Wake Up

by Tim Pears

  Are we obliged to grow ever more? Is it what we want to do, keep growing to the bitter end, driven only by market forces? Isn’t that what this is all about?

  Lily and I, meanwhile, argued a little longer, and then we made love before joining the others for dinner. God, I remember how I enjoyed her pregnant body. I loved the feeling of my prick inside her, knowing it was inches from her womb, where the product of my cell and her egg had fused and settled; in which our baby grew. Man, I loved that. Our baby growing inside this woman whose flesh I cherished. It felt so good. I felt like a ruler of worlds.

  ‘TELL ME,’ the doctor said, ‘about the tiredness that sleep does not replenish.’

  ‘It’s true,’ I said. ‘Even when the baby has a good night, and I sleep through his feeds, my wife feeding him beside me. Or nights before I have an important meeting the next day and sleep in the spare room. I wake from seven hours’ slumber still tired.’

  ‘Forgive me,’ the doctor said, ‘but let’s not waste time on this. All parents suffer such fatigue. If the sleeplessness doesn’t wear you out, the responsibility will. We should move on.’

  ‘I agree,’ I told him.

  ‘We’ve been through everything. I can’t find anything wrong. I’m not saying there’s nothing wrong. We just can’t find it.’

  ‘There’s something missing.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘No, I mean, what’s wrong is there’s something missing.’

  ‘What? In you? It’s possible.’

  ‘Not in me. In the world there’s something missing. I’ve always felt it, seen it almost. Been frightened of it.’

  ‘Something missing in the world?’ The doctor eyed me intently. Studied my face, for what? What symptoms was he looking for?

  ‘And now it’s come for me. It comes after those who see it. Or rather, it pulls them towards it.’

  ‘Do you mean God?’ The doctor stifled a giggle, I swear. ‘Are people still talking about God? The absence where He used to be?’

  ‘No. Yes, of course, God filled an emptiness. But the emptiness was there before God. God filled it for a while, now we’re back with it again, I suppose. Some of us.’

  ‘Some of you, yes.’

  ‘God was not the answer.’

  ‘No. Forgive me, but it was, it is, a futile question.’

  ‘Doctor, I don’t ask it.’

  ‘Life is there to be lived. Live it.’

  ‘Doctor, I don’t ask the question. The question asks itself. It is asked of me.’

  ‘By whom? I mean, you’re being tautological.’

  ‘Perhaps. And you, Doctor, are being obtuse. Maybe God is in our genes. God is our DNA.’

  I’M NOT sure when I became aware of something missing. I think I’ve always been troubled by it. An emptiness. Inside. Now. Something missing in the future.

  Nothing missing in the past, of course not. There never is. I used to sleep with my sister. I never told the analyst that, oh no. Or Greg, or Lily. My little sister made love with me. But in a particular way, in a way she wanted, demanded, and to which I acquiesced.

  We discovered this path, Melody discovered her predilection for what we did, I’m sure quite by accident. She was fifteen, I seventeen. We were alone in the trailer one summer afternoon. She came in the kitchen, poured herself a glass of milk, and opened the biscuit tin, to find it empty: I’d just taken the last Penguin bar. She sighed with disappointment, and I said, ‘You want this?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said.

  ‘Shame,’ I said.

  ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘Give me a bite.’ She knew I would. None of us could refuse Melody anything. She was so nicely put together. I’m not saying our sister was physically perfect, but if you wanted to improve her you’d be at a loss as to how to. I tried it once. I studied her, her oval face, almond eyes, lustrous hair, cupid’s lips, wondering how God might have done better. The smallest improvement. I couldn’t come up with anything.

  ‘You’ll have to get it, then,’ I said, holding it above my head. She was taller than average for a girl, but still three inches shorter than me. She jumped up but I swayed it out of her reach. She tried to pull my arms down. We were both laughing.

  It just built up, I don’t know how, exactly, but she pulled the arm of my hand holding the bar down with both her hands, I pulled her arms apart, and before we knew it we were wrestling, in a way we hadn’t for years, since before her puberty when she’d withdrawn from such activity with her brothers. In a way, in fact, we never had.

