Wake Up Read online

  I am remote. I don’t have friends, for example. People like or dislike my brother. They care what he says to them. They’re wary of Greg, but only in the most obvious way. When I think of each employee we’ve sacked over the years, I’ve been the one who dealt the fatal blow. It was principally my decision, and me who said the words: I’m sorry, we have to let you go.

  One night, two or three years ago, my wife sensed me awake beside her at two in the morning. I’m never insomniac. I sleep soundly, but not this night. No idea why. No reason. Anyway, Lily asked what was wrong, and I thought quickly, and I told her how the next morning I was going to have to tell this chap who’d been with us five years, on the graders, that he was no longer wanted. He had a young family, mortgage, the works, and I was certain he had no idea of what was about to befall him. But I explained to Lily how each time we updated machinery labour costs rose, and I’d considered this fellow’s virtues and his failings and stared at my budgets, and I could not justify his salary.

  As I told Lily all this I became quite emotional. I could tell it impressed her. Lily distrusts the rough and tumble of money, and the catch at my throat was something she was gratified to hear.

  ‘I have to do it,’ I said. ‘Once I’ve done it, I’ll be all right. But I don’t like what I have to do.’

  Lily gave me a sleepy kiss. ‘Don’t change,’ she said.

  Greg and I have always talked. We discuss everything, endlessly. I’d be quite happy to make big decisions alone, and I do believe Greg would let me; while I don’t really need to know every detail of each conversation Greg’s had with farmer, wholesaler, greengrocer and so on and on. But we yap and yak, and I think the words are the bricks in our relationship, they help to make us as formidable as we are. People know how different we may be but they also understand we’re an unbreakable pair.

  Even today, though, Greg gets fed up with administration, and marketing, and I’ll catch sight of him striding across the yard, pulling on a white coat and a hard hat. I know what he’s doing. What he’s doing is he’s going to spend a couple of hours checking machinery and the men and women who operate it. He’s going to make sure that two samples are taken off every load that’s driven in, to be washed and assessed for temperature, mechanical damage and disease; he’ll check that the hot-box, which accelerates their development so they can be tested again, is fine-tuned. He’ll check the decanting of spuds from bulkers to boxes and he’ll scramble over the Acupack, where the potatoes jiggle along riddles that grade them by size. ‘They look like they’re marching,’ my brother’ll tell someone, probably Frank, whose domain it is and has been ever since we installed it, the first in this country; who’ll reply, ‘Yes, boss, they do.’

  Greg’ll watch the women sorting the line and make sure they’re picking out every reject for stock feed; he’ll stare at the bagging machines that swallow punnets with thick clingfilm, and he’ll scrutinise the girls sticking labels on bags for our supermarket customers. And you can be sure that he’ll find mistakes, human and mechanical, wherever he goes.

  ‘That bloody belt’s out of alignment,’ Greg’ll shout. ‘Those should be plastic, not wire, those screens.’ Or, ‘No, that’s not how you do it, Jesus, give it here, I’ll show you.’ As long as they don’t argue he’ll hold nothing against anyone, and he’ll come back to the office refreshed, content, spent.

  When Greg swears at our employees they don’t, on the whole, mind. He’s yelled and cursed and even struck people. But as a result, when he compliments someone they know it means something. They glow. When my brother smiles with appreciation their faces light up too. They’ll do anything for Greg, our workers, it’s one of the secrets of whatever success we’ve had so far. The farmers we deal with, too. Whatever the state of things, Greg assures me, farmers don’t want traders to share their misery: they want someone to turn up and tell a filthy joke or two, take the mick out of their rustic clothes, share some gossip. He’s right.

  * * *

  I used to wonder of other people how they could waste their lives. I was bemused by those without ambition, droning out of school with neither skills nor plans. How can you waste your life?

  Greg and I used to refer to such of our contemporaries as losers, wasters, riffraff. People who had no drive, would never amount to anything, whose entire working lives would depend upon the whim of ruthless bosses, the caprice of market forces. Youngsters like us, they were, with the same fresh sap in them but no, all they possessed was the vague expectation, or demand, that they’d be enveloped in the security of some mundane job, a career even, that would fill the dead hours of the week in which a human being was obliged to work and leave them free, with a little cash in their pocket and spring in their step, to enjoy the weekend. That was all.

