Wake Up Read online

  We stared at each other for a moment. ‘I’ll have to take your word for it,’ I acceded, but even as I did so I was neatly unpicking my tie and sliding it loose from around my neck. As I peered at the label, she leaned in and did so too.

  ‘See?’ she exclaimed in triumph. ‘Made in England.’

  ‘Precisely! Exported all over the world,’ I countered. ‘Anyway, the point is, and this is the point: what’s it made of?’

  ‘Pure silk,’ she read.

  ‘And where does the silk come from?’ I asked.

  She didn’t know the answer, but I guess she did know it wasn’t going to help her. Instead she began furiously to unbutton my shirt. ‘Right. OK,’ she said. ‘My turn.’ Standing square in front of me she fiddled the buttons out from their eyeholes as if my shirt were on fire and, as the front flapped loose, she reached up and grabbed both ends of the collar and yanked the shirt down my bare back. The sleeves ruffled down my arms, only to bunch at the wrists.

  Thwarted by cufflinks, my wife cursed – ‘Shit!’ – but she instantly spotted an opening: she reached both her arms behind me and scrunched the body of my shirt into as tight a wad as she could and said, ‘You’re stuck.’ A childish smile invaded her face. ‘You’re stuck and I’m right,’ Lily breathed at me.

  What an elegant example of intuitive logic. It’s true, I was stuck, my arms were pinned to my sides. I happened to have been trapped by my own cufflinks and my wife took this as proof that my intellectual position was flawed.

  In reaching around behind me, Lily had pressed her body against me. I could feel with my penis, through the thin and skintight layers of clothing between us, the shape of her pubic mound.

  ‘You haven’t even checked the label,’ I said.

  She let go of one hand and waltzed around behind me, regathering the shirt when she got there. Having missed a momentary opportunity of escape I now tried, too late, to move my hands, but – other than inwards, as if to applaud my captor – it was surprisingly impossible. Not without an authentic violent tussle, anyway.

  ‘Guess,’ she said.

  ‘Thailand,’ I tried.

  ‘Wrong. One hundred per cent cotton,’ she intoned.

  ‘What, is that a clue?’

  ‘No. Not really. I already guessed, by the way.’

  ‘What do you mean you guessed?’

  ‘You’ve got one more go.’

  ‘Malaysia,’ I said.

  ‘No.’ She let go of the shirt and I felt her fingers grip my left cuff and slide it out over my wrist, then do the same to the right. ‘I guessed India,’ she said, as I turned around, and she handed the shirt to me.

  I looked at the label. It said, Made in India. Her eyes were still shiny with that childish glee, convinced she’d turned the tables on me.

  ‘Well, if that’s the way you’re going to play this,’ I said, and I reached forward and took the catch of the zip of her charcoal fleece vest. Gripping the hem of the vest with my left hand, I smartly unzipped her.

  ‘I’m armless underneath,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I smiled, and slid the vest off her acquiescent body. ‘It says it’s a Flyer. Made in USA.’

  ‘But by Patagonia,’ she said.

  ‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘I remember their website. You showed me.’ Lily has a car sticker, bought from one of those Outdoor Clothes and Accessories outlets she likes, that proclaims:

  Screw the Net. Surf the Backcountry.

  But she orders most of such clothes from internet shops.

  ‘Right,’ she said. ‘They’re a company started and run by people who live the outdoor life.’ She squatted down and untied my shoelaces.

  ‘When they’re not living the executive life,’ I said, stepping out of my hand-stitched shoes.

  ‘That has nothing, zero, zilch to do with globalisation,’ she said. ‘These shoes were Made in Portugal, by the by. Plus, anyway, Patagonia’s cotton is one hundred per cent organic.’

  ‘You left the info-label attached,’ I said. ‘Listen to this: A lightweight technical pullover that provides exceptional warmth with minimal bulk and weight. Ideal for a great variety of activities, from providing core insulation on technical outdoor adventures to keeping warm at the beach when the sun goes down. Slim fit through the hips minimizes conflict with harnesses and hipbelts. Anatomically engineered for women.’

