Wake Up Read online

  I was fourteen when Greg left school, able to look after myself if necessary, and I’d begun to specialise in science subjects. I’d gained a year by the time I sat Chemistry, Physics, Maths and Biology A levels, in each of which I obtained grade As, and I was offered a scholarship by St Catherine’s College, Oxford, to study Biological Sciences.

  In that last summer vacation I worked for Greg. He’d transformed our yard with the erection of a new, airy, corrugated-iron shed, and he made me warehouse manager, taking deliveries from lorries and loading up the fleet of three vans Greg was already running.

  ‘You’re efficient, John,’ he said on one of my last days. ‘You know that? I’ll be sad to lose you. You’ll be wasted in laboratories.’

  When I went up for the beginning of the first term I took fewer clothes and supplies and equipment than I needed, just as much as I could bear alone, so that I could travel by coach rather than accept a lift from father or brother and be driven in a Sharpe’s Fresh Produce van. I arrived at university like a refugee.

  At Oxford in the mid seventies a comprehensive school boy with a West Midlands accent was bound to be daunted by the privileged majority of his fellows. It wasn’t that you suffered any kind of direct prejudice or snobbery. Some of those sons and daughters of the nobility, indeed, were the most graceful and generous companions I’ve known. It was just that they were changelings. In lectures, in the college bar, on the football pitch, we looked alike. But when you glimpsed them as dressed-up members of archaic clubs you’d not heard of, never mind been invited to join, enacting arcane rituals, or when they stood up in the Union and spoke without nerves, or drank champagne not Coca-Cola through a straw, or disappeared for Christmas in Switzerland. That’s when you knew how charming they really were, it was you who was the clod-hopping imposter.

  None of this mattered in the lab: a white coat offered anonymity and I lost myself in experiments and essays. The study of cells and genes, of organisms and populations. I was immersed in plant and microbial biology, in the analysis of complex systems, having proceeded to the Honour School of Botany after Prelims. The fact is, we were too busy for introspection, attending ten lectures a week, one or two tutorials, and practical classes. I devoured set reading and reference books, applied my brain to problem-solving exercises. I discovered, of course, that there were plenty of people as bright as and brighter than me. But I was undaunted, confident I could achieve whatever I wanted through hard work and willpower.

  In the evenings I tried to drink, but soon learned that alcohol, as well as cigarettes, marijuana, amphetamines, were poisons inimical to my own biochemistry, for rare enjoyment only.

  There were college discos. I can’t dance and never could. I’ve always been one of those uptight men, who have to grit their teeth to get down on the dance floor. You have two options: stiff or floppy. You either do a kind of stilted jerk in one place, march on the spot until the time comes when it’s not too shameful to slip away, or else you do what I do, which is to let yourself loose and let what happens to your body happen. The disco flop.

  I had sex with four or five girls during my three years at Oxford without establishing a relationship with any one of them. My overriding impressions of those days are of hard work and solitude, less in the lab, focusing one’s attention down the gaze of microscopes into the molecular structure of life, than out in the field: in Wytham Woods, the Botanic Garden and the Arboretum at Nuneham Courtenay.

  I have a clear memory of sitting down in the St Catz bar one evening, exhausted with study, and taking a long draw from a pint glass of beer. I became aware of the alcohol floating through my blood, felt my eyelids flutter, and my brain begin to relax the tension holding it together. And I remember realising that, for all my supposed intelligence, I couldn’t quite work out whether I was the happiest man alive or in a state of severe depression.

  I completed Finals in the early summer of 1976, assuming – as did my tutors – I’d get a First and return to Oxford to study further, either by doing research towards a doctorate or by postgraduate training in Forestry. In my dawn plans, in a narrow bed in a shared house on Kingston Road, I was leaning towards a future concerned with natural resources in tropical countries.

