Wake Up Read online

  The hot bath helped. I got tea and biscuits on a tray and Lily came downstairs, and we sat with Jenny the new midwife.

  ‘I realise it’s not happening,’ my wife said. She was still so calm, though she’d hardly slept now for eighty hours, except for sporadic dozes, and suffered a great deal of pain. I was as proud of her as I was worried.

  ‘No, it’s not,’ Jenny agreed.

  ‘I wanted a home birth, but that’s OK,’ my wife said. ‘Let’s go to the hospital.’

  ‘Yes, I agree,’ Jenny said. ‘Let’s go now.’

  Jenny drove up to the hospital, we followed. At eleven, Tuesday morning, Jenny booked us into a delivery suite. An anaesthetist, in a light blue uniform that exactly matched his deep sea eyes, came and put a drip in the back of my wife’s left hand, ready for oxytocin, which induces contractions, and also for a rehydrating fluid called Hartmann’s solution. Then he inserted a neat epidural into her lower back.

  By twelve-thirty Lily announced that the epidural was working, which meant she was no longer troubled by the peculiar agony of her contractions. At last. A breakthrough. Jenny told us to try and sleep. I closed my eyes in the plastic armchair and sank straight into bottomless dreams. My insane wife didn’t sleep at all.

  At two, Jenny added the oxytocin drip, and the afternoon slipped and bobbed along, with Jenny adjusting the oxytocin intake to optimise contractions: those hours have disappeared into a black hole of time. At six, Jenny gave Lily a vaginal examination and announced that there was full dilation. To say I was relieved would be something of an understatement.

  ‘We’ll start delivery in one hour,’ Jenny said.

  We were relaxed and confident. I felt so sorry for Lily. She’d planned a birth in which she would be in control, walking around the house, swaying her hips to music she liked. Here she was virtually strapped down, with an epidural stuck into her spine, an oxytocin drip feeding into her hand, and monitors attached to her belly that measured muscular movement i.e. the contractions of her uterus, and showed them on a screen. While a further device measured the baby’s heartbeat, indicated on a second screen.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I feel stronger, free of that pain. I feel I’ll be able to do whatever I need to.’

  We watched the build-up of contractions on the monitor and at seven Lily started pushing with them, expecting like the midwife a quick third stage, and the imminent emergence of our child. Every five minutes or so we’d see the line on the screen start jumping and I’d say to my wife, ‘Now!’ and she pushed the way she’d been preparing for, exerting all her might.

  Nothing happened. Time went by. At eight o’clock Vicky, the midwife from the night before, came on shift and joined us. Jenny could have left but she said no, she’d stay with us. On her own time. Vicky was good, she encouraged Lily to go for it, and my wife was pushing brilliantly, three times with every contraction. Jenny and now Vicky felt around inside her; they could feel the baby’s head, they couldn’t work out why it wasn’t coming around the pubic bone and out. I looked too. I could see the top of the baby’s head, and I could see that Lily’s pushing, despite what must have been her exhaustion, was exerting tremendous force. But the baby just wouldn’t, couldn’t, emerge.

  At eight forty-five Jenny said, very calmly, ‘I think I’ll just go and have a chat with a doctor.’

  I realised Jenny had been keeping an eye on the screen that monitored the baby’s heartbeat, watching out for signs of foetal distress. I didn’t have any idea that it was also being watched by doctors on a matching screen in a central office in the middle of the delivery suites. Jenny came back with a male doctor. I think he was Dutch. He examined my wife, and, also very calmly, suggested he use a ventouse, a vacuum extractor, to help the baby out.

  Lily agreed, and then, all of a sudden, everything changed: our quiet room was invaded by doctors in masks, nurses pushing trolleys, orderlies carrying equipment. Leads, wires, everywhere. Someone stepped forward and removed the end of the bed and stirrups were clicked into place, and my wife’s feet strapped into them. We’d been plunged into the centre of a medical emergency.

  A semi-circle of medics grouped themselves around the end of my wife’s bed. Two doctors. A paediatrician with a trolley bearing an infra-red lamp over a tiny cot. An anaesthetist. A nurse. One of our midwives.

  I stood on one side of the bed by my wife’s left shoulder, Jenny by her right.

  The Dutch doctor injected an anaesthetic into my wife’s perineum, and he emptied her bladder with a catheter tube. An assistant then started up the vacuum of the ventouse machine, and the doctor attached the end, which looked like a sink plunger, to the baby’s visible head.

