2002 - Wake up (9 page)

“I don’t see how we could have made things any clearer back in November,” Greg said. “The climate’s changing and our agronomists and our growers are adapting. Planting earlier. Harvesting later. Taking advantage. And you have to adapt, too, to different problems in storage. We had surface rots everywhere, and we diagnosed them as a mixture of blackleg soft rotting, blight, waterlogging. And pink rot.” He stopped, scanned the insubstantial faces. “Vigilance was essential, we said. We told you.”

It was the warehouse manager in Lincolnshire who made the mistake of responding.

“We have been,” he said. “Early warning of problems is essential. We know that better than anyone.”

“So what the hell is this?” Greg demanded, flourishing the papers in his hand. “Fry colours variable. Overall quality indifferent. Increased levels of black dot and silver scurf.”

“That’s right,” the Lincoln man said. “That’s what we told you.”

My brother was able to concentrate his attention on one ghost, while doing so in a grandstanding manner, for the benefit of the others. A natural bully’s tactic, bringing spectators on to his side out of relief that it’s not one of them he’s picked on. “Deterioration due to bacterial rots,” he continued, at the Lincoln man. “Especially in Maris Piper, Bintje and Fianna, for Christ’s sake.”

“Yes. Those varieties especially.”

“And what are we planning to use for this processing plant—
new
potatoes?”

My brother likes the holograms so much he believes in them. He’s also aggressive in a provocative way that can make an opponent, if he possesses a similar confrontational nature, forget himself. The Lincoln warehouse manager was a tough ex-army bod, and he stood his ground.

“Don’t read us the report like it’s a riot act,” he said. “We’re the ones whose information made up the report.”

“Are you saying these rots are not there in store?”

“I’m saying of course they are. Who else would know better than us? I’m saying don’t shoot the messenger.”

“I’ve had enough excuses!” Greg exclaimed. “We put up with a lot of incompetence, but this is the last straw.”

Again he waved the papers, but this time in front of the flat nose of the warehouse man’s virtual face. “Foreign body contamination. If you cannot check that bulkers are clean and empty, and educate your staff to keep food and bottles and other crap away from the graders, then you are in the wrong sodding business, my friend.”

It was at this point that the warehouse man became as inflamed as my brother. He didn’t like being called a friend. He stood up from his seat in an office in Boston, Greg stepped forward to meet him, and they came face to face. Each nose to nose with his hologrammatic opponent. Next thing we knew my brother took a swing at his adversary: he punched air, of course, lost his balance and fell over. Although I think I could have stopped myself, I burst out laughing—which gave everyone else permission to. Greg picked himself up, realised he’d look an even bigger fool if he sulked, and smiled at himself.

“All right,” Greg said, and tried to shake hands with the warehouse man—knowing he couldn’t. He made a slapstick kind of a joke out of it, so then everyone was laughing with him, too, including his protagonist, and it was over.

If people think that’s bad, it used to be worse when Greg drank. He quit ten years ago. Booze used to go straight to his voice: a couple of beers and he was yelling, and one thing invariably led to another. Who likes to be yelled at?

§

I was talking to my brother last week. He doesn’t understand my thing for whores. “You pay for it?” he asked. “Aren’t you worried?”

“Worried? Why? Of course I use rubbers.”

“I’d be on the lookout for bludgers. Ponces. You’re an idiot.” Then Greg hit me with another new fact about himself.

He’s forty-seven years old and I thought I knew all about him. He said, “I don’t like to come.”

“Neither do I,” I said. “Messy business.”

“I’m serious,” he said.

I laughed. “Are you joking?”

“No,” he said. “I prefer not to come. I like to hold it in.”

“Indeed,” I said. “As long as possible. I’m sure you’re a responsible and generous lover.” I’m sure he’s not. Greg is the most impatient man I know. When talking, he gets so excited by the flow, the succession, of ideas in his head overtaking each other en route to his tongue that he interrupts himself. It’s almost as if the person who’s just spoken, who is in the midst of speaking, becomes a different, outdated self, suddenly superseded by this new person possessing a new thought; halfway through an irritating, obsolete sentence, the old self is to be interrupted and brushed aside. He must be an awful, impatient lover.

“When I ejaculate,” my brother said, “I feel like I’ve lost something.”

“You mean,” I said, “you don’t like to come at all?”

“No.”

“Eventually, though. With her, right?”

“No.”

“But the bliss?”

“I feel like I’m losing part of myself.”

I didn’t really know what to say. “Do women like that?” I asked him.