  I fled laughing into the lounge, she pursued me. We had a real tussle. I kept disabling her in some lock or grip, but as soon as I relaxed she went for me again. I was heavier and stronger, of course, but she had stamina. She kept squirming, she kept coming.

  At some point I realised how aroused my sister was, that she was turning herself on. At which point I too became excited. We were both sweating and panting. I think it was just luck, our good fortune, that I knew what to do, that I did the right thing, did what she wanted me to do whether she knew it or not: I summoned all my masculine strength and well and truly overpowered her. Got on top of her, held her down. As I began to pull her clothes off she finally relented, a little, enough to let me get them off at all. Her lambswool pullover, white cotton shirt. Unwieldy jeans. White bra and knickers.

  She was more ready than I was. I slid into her, into her virgin’s juicy vagina. She was already coming, and I soon followed. Watching her in the throes of abandonment struck me to the core of my being.

  And after that we did it, occasionally. Always at her bidding. When the others were out. She’d find some excuse to say to me, ‘You think you’re so tough, huh?’ And slap or shove at me. And then we’d get into it. The longer she struggled, the more she enjoyed her ultimate abandonment.

  Sometimes she pushed me to the limits of my strength. Her looks had failed to win Melody exemption from her share of crate humping and stall dismantling over the years, the slave labour of a small merchant’s children. Melody had muscle. Once, I was tired already when my sister initiated the game and after a short time I’d had enough: I relaxed and said, ‘OK, this time you win.’

  Instantly she screamed, ‘No!’ It was frightening. I mean, it wasn’t really me, her brother, Melody was screaming at. I don’t even think it was her, my sister, who screamed. It was someone else inside her. It was the spirit animal of her libido.

  I regathered my strength and fought on and won; Melody suffered her voluptuous surrender, I had my end away.

  I believe I have a lot to thank my sister for, in my subsequent relations with women. I’d got off with two or three girls up to then, had awkward, unfulfilling escapades. My sister’s gorgeous orgasms dazzled and thrilled me. She made my blood sing. They were wonderful spectacles, and the idea that I had been even a minor agent instrumental in such pleasure empowered me. I hope that I played some similar kind of role for her.

  I’m glad to say we never became addicted. We were not obsessive. Weeks, months could go by without her challenging me, surprising me, and I never lost the grateful feeling that what we had was an undeserved bonus, a free gift I didn’t have to work for with the usual hard graft of seduction. I accepted each surprising occasion as a stupendous present. But we continued doing it for years.

  Be honest, man. We still do. I’m forty-five, my sister’s forty-three. I’ve described how pretty Melody was, when she was in her teens. People would hardly believe it now. For a woman of her age, sure, she’s attractive, but her exceptional beauty has been defeated. By bearing children, by living’s tension, by the swell and sag of flesh. Me? Oh, I still think she’s lovely. I still see that lovely child sinking into her face. And when Melody says, as she did at a cousin’s wedding last summer, cornering me in a secluded en-suite bathroom of our brother’s house, in whose garden the reception was held, ‘Hey, you. You still think you’re tough?’ I swoon before her stubborn desire, and summon my strength.

  What would people think of t
hat? It’s true. It really is. I know what they’d think. Greg would kill me, of course, but the rest of them? Those wasters we grew up with? Those sterile nerds in the Oxford labs. ‘The lucky bastard!’ is what they’d say. Yes. If that didn’t make them envious, I can’t think what would.

  Skin Spot

  Small, round, corky pimples,

  often surrounded by dark,

  sunken rings.

  Eyes may be killed.

  Extensive, superficial light-brown lesions on sprouts.

  MONDAY 4 P.M.

  I’D FORGOTTEN how much I like cars. Here I am, driving this Merc around the ring road, and I feel as if I’ve spent the day reacquainting myself with an old friend. I know it’s a new model, but even so, it’s like an old one’s had a face-lift, a spruce-up. Greg likes a Jag. I get Mercs. Walnut dash. Leather upholstery.

