2002 - Wake up (24 page)

“We’ve been taken over by Amazons,” Greg declared. “They’re everywhere.”

“Girls are bigger than they were in our day,” I agreed.

“Our day?” he said. “
Your
day, you old fart.”

“What about the boys?” I asked him.

“What? You see men?”

“You don’t see men?”

“No,” he said. “Not really.”

I considered this. “Neither do I,” I told him. “Except the old ones.”

“They come out with the spring, too,” my brother laughed. “Old men and young women.”

§

I told Greg everything, yesterday lunchtime. I dragged him to a pub. He listened. I said, “Trust me, brother.”

§

A memory keeps recurring. Our Uncle Ray. My mother’s brother. He was detached from our family. An oddball, thoughtful, a self-taught scholar; he’d moved from town to country, made a living fashioning cast-iron beds, was it? No, bannisters. Railings. With decorative swirls and knobs and flourishes. I forget exactly. He had a workshop.

Our uncle had no family of his own. My mother mentioned a ladyfriend, but I never met her. I suspect Mum made her up to reassure herself, to make her brother seem less strange to her.

Dad smiled indulgently whenever his brother-in-law was mentioned. “He’s made nothing of his life,” he’d say good-naturedly. “And why should he?”

“He gets by,” Mum would say.

“Why not? That’s all he needs to, he’s a bachelor.”

“His ladyfriend has her own means.” As if no woman who did would marry.

The fact was our uncle was a loner. He’d cut himself loose. But for a time, a period of less than a year when I was ten or eleven, I visited him. I’d be packed off on the bus and be carried the twenty-odd miles into the country to stay for the weekend.

This memory keeps recurring: the first time I went on a ramble with my uncle. On the Sunday morning he fried a breakfast and then went and sat down in his favourite chair and picked up a book, as if I wasn’t there. He’d forgotten I was, or saw no reason to explain the due order of events in his house. So I sat down and read, too. I was a bit of a reader, did I say that already? And then at some point, when I was engrossed in whatever I was reading, I was snapped out of it with the slap of his book down and his abrupt exclamation, as if he’d suddenly noticed I was there: “Boy! Let’s us go ramble.”

This memory recurs. We walked a while, side by side when our path ahead was apparent, me following otherwise. Saying nothing. I sank into my own thoughts. Into the book I’d been reading. I don’t know,
Rogue Male
, perhaps;
Kidnapped
. Some adventure. Or off on one of my own boy’s fantasies. Occasionally looking around, seeing nothing other than hazards such as nettles and brambles, sinking back. We—me and my family—lived in the town, where every movement signified something human, or mechanical, that might be relevant to one’s survival, or at least entertainment. This landscape we walked through was uniform: wherever you looked, either trees or fields.

My uncle’s first words on our ramble were, “That’s far enough, I reckon. Better get back for lunch, boy.” And then this question: “What did you see?”

I was flummoxed. I remember my feelings acutely: embarrassment, resentment, shame. I’d been wrong-footed. As if I’d walked into an exam and been faced with a paper for which I was unprepared in a subject I’d not even studied. Yet there was no mistake, it was certainly my fault, because my uncle’s question clearly implied that there were things I could have seen, but had failed to. I understood this to be true. I mumbled some evasion.

On the walk back, the ramble home, Uncle Ray brought to my attention landmarks we passed. He named trees, birds, crops growing in fields. He pointed out edible plants, and the habitats of animals, upon which a resourceful man could survive. I remember it with the peculiar acuity of a dream because that is how I experienced it. I drank in every sight, the world broken down, broken open, revealing its secrets as my uncle beckoned them with his words. Science before it interferes.

“What you see, you own,” he said. “It’s yours. All yours.”

For a year or so I became an avid nature lover, my pre-pubescent boy’s hungry mind consuming lists of flora and fauna. Took that bus whenever I could, weekends and school holidays. In the winter I slept in his bed. He taught me to cook. But mostly I wandered. I saw. I owned.

“What do you
do
out there?” Greg asked me.

“I go rambling,” I told him, and I didn’t want to explain.

But I grew up, girls began to turn my head, I played football. I stopped going to see my bachelor uncle in the country. I laid my plans. Uncle Ray died. But his words that first day: “What did you see?” The memory keeps recurring.