  When Greg and I began to employ other people, the losers, the wasters, began to work for us. They began to waste their lives doing our bidding, and I realised that this must have been what they were for: their function was to work for us, to help us build our little company.

  Sometimes you learn true things about people that jolt your idea of them, that startle your framing of the world. Personal things. Secrets. Intimate trivia.

  Take Greg. I know his opinions, his values. So many conversations down the years. Offer me any issue, I believe I could predict his response to it as well as I could my own. I know he thinks for example that in vitro fertilisation – though it failed Lily and me – is going to revolutionise the way we reproduce. And very soon. That his children, or certainly his grandchildren, will freeze their sperm and eggs early on and, while they then get sterilised and enjoy promiscuous lives, babies will be conceived in the lab.

  And in the future, when someone wants to bring up a child, he or she will choose to mate their genes with those, yes, of their partner of the moment, perhaps, but possibly a friend with fine qualities. A good-looking neighbour, maybe. Or they’ll pay for the DNA of some athlete, or actor, whoever they can afford.

  ‘A thousand offspring of Britney Spears roaming the planet,’ my brother conjectured.

  I’ve not told him everything about me and Lily, but that’s what he thinks. I know that. It is more personal details that surprise. A year ago Greg told me that he hated making love in bed. I wasn’t sure I heard him right.

  ‘A bed’s for sleeping,’ he maintained. ‘I like sex in any other room. In every other room. In the hallway. On the stairs.’

  My brother’s marriage was long since over but he’s a serial monogamist: he likes his life shared, in a committed relationship. When it turns, as it always does, he lets it go and gets quickly into the next one.

  ‘What about first thing in the morning?’ I asked him, playing for time. ‘Don’t you ever wake up with your woman, and you both kind of ease sleepily into each other?’

  ‘Maybe,’ he conceded.

  At the time he was telling me this, Greg’s girlfriend was a hazel-headed, energetic solicitor, with whom he disappeared at weekends to go sailing, often with a boatload of other rustling, laughing people.

  ‘That heavy-lidded half-awake sensuality. She snuggles up to you. Don’t tell me you yell at her, No! Not here. Not in bed. Come to the kitchen. Let me ravish you upon the Formica work surfaces.’

  ‘OK,’ my brother accepted. ‘You pedantic twat.’

  ‘I demand the indentation of the draining board in your buttocks!’

  ‘Enough already. If I wake up and she’s already cuddled up in the way you’re describing, nuzzling into me, of course. What, am I going to spoil that? I’m telling you what I prefer, John. I prefer it in the bathroom. In the shower. The feel of porcelain.’

  I sensed myself becoming aroused. I couldn’t help imagining his breezy girlfriend, her flesh spread on white tiles, under running water, drops of water settling across her wide shoulders, on her diminutive breasts.

  ‘I like it in the car, still,’ he continued. ‘I mean, am I a kid? No. But it makes me feel good.’

  ‘You’re a pervert,’ I told h
im.

  ‘And I like it up against the front door,’ he said. ‘I love that.’

  ‘What? On the outside?’

  ‘Inside, you moron,’ Greg laughed. ‘But of course it helps if someone comes up the garden path and knocks. Even better.’

  John Junior has ready-made mentors, unfortunately: his cousins. Greg’s sons are now aged fourteen and seventeen, and they sometimes come out to our place. It’s very odd. I don’t really know why they come. They seem to like Lily. They’re street kids, townies, yet they get themselves a lift to the village and mess about on my quad bike, wheeling around the wild bit Lily calls our orchard. She can’t watch.

  ‘They’ll kill themselves,’ she says.

  The older boy, Clint, lobotomises himself fiddling with his Game Boy. That frenetic docility, it disturbs me. He speaks reluctantly, in a little-used voice of grinding glass. Neither he nor Lee read, I don’t know whether or not they can. Though they’re never without a shiny and expensive magazine or two. Skateboarding. Techno. Football. As far as I can tell from cursory flick-throughs, these mags contain nothing but adverts, no editorial content whatsoever, nothing that demands more than two seconds’ reading of words, nothing to interrupt the grazing over merchandise. Remarkable marketing, it really is. It makes sense: the boys are contented consumers. What would they rather browse than glossy enticements to consume more of their favourite products?