  Encouraged by all, my wife pushed in time to the monitors’ urgings. She gave it her all, and so did the Dutch doctor, pulling for all his worth on the ventouse. The baby’s head began to emerge. The doctor grunted, Lily groaned. Like ringside fans, the rest of us cheered them on. Suddenly the suction on the baby’s head snapped loose, the doctor staggered backwards across the room and the baby disappeared back inside where it’d clearly decided it was going to stay.

  The doctor picked himself up. Everyone regrouped. The vacuum machine was started up again, the doc attached his toilet plunger, we all watched the screen, the lines started jumping.

  ‘Now!’ we cried. ‘Push!’ and my obedient, plucky wife pushed, and the doctor pulled. The baby’s head came out, there it was, crowning, no doubt about it … Another inch! Come on! … When – plop! – again the ventouse came off, the doctor threw himself backwards, the baby retreated.

  How long can this malarkey continue? I wondered. They’re going to have to cut her open. Maybe the kid’s weirdly malformed and there’s an aberrational part of its unfortunate body hooked up in there. They warned us that was possible. What’s it going through, anyway? When the hell are they going to decide to perform a Caesarian?

  They started the palaver again though, went through it all, the same cries of encouragement, the same pushing and pulling. This time, the suction held, but even so the Dutch doctor didn’t seem able to pull the child out, when suddenly my wife made a great grunting roar and pushed her baby’s head clear out, and then the rest of its body slithered free. Spontaneous vaginal delivery, as the notes would confirm. The doctor made to pass him to the paediatrician, but Jenny assessed that he was OK and like a rugby player she intercepted, grabbed the baby and put him straight on to Lily’s tummy.

  Lily was done in. She was dazed. The medics administered syntometrine and pulled the placenta out, and they gave her a few stitches. I sat with her and hugged her and the baby, who was all dopey. His head smelled like honey and piss. John Junior had joined us.

  ‘I DON’T know,’ I told the doctor, ‘I always seem to have a sore throat nowadays.’

  ‘You think it’s something in the air?’

  ‘Me? I have no idea. Yes, maybe. What, do you think there is?’

  ‘I don’t know either. People say so, but I’m not qualified to comment. Your son, is he beginning to speak?’

  ‘My son?’ I laughed. ‘No, of course not. Well, he’s making noises, yes. Burbles. Squeaks. But not words. Perhaps one could say he’s finding his voice.’

  ‘And you’re losing yours.’

  ‘What? You think?’ I shook my head. ‘No.’

  ‘Tell me more,’ the doctor said. ‘Tell me about the constipation.’

  ‘Yes.’ I shifted uneasily in my seat. ‘Yes. Sometimes I do get the urge to defecate, well, I have that lovely ache in the arse, I don’t know where it is exactly, you tell me, Doctor, and I make my way to the toilet. Only for the promised relief to, I don’t know, retreat. No, to evaporate. Yes, for the putative stool to reveal itself as so much hot air. As wind, the sound of its expulsion amplified by the toilet bowl, which with its water is apparently a perfectly constructed acoustic instrument: a sardonic echo chamber. Mocking me.’

  The doctor frowned. ‘Do you think you’re being a little, shall we say, me
lodramatic?’

  ‘There’s another thing.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘God. Yes. I’m embarrassed. Sometimes when I have had a shit it seems I can’t clean myself. However much I wipe. I miss something. Roll off more pieces of tissue paper. Spinning the toilet-roll holder like a mouse in a cage. You know the places in the world where they don’t use paper? They use water. They think what we do is unclean. They’re right. I use more paper, enough to clog the U-bend. But a second flush and away it goes. All that soggy wadded mess of tissue, hurtling along the enduring drains.’

  The doctor sat there, placid, impassive as ever.

  I shook my head. ‘Crazy,’ I said. ‘I remind myself of my mother. For fuck’s sake.’

  YOU KNOW, everything is speeding up. Yes, except for my digestion, which is slowing down. Very funny. The last time I was in Berlin I had this taxi driver. He drove with one hand glued to the gearstick, the other alternately wrenching the steering wheel and fist-shaking at other cars. He was the most aggressive driver I’ve ever been driven by, and anyone who’s been a passenger in my brother’s Jaguar would appreciate what a tribute that is. This German punched the steering wheel, cursed, gave the finger to lorries and motorbikers.