  Although in those days we received government grants that covered most of our living expenses, I’d borrowed some money from Greg, so without waiting for my results I went straight home to work for him. For Sharpe and Son, as Greg had generously renamed the company, although Dad ran just his one stall in town still, as he always had. Actually, I discovered that Greg was having to cover Dad there with one of his employees, because Dad, who never missed a day’s work, kept having to admit he felt too ill to lift crates. Always a thin man, he’d lost weight, and looked like the victim of some inexplicable assault. At supper he’d frown at the plate Mum put in front of him as if surprised by it. ‘Not for me, love,’ he’d tell her, and when he saw me looking at him, say, shaking his head in a puzzled way, ‘I seem to have lost my appetite, son.’

  Dad would get up from the dinner table and wander outside to have a cigarette and try and work out why he wasn’t hungry, but you knew, really. His body was refusing sustenance, like he was living on smoke, and you knew.

  ‘I’ve got a neat project for you, John,’ Greg told me. ‘I want you on the road.’ There was a potato supplier in town who was about to retire, and Greg had bought the business. It was a small operation, consisting almost entirely of a contract to supply a few primary schools, and Greg pitched me right in: I spent my first week back home motoring round with Alfred Jemson in the green van he was bequeathing us, being introduced to various catering managers and dinner ladies. The following week Alfred was putting his feet up in Benidorm, while I drove the newly sign-written Sharpe and Son van from school to school.

  It was the summer that changed my life. The work was a breeze. I started seeing a girl, Jen, one of Melody’s friends who’d just left school. We went swimming in the warm evenings in the river north of town, I fed her ripe peaches, and we screwed on a rug in the grass or, when Jen’s flesh goose-pimpled as the sun went down, in the earth-smelling back of Alfred Jemson’s spud van.

  All summer Dad was dying. When he went into hospital we spent most of each Sunday up there, Mum and Melody camped by his bed. Greg would go outside for a smoke, and I went with him.

  ‘Don’t think I’m not proud of you, John,’ Greg told me. ‘I am, as much as Mum, or Melody. Dad too. But I do wish you’d join me.’

  I was just as proud of Greg. He was barely twenty-three and already established, a man of substance in our town. We sat on the grass bank at the side of the hospital and gazed over the rooftops of the town spread out below. People walked to and fro, between hospital and car park, in front of us.

  Greg stubbed out his fag and grabbed me, wrestled me down the bank and held me in a headlock. ‘My little boffin brother,’ he said, and kissed my forehead before letting me go.

  ‘Jesus, Greg,’ I said, picking stems of grass off my clothes. ‘Look at this stain.’

  We climbed back up the bank.

  ‘I do wish you’d come and work with me,’ Greg said. ‘Don’t laugh. I’m serious. It’s lonely. I’ve got people work for me but they don’t give a shit.’

  ‘How many people now?’ I asked him. ‘Seven?’

  ‘Eight. One’s part-time, and one just a Wednesday.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I’ve got four vans. I’ve got three stalls, plus Dad’s. I’ve got the schools contract. I’ve got the shop now.’

  ‘Your first shop already,’ I said, shaking my head. Dad had laboured thirty years with no thought of such progression.

  ‘The overheads pile up like you wouldn’t believe, John. I’m in debt up to here. I hate it. And all they want is to give you more. My bank manager says, “Come and see me, Greg. Whenever you need a further loan.”’

  ‘They’re not stupid,’ I said. ‘He must know you’re a good bet.’

  ‘I can’t stand to
look at another business plan.’

  I turned to smile at my brother. He looked like I’d never seen him before: angry, anxious and a little bewildered. ‘I can’t stand it.’

  ‘This is not about Dad, is it?’ I said. Greg didn’t respond. We sat in silence for a while. ‘Oh, it must be,’ I declared, leaning forward and letting gravity bring me to my feet, and I pulled Greg up. ‘Come on, brother, let’s get back in there. He’ll be all right. Dad’s a fully paid-up member of the awkward squad: he’ll be on the stall next week just to wrong-foot you.’

  My older brother has been a big and bluff and reassuring presence all through my life. I grew up with it and it’s there with me today. People respect and trust Greg. He’s afraid of no one. But for that brief moment, a couple of months, what he’d built was trembling. I couldn’t admit there was something, everything, he couldn’t handle. I resisted my own awareness that Greg had reached his limit, his own glass ceiling. Indeed, he was already over-extended. The fact was, Greg had no gift for abstraction. As long as he could see what he owned, count the turnover in his head, watch what his employees were doing, haggle and barter, juggle the components of a business like oranges in his hands, then Greg was the master of his domain. But the business was spreading around and beyond him and he was lost.