  The boys can both loll for hours in our swimming pool. Mostly, though, they mooch around inside, moon in my wife’s direction, gawk at our flat screen, gas plasma technology TV. Most of the time they live with their mother, some with their father. One gets the feeling they don’t mind which but they’d prefer somewhere else again, really. Their own den to vegetate in.

  The older boy (we seem to be a male-producing family; my sister remains the anomaly even through another generation) is as tall as me. Clint has a curious way of walking: he slouches while at the same time rising up off his tiptoes as he walks. He is a head taller than his father; towers above his mother. On the rare occasions that I see all four of them together, Clint makes Greg look, somehow, like a superseded model. Which I suppose he is. And I guess my own baby son will soon enough do the same to me. Hell, he already has.

  We’ve developed Spudnik over the years slowly but remorselessly, and Greg has accepted all my plans. But he still doesn’t quite trust genetic modification. He’d prefer us to concentrate for our expansion on foreign sales. He likes to represent Spudnik himself at International Trade Fairs and Farmer Expos. Greg doesn’t speak a word of any foreign language, but he’s the kind of chap who doesn’t need to. He’ll hug or shout or drink with strangers, and they’ll get on.

  I keep working at him. ‘Look,’ I said last year, ‘there are already potatoes modified to absorb less fat when fried. You know what that means?’

  He pondered for a moment. ‘Crisper chips,’ he decided.

  ‘Bingo. Tell me that won’t be popular. If we don’t sell them, someone else will and take our market share. People like crisper chips.’

  ‘We don’t need it,’ he said. ‘We should concentrate on increasing the markets we have.’

  Which at the latest count include Hungary, Spain, Portugal, the Canary Islands, Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Holland, Belgium, France and Ireland. A hard-won roster.

  But regarding biotechnology: I accept Greg’s qualms. Some say it’s simply a development of traditional agricultural methods to improve healthy yields. Others, that it’s fundamentally different, a hubristic tampering with nature’s sovereignty. But this either/or dichotomy misses one simple point: that we all seem to think it just occurred yesterday to mad scientists, Hey! Why don’t we mess about with the genes of organisms? That’d be fun! Who knows what we’ll find?

  When in fact, ever since Crick and Watson identified the double helix of DNA in 1953, research has continued, at an ever increasing pace, into the genetic make-up of plants and animals.

  So what I’ve been trying to tell Greg is that what he and the public seem to regard as scientists’ sudden presumption is in fact the opposite: they have been amassing and applying knowledge for fifty years, to the point where not modifying the genes they understand so well would be both absurd and a dereliction of their duty.

  ‘TELL ME about the loss of appetite,’ the doctor said.

  ‘It’s ridiculous,’ I said. ‘I eat like a horse, I always have, just like my father. I love food. I mean I like good food, you know, I appreciate haute cuisine as well as anyone. But the act of eating. The experience of taking food into one’s mouth, tasting, savouring texture as well as taste, biting and chewing it there, and swallowing. The mouth becomes, what? A cavernous realm of sensual pleasure.’

  The doctor gazed at me. ‘You’ve described it also,’ he said, consulting his notes, ‘as a hunger that eating doesn’t satisfy.’

  ‘That doesn’t make a lot of sense,’ I admitted.

  ‘I don’t disagree.’

  ‘Those sound like two quite different symptoms.’

  ‘One would have thought so.’

  ‘When I do eat, I want to eat more. I can feel my stomach bloating, but still I want to consume. As if I want to fill every last space in my body, every last emptiness.’

  ‘I’d like to have a look at your gut,’ he said.

  ‘What worries me,’ I said, ‘is that my father died of stomach cancer.’

  ‘Ah. I see. Naturally, you fear that it may be hereditary.’

  ‘Well, the incidence of cancer has been rising steadily for decades, hasn’t it? But yes, it horrifies me. Cancer. The renegade cell.’

  ‘That’s how it begins. Remarkable, isn’t it? An oncogene can differ from its healthy cellular counterpart by a single point mutation, the alteration of just one chemical rung in the double helix of its DNA.’