§

It may be that growth only comes, or came, with fear of death. That it was only when human beings became uneasy with their place in the cycle of life and death that they developed technology in the first instance.

Mortality comes ever more to mind in middle age, naturally. My family background provides no compass for approaching death. Our grandparents had already joined the twentieth-century drift from religion: my parents may have exhibited still the proud incuriosity of that part of the English working class they came from, but they’d bravely shrugged off the dumb faith that used to go with it. So I possess no liturgy learned by rote, no ingrained dogma, with which to deal with death.

I study my son. I see no evidence of behaviour that may suggest his having lived before, see only his slowly forming brain. As for myself in him, there’s consolation in that, of course. I should hope so. More than anyone has ever had before me. Well, we want some payback, right?

Our son is so robust. At nineteen weeks old so big and fat and cherubic, that I have no fears about his health. I really don’t worry at all that John Junior might have something seriously wrong. He’s given me no cause to. Tiny symptoms—rashes, coughs—that Lily spots and anxiously alerts me to, I shrug off. “It’s nothing,” I say, and I mean it. And it is nothing, it goes away.

I’ve only one worry. Not that he will be sickly, but that he will die. Cot death, stopped breathing in the night. A monstrous fit seizing his healthy body. Ridiculous.

The fact is, now that he’s made it this far, an infant today is likely to live long. A hundred and fifty years, according to one of the AlphaGen chaps. As long as I make some money for John J. to inherit and hang on to, so that he can afford the necessary treatment along the way. Virtually immortal, says the biologist.

§

AlphaGen and ourselves agreed a couple of months ago to proceed upon the assumption that the Norwalk Virus clinical trials would be successful, and planned how best to work together on bulking up the materials AlphaGen had produced in laboratory tissue culture, for larger-scale testing. They already have almost enough seed to put out a whole field of potatoes.

Such planting will not be possible in this country for years. Even in the States, government permission to grow the crop outdoors is not quite forthcoming. We could work in glasshouses there, but field trials are essential as soon as possible. I’ve earmarked an out-of-the-way spot over in the Marches. There’s a farmer grows potatoes for us in a remote valley. No lanes, no footpaths, pass close by. I’m confident it’ll be possible to lose a hectare or two of transgenic potatoes in their midst. Greg knows the farmer well. I’m sure he’ll look after him.

§

Greg has always claimed not to be excited as I am. He plays this game with me: says he’d rather put a barrier up around this whole island. That organic is the way forward, and that if the public can see we’re GM-free they’ll
Buy British
. They’ll buy from
Spudnik
. I’m not saying he’s stupid, I love my brother.

“What’s the wife reckon, then?” he provoked me yesterday, when I told him about AlphaGen and the trouble in Venezuela.

“You think I’ve told Lily?”

Greg gazed around the pub. Buying himself time to think things through. “I wonder what Melody would say.”

“What the hell’s Melody got to do with anything?” I said. “Listen to what I’m telling you.”

“Technology is never inevitable,” Greg pointed out. “The Aussies haven’t built a single nuclear power station. They chose not to.”

“This technology can immunise, one day cure, people even while it feeds them,” I said. “Look, you know full well genetic technology is different in kind. It’s information. There are no barriers big enough to keep it out.”

Greg pretended he was unconvinced. It’s his way of dealing with change. “Tell me again how it’s going to help us,” he demanded.

“Us? The company? This will be the biggest boost to the farming industry in a thousand years,” I told him. “It’s going to provide
Spudnik
with access to a new and lucrative market.”

He lifted his arms out wide in exasperation. “I’m trying to cut out competition, and you’re opening us up to it. Don’t you think if you’re on to this, the Dutch are, too?”

I laughed. “Our competition’s not going to come from Holland,” I said. “The problem is that proteins become unstable in potatoes when they’re cooked. And who wants to eat raw potato? No, the competition’s going to come from tomatoes. From medical fruiterers reseeding the apple orchards of Kent. From hazel nuts in coppices in newly planted native woodland, programmed to grow at double speed. This is the future, brother. We’ve no time to waste.”