  I did a bit of in and out, overtaking, just now, to get the feel of this animal and see how she responds to me. I’ve never wanted an automatic. I can’t help thinking automatics are for men who haven’t quite figured out where their wife’s hot spot hides out. When you get a new car you want to shift up and down, from first through to fifth and back again, stop, ease across into reverse; get to know where everything’s located, get to know what’s snug and loose, till you know it all and love it like your own wife’s gearbox. And then squeeze your foot down on the accelerator. Hear this beauty purr and growl. Feel her pulling us away.

  They’re going to say I share the blame for the death of two volunteers. Simon Wright panics too easily, he’s not used to pressure. You build up a business like mine and Greg’s over twenty-five years, you accustom yourself to pressure.

  Nineteen of the twenty volunteers who ate transgenic potato developed an immune response. Generally modest, it’s true, but Simon pronounced this a brilliant result. So – with my blessing – he instructed the scientists out there in Amazonia to conduct immediate follow-up research: to challenge all twenty-four volunteers with hefty doses of Norwalk Virus toxin. Yes, all of them, even the control volunteers. Hindsight’s a wonderful thing.

  I am forty-five years old. I am, as a bright spark at AlphaGen brandishing a research paper promised me on my last birthday, in the middle of my life. We may be in a dark wood, and we may well be lost, but the sun has risen and is illuminating ever greater shafts and shadows and clearings amongst the trees. And we are not looking for a way out. No. We are marching into the heart of the wood, probing its deepest secrets. There lies the light.

  John Junior is nineteen weeks old. Our baby is just beginning to develop a sense of humour. He doesn’t quite get the peek-a-boo routine yet, me hiding then revealing myself from behind a door or towel. Sure, he may laugh once and, encouraged, I continue, but then he just stares at me, or he turns and looks at something else more interesting. Like a blank wall, for example. You feel stupid. It may be one thing to die the death at the Glasgow Empire, but to flop in front of your own baby? Fortunately, he’s developed an appreciation of his father coming gradually closer to him, making slow-motion anticipatory sounds (round and round the garden, like a teddy bear) that end with tickling, or kissing, or best of all blowing raspberries into his fleshy tummy.

  John J.’s laugh is a gurgle. It’s so pleasant and so pleasing that I wonder whether just as his crying messes up one’s brain, frazzling one’s thought patterns (Lily and I are the latest parents to discover how difficult it is to drive a car when your baby is crying behind you), so his laughter triggers the release of serotonin or something in my brain: mini-injections of happiness when he laughs.

  I made a mistake over what the boy might find humorous the other day, though, which itself was kind of funny. We’ve had floodlights installed, the sort that come on when movement is detected in a laser beam. To splash a thief with white light. I thought my son would appreciate us creeping along, me holding him and singing the rising notes that anticipate a funny occurrence, then the lights suddenly blinding us. What happened? John J. burst into tears.

  My wife came strumping over. ‘Did you just do what I think you did?’ she demanded, as she grabbed him crying from me. ‘Are you completely insane?’

  Of all the things I look forward to sharing with my son as he grows up – reading, football, science – it strikes me that comedy is top of the list. The old silents of course, then Laurel and Hardy, The Marx Brothers. I’ll stock up on DVDs. Videos of Fawlty Towers and The Young Ones.

  John J. will stare at them stony-faced, I suppose, wondering what it is that’s even meant to be funny, and feeling somewhat sorry for the old folks. As I did for my father chortling at the frantic antics of Alf Garnett, Steptoe and Son. Humour tends to age quicker than anything, doesn’t it?

  Not as quickly as bad art, which ages in the act of creation, is born stale. Like many wives of successful men, there is in Lily, even as she and we and our budding family reap the material benefits of me and my brother’s struggles in the marketplace, a seething frustration and envy. I do my best to soothe it. I tell her she can have or do anything she wants. She doesn’t have to bring the baby up full-time – though she can do. Whatever she wants. Nannies, au pairs; child-minders, nurseries. We could afford it, I swear.

  There is a part of Lily that’s taken on board the modern injunction that one’s first duty is to oneself. But what is this self, exactly? Following the injunction has necessitated the creation, within people’s minds, of a new duality. It’s as if for Lily there is the one in charge, who makes decisions, lives a life, in the body; one who makes sacrifices for others, sure. She does have personality and will, to some extent, but in reality she is a drone whose only purpose is to protect a more important self, her invisible, sacred self that exists in a more refined and fragile dimension deep within the blunt habitual one.

