Jam

by Jake Wallis Simons

  Hsiao May knew that if she hadn’t become a doctor, her mother would quite possibly never have spoken to her again. She was covered in shame as it was. Thirty-three years old, no married, no children. And bugs? You study bugs? For this you can become doctor? Why not you become a real doctor, one that help people with broken leg? With cancer? Why bug doctor? You crazy? She had tried at length to explain, and her mother had, in the end, fallen into a sullen silence. A doctor was a doctor, even her mother grudgingly had to admit. But if she were to have studied bugs and not become a doctor? It didn’t bear thinking about. Aiyah.

  Hsiao May was not overjoyed, of course, about being thirty-three years old, not married, with no children. But she had her work. Her real passion – and the subject of the paper she was on her way to deliver in New York – was, in her view, one of the most important fields of study around. As much as she loved studying the Oedipoda caerulescens, that was just one tiny piece of the vast puzzle of the universe. The sick would not be healed, the poor would not be elevated, the incarcerated would not be freed, as a result of her studies of a blue-winged grasshopper from the Channel Islands. No, her real interest lay in something bigger, something with profound sociological implications, something that cast her – a slightly built, bespectacled academic from Slough – as a prophetess who would save mankind. Something that could hold the answer to the very biggest questions of the twenty-first century. Something on which the future of the world may very well depend. The name of that something? The word that rang like music in her ears, like a string of waterdrops falling in a well? No, not entomology – entomophagy.

  On the bidding of her inner mother, she turned on some Mozart – she still practised the piano, even now – reached into the slim briefcase that lay in the footwell, and drew out her lecture notes. They were enclosed in a buff folder, creaseless, perfect. Everything about them was pristine, in both form and content. Though she did not expect to need it, she took out a highlighter pen as well. Then she turned on the overhead light, reclined her seat and sat, papers poised, looking out of the window.

  Night was deepening. The vast car-swarm was brooding in the deluge, the fumes from the last few engines coiling into the air like condensing breath. A feeling of unease filled her chest: we are destroying ourselves, she thought. These cars live on the lifeblood of the earth. This electricity is produced from the burning of its carbon. This paper from its trees. This leather from its animals. She snapped herself out of her reverie and returned her focus to her notes. But these she had re-read so many times that she had lost all objectivity, and no detail had been left unconsidered, so there was nothing for her mind to latch on to. It was not long before she was looking out of the window again. The Mozart bubbled around her like a child’s laughter, enveloped in the hiss of the rain . . . this, she thought, is an age of destruction.

  The title of her lecture was ‘Ethnocentrism in Entomophagy: A New Approach’. The audience, she knew, would be refreshing. Unlike many of the people she was used to addressing on her evangelical lecture tours, all would have a solid science background and would already be familiar with the facts she would draw upon to form her argument. They would know that eighty per cent of the world’s population eats insects happily. They would understand that with the increased pressure on the world’s resources and climate, World War Three would likely be fought over water and food. They would know that insects, being cold-blooded, were four times more efficient at converting feed to meat than cattle, who burned energy needlessly by keeping themselves warm. She would barely have to mention that insects, pound for pound, had the same amount of protein as beef; that fried grasshopper had three times as much; that bugs were rich in micronutrients like iron and zinc; that they were so genetically distant from humans that there was little chance of contracting spillover diseases like bird flu or H1N1. They would understand that insects were natural recyclers, happily living on cardboard, manure, and food by-products. They would know how humane insect husbandry could be, that filthy, overcrowded conditions made bugs happy. Yes. They would know already that it made sense. Her job would be to give them confidence in proselytising. Insects, she would argue, were economical, clean, ecological, sustainable, nutritious, and, importantly, tasty – a gastronomically pleasing answer to the growing food shortages of the world. She would be strong. She would persuade members of the Entomological Society of America that society’s instinctive distaste towards ingesting insects was culturally specific and ethnocentric. They must take people by the hand and introduce them to the mushroomy tang of beetle larvae; the rich chewiness of the sarcophagid maggot; the mouthfeel of a lightly fried young chapulín.

  They would give her a standing ovation.

  She drained her Diet Coke and realised that for a long time she had needed a pee. What could she do? Panic began to spread through her. How long would this traffic jam last? Her phone rang. So she had a signal now? It was her sister. She muted the Mozart and pressed accept.