  The following Sunday we sat on the same brown sun-baking grass outside the hospital. ‘It’s not difficult to begin to analyse a complex system,’ I told him. ‘And this is a simple one. All you want to do is systematise the processes involved.’

  ‘I do wish you’d join me,’ Greg said gloomily. Then he brightened. ‘Could you do that this summer, John?’ he asked. ‘This analysis of yours?’

  My degree result came. I opened the envelope in the yard and stared at the piece of paper, not breathing. They hadn’t given me a First. They’d given me a worthless 2:1. ‘A good 2:1, John,’ my tutor would bullshit me, a couple of days later. It was the mark of bright youth. Of clever students who’d spent their time in drama or sport or debate; of future politicians, journalists, businessmen, who’d go on to run the country. Intelligent people who had things in perspective.

  A good 2:1 was the mark of the not quite Firsts, the almost geniuses but not really. In fact, nowhere near. Actually also-rans. The workaholics for whom no amount of study and revision could make up that gap between themselves and those destined for profound academic success.

  Realising my knees were about to go I sat on a crate in the yard, put my head in my hands. Melody came out with a glass of water. ‘Are you OK?’ she said. ‘You’re shaking.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said.

  ‘What happened? Did you faint?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘You’re white,’ Melody said.

  I was struggling not to weep. ‘Piss off,’ I said.

  There was silence. It was the only time I’ve ever spoken like that to Melody.

  ‘I’m going inside now,’ she said. I glanced up. She was smiling at me. She turned and went away.

  It took me another two days before I could tell anyone. Two days of coming to terms with betrayal: I couldn’t work out why I’d been deceived, and deceived myself. I’d thought I could do and have anything I wanted, but it turned out this wasn’t the case. A small knot of rage tightened in the pit of my stomach. Who knows? Maybe it’s still there today.

  Of course, when I told my family, they were delighted with my degree. Greg broke open a bottle of Asti Spumante around Dad’s bed, and Dad promised he’d be out of hospital for my graduation.

  ‘I don’t intend to miss you in a black gown, Johnny,’ he said, spluttering with feeble laughter. ‘And a plasterer’s board on your head.’

  They were almost his last words to me.

  We’re coming up to Kite Hill. Up there’s the hospital. There on that floor’s the ward where we visited him. He never believed he was dying. The weaker he got, the more tubes and wires his wasted body was tethered by, the more plans he made. No one told him. They do things differently now. He was withering in front of our eyes and he started croaking at Mum about holidays, taking her abroad. Childhood summers once or twice he drove us down to Weymouth. Mum didn’t want to go anywhere but Dad acted like she did and always had, like he’d make it up to her as soon as he bounced out of that hospital bed.

  Mum’d have a sob once we got out in the echoey corridor. ‘Majorca,’ she’d say. ‘Dad wants to take me to Majorca,’ she sniffled in the car on the way home from watching the cancer consume him, right there in front of her.

  We want to live long. We want our children to live for ever. To be spared death. A chap I know has a company developing xenotransplantation: the transfer of animal organs, hearts, kidneys, livers, into human beings. Humanised pigs. Genetically altered to match an individual client, ready and waiting to provide an organ when those of that person fail.

  Certain primitive tribes believe themselves watched over by unearthly guardians: each soul accompanied by an animal familiar. Eagle, panther, gorilla of the spirit world.

  Now my son too will be protected, by his very own lab animal.

  Blight

  Haulm: Initially brown spots with

  pale green margins, often with

  whiteish mould on undersurface.

  Spread can be rapid with leaves

  killed completely.

  Tubers: Brown to purplish areas on skin,

  with rusty-brown, granular

  marks in the flesh.

  May remain dry and firm, but often

  followed by soft rots.

  MONDAY 10 A.M.

  WILL THEY say that I am implicated?