  At pedestrians he yelled (I translate), ‘Get off za fucking pavement you shithound!’ as he mounted the kerb in order to gain a few seconds. This lunatic tail-gated the car in front of him, jumped traffic lights, cut across lanes, beeping and snarling all the while. And I, sat in the back, was an irrelevant, if enthralled, witness. His passengers were less people than batons he picked up in a never-ending relay; an endless race through the traffic, a race he never wins for he is thwarted at every turn by incompetent fools.

  A couple of weeks after John J. was born everyone came over to our place. We thought we’d do without a christening. We don’t want godparents. Poor Lily. No immediate family of her own left, mobbed by the Sharpe menagerie.

  ‘What you want mate’s a Compaq iPAQ pocket PC,’ Greg was informing Bill.

  ‘I don’t need games, mind.’

  ‘Who does?’

  ‘One or two, maybe.’

  Lily and I sat on the sofa with John J. on our laps and let my family pay homage. ‘He’s beautiful, John,’ said Melody. ‘I’m so pleased.’

  ‘It’s Lily we should thank,’ said Greg. ‘If you’d left it much later, mind, love, he’d be supporting you all on his pension.’

  ‘I’ll support us if needs be, thanks, Greg,’ Lily told him.

  ‘I think it’s very nineteenth century, John,’ said Bill. Whatever the hell that meant.

  Melody had brought cakes and persuaded Lily to stay put and let her fetch tea and squash from the kitchen, assisted by her children, who when she asked them to help rose as one with robotic good grace.

  Since her fall before Christmas, Mum zimmer frames around her bungalow, but she’s got a wheelchair for special occasions. She can operate it herself with a joystick but being pushed makes her feel more important. Lee was lumbered with the job.

  ‘Watch my ankles John … Greg.’

  ‘Lee, Nan.’

  ‘Watch my elbows, Lee.’

  ‘What’s the suspension like on that road-runner, Nan?’ Bill asked.

  Clint was slumped in an armchair as if his relatives were vampires collectively sucking the lifeforce from him. At some point, though, he must have summoned sufficient energy to slink away. To hole up in a room in our house with a lock on the door.

  ‘He looks nothing like you,’ Mum assured me. ‘Does he, Lee?’

  Melody and Bill’s children sat back down on the blue sofa. They were smiling reminders that teenagers are not obliged to be misfits or ruffians. They said things like, ‘Doesn’t Jacob smell great?’ and ‘He’s lovely, Aunt Lily.’ They were really very nice.

  Did I say this generation had only produced boys? I clean forgot Melody’s April. She looks more like her father than her mother, that’s doubtless why. A pale and chunky girl. It’s probably just as well.

  Greg clipped a Communicam to the base of his mobile and took pictures. John J., needless to say, started making faces like he was trying to poo. Unsuccessfully.

  ‘Tell you what, John,’ said Greg. ‘Hang on.’

  ‘What?’

  He fiddled with the phone. ‘Just a sec. There you go, Lily, digital pics already on your computer. I’ve e-mailed you them.’

  Clint reappeared, looking shifty yet refreshed by a bout of self-abuse in our bathroom, and stood next to his father, whom he proceeded to gently shoulder-barge. Greg nudged his son back. Every now and again one of them chuckled. It was simpler than speech, I suppose.

  ‘Can you believe it, Ma?’ Lily asked. ‘Six grandchildren.’

  ‘Dad never saw one of them,’ Mum sighed. ‘You’d have liked him, Lily. He was a man and a half, he was. Wasn’t he, Lee?’

  I realised that Melody must have served up all the tea and cakes without me, or anyone else probably, noticing. It struck me how different she was from Lily. Lily hands dishes round and people stop to say, ‘Thank you, darling,’ and, ‘How delicious.’ From Melody people find cups and saucers and plates have appeared in their hands. She’s meek. Like Mum, our beloved sister, I had to admit. As if Mum had passed on a self-effacing gene to her only daughter.

  * * *

  Where was I? Oh, yes. Berlin. I wonder whether other people have noticed the dogs there? It’s as if dog-leads are against the law; freedom for canines written into the United Germany Constitution. They’re everywhere, and they lope at their own speed along the pavements (past dawdling, zombie-like humans, dislocated in another, slomo dimension) moving in straight lines on their four legs but with their bodies at a slight diagonal. I’ve seen them.