  Some job: anatomical engineer for women’s second skins. Call me a pervert if you will, but am I the only person this kind of thing turns on? Lily, meanwhile, was unrolling my socks.

  ‘As with all of our products,’ I continued, ‘our fleece garments are engineered with the same ideology – ideology! who said it was dead? – the same ideology of minimum weight and bulk with maximum performance. We have utilized some of the most innovative fabrics in the world to ensure incredible freedom of movement for high mobility and activity. And a close comfortable fit that maximizes warmth to weight ratios.’

  As Lily stood up I lowered myself to one knee, grasping the top of her thermal leggings on the way down: as she rose, I peeled them down her legs.

  ‘They donate a percentage of their profits to environmental groups,’ she said.

  ‘They can afford it,’ I said. ‘Their profits are vast. They’re a corporation. They’re worth millions. And why not? There’s nothing wrong with that.’

  My wife, leaning forward, put her hands on my shoulders for balance. I pulled the leggings off her lifting feet. They had the feel of an underground nocturnal animal; I brought them to my face and breathed in her heat and her aroma.

  ‘Dakini,’ I said. ’Made in USA as well. Holders of the Crazy Wisdom, it says. Buddhist tights, no less.’

  She grasped my neck just below my ears and ushered me up. As I rose I took her pink sleeveless T-shirt with me: this time she leaned forward to hurry its removal, and stayed there to unclip my belt and unzip my flies. The trousers crumpled to the floor. I stepped out of them as I grabbed her hair, and squeezed handfuls of it. She’d yanked my briefs down and took my throbbing cock in her mouth. I could have come quicker than either of us wanted.

  ‘No,’ I said, pulling her off me. I leaned over her back and undid her bra, holding the undone catch in place till I’d encouraged her upright again before letting the bra go, so that I could watch the spilling release of her gorgeous breasts. I put a hand on the back of her head and pulled us together and kissed her while with the other hand I eased down her knickers by clumsy degrees. We lowered ourselves to the floor then, where I abandoned her mouth and rotated my way around to her quim. It was waiting for me. She returned to my cock.

  That’s how it was for us. That’s the kind of thing we did. I don’t suppose we shall again. But who knows? Who knows?

  Dry Rot

  Externally, skin wrinkled; concentric

  rings around infected area and white,

  pink or blue-green pustules present.

  Internally, cavities often with fluffy mycelium.

  Boundary between healthy and

  diseased areas indistinct.

  MONDAY 12.45 P.M.

  I DRIVE around, around the ring road, at fifty-five. I feel as if I’m tethered to the centre of town by a long rope, like a horse. Every car should be broken in this way.

  The more I consider the matter, the less I think there should be any fuss at all. Two aboriginal villagers who were possibly ill already, their deaths unrelated to the peripheral role they played in the AlphaGen trial. I really do think Simon is overreacting. I’ll calm him down, and I’ll calm Greg down too when I tell him. And I will tell him.

  Here comes the turn-off for … Grove Wildlife Park. Stoke Abbey. Brown signs, the heritage colour. They’re everywhere now. Brown signs used to be allowed only for country houses and zoos and whatnot that attracted a minimum of visitors, say twenty thousand a year. Until a bright spark in the Treasury realised, hey, that doesn’t make any money. So now they’re simply sold. If a person wants a brown heritage sign they just buy it.


  Look, here comes another one: for a pub. The White Hart at Newbridge. They do good food there. I feel a bit peckish. Almost lunchtime, what time is it?

  I know about the brown signs because Greg said a couple of years ago, when we were trying to sort out a cash-flow problem, ‘Why don’t we open up the site here to visitors? Charge entrance?’

  ‘You what?’ I said.

  ‘Offer them cream teas, ice creams, a guided tour.’

  ‘A tour of what?’

  ‘The potatoes’ journey. In on the lorries, off on the loaders. Sorters and packers, right through the warehouse. The graders.’

  I shook my head sadly at my brother.

  ‘They’d love it,’ Greg said, even while shrugging the idea loose from his shoulders and letting it go as he walked out of my office. Idiotic. Although actually I think he was on to something. Men love to watch other men working, don’t they? Roadworkers, window cleaners, builders: look around and you invariably find other chaps idly studying them.