  ‘Doesn’t that worry you, Doctor?’

  ‘Worry? It amazes me,’ he said. He was a lot more excited by fatal disease than by good health, that was for sure. ‘By the time a tumour has built up large enough to be detected, it’ll already comprise a billion cells. All self-multiplied from that first oncogene.’

  I shuddered. ‘Unrestrained, anti-social growth,’ I said. ‘Destroying the body in which it grows. Insane.’

  ‘Oh, you must bear in mind,’ the doctor said, ‘how stable our cellular system is. A large number of brakes and checks operate, you know: DNA repairs itself; cells die of their own accord after fifty doublings or so. I mean, it takes a lot for them to acquire cancer’s unwanted immortality, and anyway, clumps of malignant cells soon stop growing unless they connect to the blood supply.’ I began to reply but he cut me off: ‘And what’s more, our bodies have a mechanism for inducing aberrational cells to commit suicide.’

  ‘Literally?’

  ‘It’s called apoptosis. Yes, really. Cancer demands a whole pattern of cellular behaviour that makes it unlikely to occur in a person’s lifetime. But still, if it’d make you feel better, we’ll take a look at your stomach.’

  I began to stand up, pulling my shirt loose from my trousers. The doctor put up his hand.

  ‘I meant from the inside,’ he said.

  I sat down, tucked the shirt back in. ‘Is that going to be painful?’ I asked. ‘Will you use a general anaesthetic?’

  ‘Local,’ he said. ‘I’ll just pop a fibre-optic camera through your navel, and take a look.’

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘You look where you need to. Wherever you want.’

  ‘I’m not saying I’ll find anything.’

  I shook my head. ‘I hope you don’t.’

  While I made to leave, the doctor seemed pensive. ‘You know …’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘With your research …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s not bothering you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Just to say that, you know, genetic material is not dangerous. It’s easily digested by gut enzymes.’

  ‘I know t
hat, Doctor,’ I told him, and left.

  I’M NOT sure what Greg would say if he knew about these consultations with my doctor. ‘You hypochondriac wimp,’ probably. I haven’t mentioned them to him, nor to Lily. But I can be sure he’d like the technology. Why, he’d demand a diagnosis himself. Me, I’m squeamish, but Greg would love to lie back on a clinical couch with his belly button frozen with lignocaine and watch an overhead video of a camera tunnelling through his insides.

  He’s always been ahead of it all, has wanted gadgets to work more efficiently, faster. I remember when he bought his first car, other than our family firm vans. Automatic opening windows. They’d just come in then: you’d spot middle-aged men sat in their cars, waiting for their wives to come out of shops, pushing a button and watching the window slide down and up and down, like hypnotised children.

  My brother? Within hours of getting his new saloon Greg was furious that the window didn’t open quickly enough. If he needed the window opened then it had to be right NOW! He pushed the button and the window slid slowly, slyly down, and my brother gnashed and snarled at it. At least with the old kind of handle he could vent his impatience into wrenching the window open.

  We had an argument the other day, Greg and I. I’d suggested Spudnik sponsor a recipe book of microwaved potato dishes.

  ‘Microwaves are shit,’ he said. ‘You’ve seen the research: it proves that microwaving spuds takes away aroma and flavour.’

  ‘So?’ I said. I told him he was the dim one, that the research was irrelevant. That microwave use won’t stop increasing. ‘Not enough people care about taste,’ I told him. I pointed out that apartments are being built without kitchens: just a fridge, a kettle, and a microwave in the lounge.

  ‘You Can’t Beat ’Em,’ Greg muttered as he marched out of my office. ‘But You Can Fucking Microwave ’Em.’

  What’s the great thing about food? Fresh food? Its inbuilt obsolescence, that’s what. Its blessed perishability. There are manufacturers of non-perishable goods I know who expend absurd amounts of energy attempting to justify the limited lifespan of, I don’t know, their light bulbs, their automobiles. Dishwashers. CD players. The more sophisticated our engineering, the less durable become our goods. It takes phenomenally low prices to keep consumers from questioning this nonsense, but low they must remain, and shoddy the product, too, because turnover is essential. Right?