells.

  §

  Shopping for the baby before it was born drove Lily crazy. Don’t get me wrong, she wanted everything for him, but the sheer quantity of choice oppressed her. Slings and Wilkinets and backpacks. Prams and pushchairs, strollers and joggers and buggies. Carrycots and car seats. It was less the difficulty of choosing that irritated her, more, simply, the wasteful existence of so wide a variety of objects.

  But I mustn’t draw a picture of my pregnant wife as an angry harridan. Last autumn was warm, at night we lay glued together. When it cooled down we canoodled like teenagers. And I made Lily laugh like never before, I can’t describe how, from silly slapstick with my lanky body. Pregnancy made her susceptible to humour, and she farted with laughter. She enjoyed what her body was doing.

  §

  I remember, though, one evening a little over a year ago we were arguing about the same kind of thing as the baby-stuff choice. This would be about the time our son was made. Maybe the very moment. Lily was banging on about the iniquities of free trade again.

  “Listen,” I said. “Globalisation is what makes all this possible.”

  “All what possible?” she demanded.

  Our lives, I could have said, but I needed to convince her with specifics. “All this,” I said, pincering the hem of my jacket between thumb and forefinger. I was clutching at straws. I wrestled myself free of the jacket. It was a gamble, I knew that. “Look,” I said, triumphantly relieved. “Made in Italy.”