  I can see the future. All over this country there are women whose husbands earn the dough for the family, whose children are growing up and out and away, and who instead of using the expanding time at their disposal for a useful, remunerative contribution to society, find they have the leisure for art. Again, or for the first time; at last.

  All over this country, middle-aged women poets, potters, painters (and their middle-aged male partner-patrons). Photographers, sculptors, batik silk-screening designers. What will Lily do when it’s her turn? How about retablos? Photos, bad snapshots, glued on to driftwood, and painted around and over. That might suit her, it’s an example.

  Lily’s friend, Mira, is a poet. What Mira does is she focuses on some existing area of writing, like gardeners’ seed catalogues or travel brochures, collects a load together (’research’, according to Lily) and fillets the advertising blurbs for notable arrangements of words. These she sets out on a page in the form more or less of poems. Which she puts her name to.

  Mira commits a lot of time and energy to this enterprise, but she couldn’t get these poems published. Well, she had one or two appear in magazines, but no publisher wanted to bring out a book of them. So what Mira did was she started framing her poems and hanging them on walls.

  In response to my bemusement Lily explained, simply, ‘It’s conceptual poetry.’

  Mira’s success was immediate. A couple of years ago our town’s one hip art gallery displayed an exhibition of her work. A thin catalogue was printed, hey presto, Mira had her first book published.

  ‘I still don’t get it,’ I admitted to my wife. To be honest, I couldn’t even work out whether the poems said, or were even meant to say, anything about seeds or travel or what have you. ‘I mean, she hasn’t written a single original word, has she?’

  Lily shrugged. ‘Wake up, sweetheart,’ she advised me. ‘We’re in the third millennium. Is there anything original left, do you imagine?’

  No, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. Not at all. It’s not as if artists are superior beings. The opposite, actually: the average painter or novelist has a higher insulin percentage than most people. He or she suffers an increase in random connections between different
brain areas. Caused by a gene mutation. Left to itself, evolution will probably select artists out.

  No, I think it’s wonderful. What better way for people to spend their time? If the husband’s strivings in the world of Mammon have earned this leisure, why not use it? Let us each do what we do, and do it on each other’s behalf, that’s what I say. That’s my philosophy. Let the baker bake bread on my behalf. Let the estate agent buy and sell houses so that I don’t have to, let a Filipino factory worker solder micro-boards so the rest of us need never think about how our computer works, it just works. Let me and my brother sell spuds for everyone and let the artist explore existence for us all. So I think it’s wonderful: let the ladies paint.

  Except for one thing. A single objection. Why impose their work on other people? That’s all. Why do they spend yet more of their husbands’ earnings on frames, glass, publicity leaflets, the booking of exhibition space? Why do they issue invitations to their friends rather than their enemies, as well as gullible members of the local media, to a Private View? At which some of the sweeter or wealthier of these friends will pay an exorbitant price for some hideous painting that it would be a kindness to take to the local tip on the way home and put out of its misery. But not only can the friends not do that, they will, having committed this initial error, continue to pay for it, for they’ll have to hang the painting at home, won’t they? And not in the attic or the bathroom, no, but in pride of place on their living-room wall, for ever. For as long as their friendship lasts.

  Why do they do it? Exhibitionism, I guess, a kind of striptease by women without confidence in their bodies, which in my opinion may well be luscious in a child-born way, far more agreeable than their half-baked pieces of pottery or ludicrous drawings.

  Men on the whole are less wanton, less shameless. More circumspect, aren’t they?

  But my wife is a striking woman. Fine bones. Strong bones. Lily’s going to look good right through her middle age. Wears her blonde hair cut short. She’s a lesbian, actually: she doesn’t really like men. If we are with another couple or two, for example, at dinner, she invariably addresses and pays attention to the women present. She doesn’t on the whole take men that seriously, I don’t think. She’s at ease in the company of women. When Lily realises that a man is being mildly flirtatious with her you can see her radar go on the blink for a second, she’s all at sea, then she’ll either make the effort to awkwardly respond or more likely move, turn away.