  Greg said to me, when I first mentioned AlphaGen’s business to him, ‘What are you telling me all this about bananas for?’

  ‘Bananas,’ I said, ‘illustrate the process of bio-pharming. We deal in potatoes, but we need to think of them as a particular technology. Different markets require appropriate technologies.’

  The principle remains the same. Food that provides nutrition and medicine in the same mouthful. Bananas are a common food staple in most of those countries whose children are dying needlessly. They don’t need to be refrigerated. They’re customarily eaten raw. A field is cheaper than a chemical manufacturing plant. There is no need for sterile equipment nor trained medical personnel.

  Greg was squeezing his mobile as if urging it to interrupt us. ‘And consider this,’ I told him. ‘By engineering a few pigmentation genes, the medicinal bananas could have their peel splashed a different colour from normal ones. The blue bananas are good for you.’

  Greg emitted a dismissive burp of laughter. ‘No shit.’

  ‘Pink potatoes will make you well.’

  Before bearing a child, ought we to ask ourselves whether we should be adding another mouth to the population of this world? I was in town a couple of weeks ago. I saw the beggars. Asylum seekers. Drug addicts. Should we be inflicting this world upon a new being?

  But I don’t have to justify myself to Greg or anyone else. That’s the beauty of the times we live in.

  Lily’s pregnancy was what they call an easy one. A minimum of morning sickness, no apparent complications. We were well monitored. She had ultra-sound scans. At seventeen weeks her midwife reckoned she was too big. ‘Either we’re a month out with our calculations,’ she told Lily, ‘or there are twins gathering there.’ Twins! We thought, My God, it’s cloned itself! Over the week between this assessment and the resultant scan I took to the idea. I’d like us to have a couple of children, and what could be better than both at once?

  Lily lay down, I sat beside her, the radiographer slapped on some cool gunk and moved her scanning device over my wife’s gelid tummy. We watched a churning, mercurial flux on the black and white monitor. It looked like ancient footage, from some nineteenth-century archive. A primitive, spooky attempt at photographic representation. Opaque prenatal images.

  ‘There’s the head,’ the technician said. ‘There’s a foot.’

  All I could see was a bubbly, blobby cauldron. Maybe in fact it was quite clear, and I was like one of those natives given a photograph who turns it round and upside down. I just couldn’t see the new.

  ‘But how many are there?’ my wife asked.

  ‘How many? Just the one,’ the technician said. ‘Look, there’s its arm.’

  What happened to the other one? I wanted to ask. What have you done with our twin? I almost demanded in sudden disappointment. Then I saw the baby’s back: the interlocking vertebrae in its curved bent spine, emerging through the murk; bones brand new, and prehistoric.

  Lily dragged me along to antenatal classes, although she’d already read the books: she knew everything the midwife and health visitor told us. The most useful thing they could have got us to do would have been to tie one hand behind our backs and try making a cup of tea. Because with a baby in the other hand that’s what you’ll soon be doing. One-handed games would be a good ice-breaker, actually, in a circle of belly-protruding, queenly women – beside each, in comparison, a weedy-looking man-drone. All our lives about to be turned inside out. Anxious, smug, serious women. It was comic.

  Lily planned a home birth, to which her gynaecologist shrugged in a Mediterranean way and said, ‘No problem.’ We prepared the house as if for a party, music all set up – belly dance tapes to help with contractions, Bach and Enya in between. Fairy lights and incense. Bowls and towels and whatnot. We almost hired a birthing pool, some friends of hers had used one. The bloke shed his clothes and jumped in too. Lily’s a dolphin in water, and perhaps for that reason she didn’t like the idea of being trapped in a pool of it for hours.

  The baby was due on the 3rd of December, but the first one’s generally late, and ours duly was. The following Friday Lily had an appointment with the midwife, and while she was in the surgery she had a show, as it’s called: a discharge of blood as the mucus plug that keeps the amniotic sac protected, at the neck of the cervix, comes loose; the first sign of the onset of childbirth. Propitious timing, we thought. Lily came home excited, and sure enough, around midnight her contractions started.