“If you’re right. If everything’s going to change,” Greg said, “there’ll be endless public discussion. Committees. White papers. Green papers.”

“In due course,” I said. “Of course. But we’re talking about now. About who’s in the lead. Don’t go scared on me, now. The money’s running right behind us.”

§

The very first potato growers were in the Andes. Modern-day Peru. High up on the altiplano. They were people who’d climbed out of the forest below, had fled from the terrors of the jungle. Impelled to grow out of their lives as savages, to escape being preyed upon by jaguar and boa constrictor, hemmed in by impenetrable undergrowth, by waters infested with alligator and voracious fish. Volatile tribes at shrieking war with one another, fighting with spear and poisoned arrow. A discordant life of oppressive tedium alternating with terror.

Or, if we prefer, they were people who’d been expelled from the innocent rainforest, where they dwelled with the spirits of their ancestors. Where they lived on a plentiful diet of fish and turtle, patches of manioc they cultivated in small clearings, and fruit they plucked from overabundant trees. A life of harmony. Take your pick.

These people—exiles or pioneers—climbed out of the lush montana, and sought places for settlement in the valleys of the high tablelands, where they domesticated llama and cultivated our
Solatium tuberosum
. And they survived the cold and the shortage of oxygen of that pitiless altitude, and its roaring driving rains.

This is progress. What can we do? We can’t stop still. You stop still, you go round in circles. You go nowhere.

§

I dress our baby in the morning. His mother selects an outfit the night before and hangs it on the towel rail in the bathroom. There’s a bewildering variety of design of the most basic items in a baby’s wardrobe. During prenatal research into nappies, Lily bombarded me with outraged statistics about the amount of soiled disposables put into landfill sites each day, and waved brochures at me offering Terylene this, Velcro that. Snaps and poppers, cotton and cloth. Our boy is now secured with non-disposable unbleached cotton nappies, with a plastic outer wrap.

Then he wears a one-piece, a little leotard that fits down over his head and does up with three poppers at the crotch. Over this he wears a larger item, another all-in-one but with long arms and legs. Versions of this jumpsuit come in many different designs, though it has certain basic requirements i.e. fitting the baby and keeping him warm; being simple to open up and out of the way for nappy changing, and reasonably easy to change in and out of following inevitable spews and spills. There’s one we have, from
Next
, I think, that meets these demands. It covers his torso and limbs in a comfortable balance between snug and loose; it’s made of soft, thick cotton; you can slip it on and off; plus he looks good. These seem simple enough requirements, well met.

But some of the others people wouldn’t believe. There’s one with a home-boy hood and blue checks that’s so tight and starchy it straitjackets him: sit John Junior up and he stays there, staring at you, stuck. There’s another, a gift from an Italian friend of Lily’s, that does up in so complicated a coming together of material at the back and sides that I have to flip the babe on to my lap and then on to his side, round and round, to painstakingly popper him up. And there’s yet another that was designed for a baboon baby: it fits our boy’s torso well enough but the arms and legs are twice as long as his and have to be folded back up, only they’re very tight and can barely be persuaded to without cutting off the blood supply to his extremities.

“Why can’t these people settle on one reasonable design and all use it?” I ranted at my wife yesterday morning, as I fumbled with ill-fitting buttons on a squirming baby (who I have to admit seemed unconcerned himself. John J. was fiddling with a label: he likes the satiny feel).

“I know,” Lily said. “Let’s all have Maoist babies, in identical little uniforms. I agree. But you could say the same about anything. Cars. Pens. Washing machines.”

“No,” I said. “This is a very simple and singular case where the best design should clearly win out.”

“I’m not arguing,” she said. “It’s your system. Go on: you people defend it.”

I laughed. “I can’t,” I said. “It stinks. Pass me that zinc and castor oil cream.”

§

This morning I lay in the spare bed, going over things in my mind, with my son asleep beside me. He stirred, hunger rumbling deep within him. Sometimes he wakes with ease, rising effortlessly into consciousness; opening his eyes, seeing me and smiling.

More often John Junior strains and fidgets in his sleep. It looks as if some unease is waking him, while at the same time a different unease is thwarting his attempt to wake himself. To struggle up out of this pit of sleep. Tossing his head from one side to another. Grimaces, baby groans.