  One thing affected by the fall of the Wall, not just in Berlin I don’t mean but the crumbling of the Warsaw Pact in general, and Russia’s dereliction too, has been the quality of prostitutes in Germany. They’ve reached Amsterdam and Paris as well, presumably. The standard of beauty has shot through the roof; goddesses you would once have hardly dreamed of laying a trembling finger on are now for sale in every shop window and alleyway.

  I’m not sure how many men realise what a golden age this is for them. These eras pass us by too easily. It’s like the fashion for sports gear a few years back. Suddenly women were walking the streets of England in sporty versions of bras and tights and figure-squeezing knickerbockers. Women’s midriffs displayed to the world. Bellies and thighs and even genitalia lovingly described by Lycra. Cotton-clad bottoms wobbling along the pavements of the streets of my country. I remember thinking that heaven was upon us, we’d entered a new Jerusalem, and here we’d stay. But I didn’t fully savour the moment, for that is all it was, and the moment passed with the next season in fashion. Clothes shops were full of something else and women’s bodies retreated once again behind more demure fabric.

  So, a golden age now of dyed-blonde angels with Slavic cheekbones, though not, funnily enough, a golden age for me. When I pay for it, when I have a consumer’s choice, I like to fuck a big fat woman. Indeed I do. I’ve rarely had a problem finding one when the mood has overtaken me: anywhere there was a smattering of whores I didn’t need to worry, there’d be at least one large trollop. Which is comforting, isn’t it? It doesn’t matter how perverse a man’s sexual fantasies are, he won’t be alone. When Greg first got me hooked up to the net on the home computer I spent a mind-boggling afternoon surfing via links from one website to the next down a ladder of depravity. And what was astonishing, and so reassuring, was that I’d reach a site devoted to the most unlikely and outlandish of proclivities, I don’t know, for men who want to dress up as cardinals in gown and gaiters and tie up a Chinese girl. Or to have their balls licked by a toothless poodle. Whatever. I stole into these sites, assuming I must be the first person ever to discover them, only to see a little box that read:

  You are the

  802, 379

  visitor to this site.

  And
I, with my own taste in the real world, if hardly weird, for giantesses, was catered for. I was not alone; I found the company I sought (which is curious, isn’t it, the idea of ugly whores? Women who can’t get other jobs do the one you might have thought them to be uniquely unqualified for.) Except not any more. The poor fat cows are being squeezed out of the market by sheer aphroditic beauty swanning in from the East. No more part-time hausfraus or fat African rumps. No more slatternly, buxom wallops. Customers have got the upper hand and, topsy-turvily, what sneaking men used to have to make do with has become a minority taste, one I share, that’s hard to cater for.

  I may not be a connoisseur of whores, but I’ve the highest regard for them. There’s too much lust in the world, isn’t there? You shudder to think what would happen to it without them. A five-knuckle shuffle is not always enough, men need to be brought off by another’s flesh. Orgasm. That’s what we’re talking about. What it all boils down to. Ejaculation. How incomparably blissful it is.

  Why I relish bosomy women, though, I don’t know. Neither of my wives, none of my girlfriends, have been unusually large. Lily is long and slender. Is it to make clear for myself a distinction between different kinds of sex? Different orders of relationship? I don’t know, really I don’t. I like to writhe around with roly-poly women; I like to feel them smother me, absorb me, take me. To ram one from behind, thumping against her buttocks, lashings of gluteus maximus, till my knees turn to jelly.

  And as they wobble around, you can almost convince yourself they’re enjoying it.

  The more flesh the better. An obese girl in an American mall, so fat her own flesh is a medium surrounding her. That she, the real her, has to wade and waddle through with every step. Oh, the fat of such a young woman is luscious, it is the succulence of roast lamb, it is the salivation-making pulp of ripe mango. With a plump girl, a man can grope and poke his way to a delicious, enveloping nirvana.

  Myself, I have a disappointing figure. Tall, awkward, not thin – of classical proportions just without the muscle – but rather shapeless. Narrow shoulders, wide hips, scrawny limbs. And now, having entered middle age, a soft paunch; long and puny, yet with loose flab. Naked, I cut an absurd figure, with my thin prick at least proportionate with my frame. I used to suffer a mild form of gymnophobia, the fear of getting undressed in front of other people, of being seen naked, in public changing rooms.