  ‘Hello, Lulu,’ she said.

  ‘Are you moving yet?’

  ‘No, still stuck.’

  ‘You’re joking.’

  ‘No. It’s solid. Completely solid.’

  ‘Still on the M25?’

  ‘Still the same.’

  ‘What? Sorry, you’re breaking up.’

  ‘Don’t need to wait up for me, Lulu. It’s really late. God knows how long I’ll be.’

  Sorry, what? This is a terrible line. Are you OK?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘This is fucking annoying. I had dinner ready and everything.’

  ‘I’m sorry, OK? I’m sorry. It’s not my fault.’

  ‘I know . . . Hello? Hello?’

  ‘I’m here. Can you hear me?’

  ‘I just don’t know what we’ll do without you for a whole fortnight.’

  ‘You’ll manage.’

  ‘The kids are going to miss you. Their favourite auntie.’

  ‘Mama will step in.’

  ‘I wish I could just swan off to the States like that. Just pack in all the housework, leave the kids somewhere and piss off. I can’t remember the last time I went on holiday.’

  ‘You went to Malta.’

  ‘Yeah, but I mean by myself. That was with Ricky and the kids. You’re lucky. In a way.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Look, I’m losing you . . . I’d better go.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘I’ll leave the key in the red Wellie. Good luck with the traffic.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘I’ll leave my phone on when I go to bed. I . . .’

  The phone went dead.

  Hsiao May held it glowing in the palm of her hand until the light dimmed and went out. Miracle that she got through with no signal. Miracle. If only people could see the power of the ideas contained in the modest buff folder in her hands! That was the true miracle. She closed her eyes.

  In the camper van

  Shaking the rain from his hair like a dog, Harold clambered stiffly into the cab of his camper van and heaved the door closed behind him. His knee was giving him gyp, his shoulders and thighs were soaked. Leaving the vehicle hadn’t been worth the effort. He had craned his neck until it hurt, had walked – no, limped – up and down the hard shoulder, and still had not been able to find a vantage point from which the obstruction could be seen. It could, he had supposed, be many, many miles away. His fellow travellers, but they had proved too preoccupied to sustain anything but a fragmented conversation. Ah well. Seems like everybody is preoccupied these days. It wasn’t until he had reinstalled himself in the van and caught his breath that he began to think about that diminutive Chinese woman – he had forgotten her name already, that was a worry – who had something to do with insects. He couldn’t remember with any certainty, but he thought he may once have attended one of her lectures. She intrigued him. Her evangelist’s zeal. She was something of a celebrity, really. The wee bug lady. Fancy her being here like this.

  He scratched his be
ard, treated himself to a Mr Kipling’s Angel Delight, brushed some crumbs from the dome of his stomach, sighed. The M25 hadn’t known traffic this bad for years, and he should know. In the sky he thought he could see the lights of a helicopter, thought he could hear it far off, beneath the noise of the pelting rain. In all probability, a major accident. Major enough to warrant closing both carriageways. Major enough, perhaps, to be included in future accounts of the M25. He shuddered. What was going on as he sat in the safety and comfort of his camper several miles down the road? Twisted metal, burning vehicles, people trapped, people unconscious, people dead? There but for the grace of God, he thought.

  Although he was disturbed by the idea of the accident, he was relieved that he seemed not to have become preoccupied by it. Dad had died the year before, and the depression he had subdued twenty years before came crashing back like a ruffian uncle from the war. Once again he found himself in a battle with himself. Back to square zero. In the early months, his mood was on a hair-trigger; the smallest thing could set off one of his old black dogs. He even went into a three-day-long spell of melancholy after watching an advertisement on television for cheap diamond rings. The consumerism. The failed dreams. The bleakness of modernity. The wilful ignorance of mortality it entailed. The loneliness of it all.