  There were four people in the control group. Two of them are fine. They had diarrhoea, vomiting, some sweat and shakes, but now they’re recovered. The two unfortunate specimens who died were ill-chosen: one too young, the other too old. Their selection by the scientists in the field was irresponsible, not to say reckless. It may be that Simon and I should inform some authority of the scientists’ error before they return. Yes, this may well be the thing to do.

  I’m driving around the ring road. Here comes my exit again already. Time to turn off: apply your fingers to the indicator. Their weight is not enough to depress it. They tremble. Oh, look, I missed it.

  Cobditch. Buckland. Foxmoor. There’s the crematorium. They’re always out of town, aren’t they, crematoria? Yes, Lily, I got it right. That’s the plural.

  The priest at the crem, a stranger to us all, gave a short eulogy gleaned from what we’d told him about Dad. Worker, joker, abiding husband, pillar of his community, stalled in the market thirty years. He summed Dad up well in a few words. Then he said, ‘Let us pray.’

  People had already stopped kneeling, hadn’t they? We don’t want to be disrespectful to ourselves. There was a sound of bottoms shuffling as people sought a compromise: we leaned forward; we ducked. I glanced behind me. Mourners trying to hide. From the priest? From God? I don’t know.

  What can you do? You take a bit of Celtic myth from here and a bit of Hindu yoga from there, as Lily does. It’s either that, or ignore the whole business, like me. I don’t see what else you can do.

  Many years later, long after Dad’s death, I spotted him and Mum crossing the High Street. It had only just been pedestrianised. Dad looked surprisingly spry, although both my parents appeared suspicious of the vacated tarmac. Hand in hand Dad was helping Mum, leading the way, but he looked as anxious as she did as they made their tentative way across a road in which there was no traffic. Their every step suggesting unseen dangers which might have replaced traffic, and could erupt in front of them, an invisible obstacle course.

  And it was many more seconds, half a disbelieving and wonderful minute, before I understood that it wasn’t Dad at all, it was some other thin man crossing the road with Mum. In fact, it wasn’t even Mum. It was two strangers my brain mixed up, in a moment of derangement, with my parents.

  When I was a child we were given polio vaccines in a sugar cube. Al
l others were by injection. There was no doubt which we children preferred.

  It’s now twenty years since foreign DNA was first inserted into the genomes of plants. Shortly after that, it occurred to a couple of American molecular biologists that plants might be coaxed into expressing vaccine antigens, and eaten as an alternative to a jab.

  This is the idea. Edible Plant Vaccines.

  I met Simon Wright, the MD of AlphaGen, five years ago. I joined his board soon after. With academic partners in Plant Biology at Cambridge, AlphaGen had just achieved the first successful expression of a hepatitis vaccine in transgenic potato. They were almost ready to conduct human trials, and a partner in the potato trade – one willing to invest – was welcomed.

  There can’t be many ring roads go right around an old town like ours, roundabout to roundabout.

  How nice it is to orbit the town. I wonder whether I or the car might get dizzy, going round in circles like this? I should cross to the other side, and resume in the opposite direction.

  I feel like a satellite. Things are slowing down. We’re gradually transcending the gravitational pull of the earth. Entering galactic time, where nothing matters if it lasts for less than a million years. Where empires rise and fall in the blink of an eye. Where all that matters is an ice age … or a falling star … or the birth of a child.

  While my son sleeps beside me in the early morning, I scribble. I still make plans at dawn.

  He doesn’t like to be watched in his sleep, John Junior – which is what I call Jacob. He’s like me (of course). However silent I am, he’ll stir, he’ll fidget. Sometimes his eyes open simply because, it seems, he’s being observed. It’s true, they really do. But I love to watch him. It feels less the absorbing observation of a process taking place, of life unfolding (though it is this too), than me feeding myself, visually. Feasting on my son with my eyes.

  Our son is woken in the early hours, either by what Lily takes, from his reddened cheeks and drooling, to be teething, for which she slips a camomilla homeopathic pill on his tongue, or else by some hindrance in his digestion. His mother soothes him with soft stroking words, but sometimes he won’t be calmed and I scoop him up out of bed, rush him away from my exhausted wife. Then you may find me in the dead of night, feeding John J., my finger dipped in dill water.