  We called the midwives in the morning and the senior one came at 9 a.m. She’s been practising in and around town for forty years; she’s delivered the babies of people we know, not to mention the people themselves. She gave Lily an internal examination and pronounced that there was no dilation of the cervix yet. It needs to dilate ten centimetres before a woman’s ready to give birth. Lily’s contractions continued. The midwife came back at 1 p.m., performed another vaginal examination, and said the cervix was still barely open.

  The rest of Saturday afternoon, into the evening, and all through the night Lily had regular, painful contractions.

  ‘They’re not right,’ she told me. ‘I knew they were going to be painful, but this is the wrong pain.’

  ‘How can you be sure?’ I asked her.

  ‘Look,’ she said, holding her fingers against the front of her lower abdomen. We consulted diagrams. ‘It’s pushing out against my synthesis pubis. It should be pushing down against the cervix.’ She grimaced as another contraction came. ‘It’s not right.’ She closed her eyes, she looked tired.

  ‘I’ll phone,’ I said.

  At 3 a.m. an on-call midwife came. She gave Lily another internal. ‘It’s barely one finger dilated,’ she said. ‘If that. Why don’t you take a couple of paracetamol, get your husband here to make you a hot-water bottle, and try and get some sleep.’

  It was good advice, and we took it, and Lily slept a few hours. She woke, but carried on dozing on and off through Sunday morning, until the contractions started again around noon, immediately painful, stabbing her, in the same way as they had before.

  She spoke on the phone to someone, I don’t remember whether it was a doctor or a midwife, and they said to relax as much as possible and just stay with it. We had the feeling we were going round in circles. Sunday evening wasn’t too bad, and Lily got some rest, but then from midnight on she was in a lot of pain, with the same short, sharp contractions.

  Lily sent me to the spare room to get some sleep. ‘You won’t help me if you’re exhausted,’ she said.

  Around the middle of Monday the contractions became longer and more regular than they had been. Another midwife, an Irishwoman, came at 3 p.m. She gave my wife an internal examination and said the cervix had thinned, it had just started to dilate.

  ‘This has been going on since Friday night, for Christ’s sake,’ I said.

  ‘It’s not the right pain,’ Lily insisted. But I could see that the midwife didn’t heed what she was saying, because she was in such con
trol. ‘It’s really painful,’ my wife said, but she wasn’t weeping and wailing so the midwives just thought, This woman, she doesn’t know what pain is – but she will soon enough, God help her.

  The Irish midwife advised Lily to rest, to lie on her left side, which meant the baby’s back would be facing downwards, and gravity might encourage his head away from where it seemed to be hurting her. I took the midwife aside as she left. ‘Tell me,’ I whispered through gritted teeth, ‘what the hell is going on?’

  ‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘Everything is fine. You relax as well yourself.’

  Lily lay on her side but the searing pain continued striking her. At 1 a.m. we called the hospital and yet another midwife turned up. Her vaginal examination revealed dilation of barely three centimetres. She stayed with us, calm as all the others. At two-thirty all of a sudden my wife’s waters broke. There was a smell like the smell of a broken egg. Over the following three and a half hours Lily had intermittently strong and weak contractions. Still that pain.

  ‘We’ll do another examination at six,’ Vicky promised. Our anticipation prickled: when the time came all three of us were eager. Vicky felt around. You could see her trying to stop herself frowning. ‘I’m afraid there’s no further dilation.’

  We were getting desperate by now. Lily started trembling. She tried walking up and down the stairs to jog the baby loose, with little effect on anything except to tire her further, so she took a couple of paracetamol and we both went to bed, while downstairs Vicky swapped shifts with the next midwife and explained my wife’s situation. But Lily couldn’t sleep. She was still suffering stabbing pain with every useless contraction, and I could feel her shaking beside me. ‘I can’t stop,’ she said. ‘I have to stop trembling. Run me a hot bath.’

  I did as she asked. ‘It’s no good, John,’ she stuttered. ‘We have to go to hospital. Let me have the bath, help me stop shaking, and then we’ll sort this out.’