  But then, in the spring, he had felt better. Memories of his father were accompanied not by an immobilising pain but a dull, bittersweet ache, a sadness that had the right to be there, that felt natural. His favourite memory, and the one to which he returned most often, was of Dad taking him to the zoo, five decades past. It had been one of those charmed, halcyon days. Just him and Dad (his mother had died when he was small). The classic components of childhood happiness were all present: the candy-floss, being swung up onto Dad’s shoulders, the feeling of his hand being engulfed in that of his father, the ruffling of his hair, the laughing at the daft monkeys, the swaying elephants, the aloofness of the birds of prey. Most of all, that day showed Dad’s taciturnity at its best. He had been a man of few words, had Dad. He was of that generation, the war generation; he had lost a foot at Dunkirk – spent the rest of his life on crutches – and emotion had never been his strongest suit. And although this, as Harold entered his 1960s adolescence, became a source of frustration for him, at times it made things take on a sense of the numinous. In the zoo they had looked at the lions, the zebras, the penguins in silence, and in the absence of any name, and any comment, he was faced with things as they really were; not the wall-frieze animals but the beasts themselves; he saw everything with the clarity and immediacy not available to those who fracture their every experience in the kaleidoscope of language. There was just himself, the solidity of Dad, and the magnificence of the animals, all imbibed with a sacred immanence. That was enough, and Dad, in his wisdom, knew it. Dear old Dad.

  When he had started to feel well again, he had taken on the project of renovating Dad’s old camper. The one in which they would go on rambling trips in the school holidays to the Scottish Highlands, the Western Isles, the lochs, even – once – to Snowdonia. A 1967 Type 2 Volkswagen Kombi, khaki in colour, with a split windscreen – a ‘Splittie’ to the enthusiast – it had languished in the garage for many years and was in a state of serious dilapidation. There had even been a brittle bird’s nest in the roof-rack. On the first day, after a good three hours of solid work, Harold had managed to get it going, and trundled it out of the garage and onto the driveway in the sun. My goodness, it was in a state. Over the weeks that followed he’d cleaned it thoroughly, both inside and out; dealt with the rust; painted it a slightly lighter shade; half-rebuilt the engine with parts available only from the most obscure corners of the Internet; installed a fold-out bed and kitchenette; fitted it with cheerful orange curtains. And one morning at the end of June, as he stood with his sleeves rolled up, beholding the machine in all its splendour, backlit by a brilliant sky, he was infused from top to toe with a feeling of warmth, an embrace of unmistakable love, as if his father had been with him all this time, as if this task had been one of devotion, as if he had cleaned away the obstacles to the full blessings of heaven and suddenly they were raining down upon him; and he imagined that within the freshly buffed paintwork of the trusty Kombi there lay reflected the face of the old man himself, anthracite and stoical, yet with eyes twinkling as brightly as ever they had.

  A cup of tea. Why not? This lot wasn’t moving. From the galley of the camper he could easily see the smeary windscreen, so he would know if the jam began to move. Even if he fell asleep, he thought, he’d be OK; the ensuing cacophony of hooting would doubtless be sufficient to wake the dead. Impatient, people, these days. He climbed out of the camper again, puffing with effort, and made his way into the rear galley. Here he had to stoop; he was a tall man, more than six foot, and here the ceiling was low. He sat heavily on the sofa and manoeuvred crablike along it until he was next to the kitchen unit; from there he filled the kettle and put it on to boil. Then he sat back.

  This sitting, this silence, was kin to him; it was kin to all Quakers. As he waited for the kettle – it would take some time on that pygmy stove flame – he naturally fell into the state of spiritual openness, of wonderment, that was required at Meetings. The peace came quickly, and he was pleased. I am one cell in the vast body of life, he thought. In this traffic jam alone, which itself is surely but one among countless throughout the world, I could be one of thousands, even tens of thousands. Who could tell? My life, though of great significance to myself and to God, takes its importance principally from its connectedness to every single other creature, past and present, in the entirety of creation. The parts derive significance from the whole; a sense of fellowship with God’s universe makes one a good person. He sighed, felt another brief pang of love for his father, and felt the poignancy of God in his heart.

  His eyes came to rest on the vase that he had screwed down in the far corner of the galley. It was filled with young lilies, beautiful and in the briefest peak of their existence. He was not a lonely man. Being an only child, his own company had never fazed him; his mother having died before he could remember, self-sufficiency had been instilled in him from an early age. There had been housekeepers, of course, and Nanny, and the ubiquitous figure of Dad. But when a boy grows up without a mother, there is no companion to the most intimate reaches of his soul, and he usually becomes either angry at the world or at himself. In Harold’s case, that anger had taken the form of depression. He had been a member of the Anglican Church then, even at one time considering ordination, but the rigidity of the hierarchy had compounded the problem and he had been driven to the brink of madness; after that, his path had led to Quakerism, and this had sustained his soul in a way that he had never thought possible. He had become accepting. A gentle God was now his companion. Not a God of fire and brimstone, but an unprejudiced God, with compassion for all of His creation and without the slightest trace of violence or jealousy. Not a personal God. The presence of ineffable truth and goodness, nothing more. So he had been healed. At least so far as healing was possible in this vale of tears.

  The kettle had boiled. Harold turned off the flame and, still sitting, reached into the cupboard and took out his favourite mug, a handsome, rustic affair with no chips. He plucked a teabag from the tin and dropped it into the centre of the mug. Then, listening to the sound it made, he poured the boiled water quietly into the mug until it was two thirds full. After the tea had stewed for two minutes he removed the teabag with a teaspoon and dropped it into the pull-out bin, which he had emptied before setting out that afternoon. A wee thimbleful of milk from the fridge and the tea making was complete.

  It was important to Harold to do things like this correctly, in their proper order, with due care paid to the detail. Many years ago he had spent a year in Japan as a visiting lecturer, and had been most impressed by their approach. It had become his belief that the little things in life, the tea making, the house cleaning and eating and grooming, should not be dismissed as insi
gnificant; these were the building blocks of life, which although utterly unremarkable when taken individually, had the capacity to create a larger picture of great beauty if proper attention was given to each. This he had made his life philosophy, and from time to time he sensed that perhaps his way of being made an impression on others. In this modern world, where speed was of the essence, where productivity was held above beauty, functionality above beauty, money above beauty, something important had been lost. This was what he valued: the modest, dignified life. This, after all, was what his father had exemplified in his own time. The quiet elegance of a bygone age.

  He took a bottle of Balvenie from the bottom shelf, had a single hot swig, put it back.

  The first sip of tea was always the best; he took his time, savoured it. The curtains were drawn, but he knew exactly what lay behind them: the grey motorway barrier dividing the carriageway from the land, a foot-high strip of grey metal waisted in the middle and supported every two metres by metal posts; the grassy ridge beyond, dotted with trees; the sign for the next junction, which would be approaching fairly rapidly had not the motorway ground to a standstill.

  He got to his feet and opened the curtains all around the camper. The scene was exactly as he had visualised, with the addition of the ferocious rain and stationary cars. For some reason he hadn’t remembered the cars. And lorries, and vans, and so forth. All with lights twinkling, a few still spewing exhaust pointlessly in vertical ropes towards the heavens. This vast mass of creation, how could he have forgotten? Perhaps it was not surprising. If ever his fellow creatures would be eclipsed in his thoughts it would be now, when contemplating the magnificence of the M25. This hellish ring of ordered chaos, this profoundly ugly – there could be nothing uglier – testament to Thatcherite capitalism, this extraordinary gesture of utter disregard for the land and the people living in it; this homage to the machine; this wonderful, polluted, grimy, exhibitionist, offensive, belligerent, self-absorbed, consumerist, dystopian concrete wonderland, this endless strip of highway to nowhere. This beautiful thing. He had made of it his professional life. He knew off-the-cuff all the stats: that it cost a billion pounds to complete, and took eleven years; that it was the biggest city bypass in the world until it was itself bypassed by the Berlin Ring, the A10, which was four miles longer; that the toll on the Dartford Crossing, which was supposed to be scrapped in 2003 once construction costs had been recouped, was still being collected; that Balfour Beatty had constructed both the first stretch of motorway in 1975, and also the last in 1986; that the question most frequently asked of the AA by customers on the Internet is how one can avoid the M25; that it would take an hour and forty minutes to lap the road driving at a continuous seventy; that Sir Horace Cutler, head of the old Greater London Council and a leading lobbyist for the M25, discovered only on the day the route was announced that it would pass through the grounds of his Buckinghamshire home; that its sections to the north follow the route of the Second World War Outer London Defence Ring; that there are only three service stations along the entire route of the motorway. And, perhaps most importantly given the current circumstances, that in the last eighteen months, between Junctions 16 and 23 alone, roadworks caused 118 years of hold-ups.