“It takes them a bit of getting used to,” he admitted. “Most women think they’re failing me. I have to persuade them it’s what I want.”

It’s never too late to see someone in a new light. This is the era of communication, after all. In which an ever wider array of human beings all over the world come into nominal or potential contact with us—but with whom in reality we fail to communicate.

As Greg put it the other day at work, “I cannot interface with these people!”

So we e-mail, nipping at each other’s heels from screen to screen, our fax machines eat⁄excrete paper day and night, our digitalised voices leave messages across the counties and the oceans on voice mail, on answering machines. You phone a bureaucracy and spend whole hours on hold: music drones, interrupted only by occasional returns of a voice that assures you you’re moving along in the queue, then the music resumes; whole songs, entire easy listening slabs of sound soothe your burning ear, your gritted teeth.

Greg claims that when BT realised there’d be a global telephone network with more connections than the human brain, they had a team of computer nerds trying to work out whether there was any danger of consciousness occurring.

Our IT guy at work told me the last time he came back to work from holiday, there were 417 messages on his computer. He suggested running a day course for our senior managers in multi-tasking: teaching them, including me and my brother, to type while talking on the phone; to check their pager, use their mobile and drive at the same time. “We have to learn to cope with the data,” he said. He’s right. People who want to make sure they get a message to me now seem to feel the need to send it in triplicate: by e-mail, fax and letter. Then they phone, just to make sure I got it.

I remember Lily stuck a notice on the door of our old place in town:
NO FREE NEWSPAPERS, NO JUNK MAIL, NO RELIGIOUS CALLERS
. But our name and address must have got on to some computerised database, and once that happens you’re done for: this item of information spreads like a virus. My wife received new unasked-for catalogues for healthy living and environmental crusades every day; it drove her crazy, the trees cut down for this pulp. She printed self-adhesive labels saying,
Return To Sender
. But a lot of these companies are crafty, they don’t put their address on the envelope.

There was one company, she kept sending back their catalogues, but every month a new one kept coming. So she got on to their website, and in the space for sending an e-mail she filled in her name and address and typed,
STOP SENDING ME YOUR DAMNABLE CATALOGUE
. She clicked on
send
, but an instruction came up on the screen telling her she hadn’t filled in all the details. So she went back and saw she hadn’t put her e-mail number in the allotted box. This she did, then clicked on
send
again, and the message duly travelled. And what happened? You guessed it: their company’s catalogues did stop coming by snail mail, yes, but they started arriving by e-mail instead. Drives Lily mental.

§

Our nephews came over again the other day. There’s a war going on inside Clint. What was divided between Greg and me, in our complementary temperaments, is crammed together between Glint’s protruding ears. The introvert and extrovert, the reflective and the young man of action, the reader and the philistine; a contest prejudiced, I should say, by the need to appear a cool imbecile, and complicated by hormones, parental acrimony, the wealth of images telling him what to do, be, pretend.

It’s no wonder Clint just sits there like a sullen, pimply oaf. I can hardly bear it sometimes. And then I get to thinking it’ll be John Junior’s turn in a dozen years.

The younger one, Lee, though, is still sweet, drifting along in his brother’s wake. Actually, he’s almost as tall as Clint now. He’d grown two inches in a week. He’s making that sudden bolt into growth.

They both follow football. Like all boys. All citizens. Lee adorned in one of his team’s many shirts, last season’s away strip, this season’s second reserve team kit. He lets himself be fleeced unblinking. Glint can take it or leave it, though not out of any cynicism. Rather, he appears not to care what people think of him. Is that possible? I may be wrong. Glint dresses scruffily but maybe that’s his, or his mini-generation’s, or his own grungy sub-tribe’s, style. He looks as if whichever clothes his groping fingers discovered on the bedroom floor before he opened his eyes in the morning were dragged inside-out over his limbs. For all I know he might have spent an hour of careful selection, fine-tuning his bedraggled attire. He wouldn’t tell me, would he?

Occasionally I attempt to wax nostalgic about footie with my nephews, I do my best to be pally with them, and describe the great players of my youth and twenties. Georgie Best and Jimmy Johnstone. The total football of Ajax, then Holland. Argentina’s hysterical, pre-Malvinas, World Cup. The lost art of passing: Gerson, Netzer, Platini.

It doesn’t work. When did it ever? I once dismissed my own father’s foggy recollections of Johnny Haynes and Peter Doherty, but my nephews have added justification for their eyes glazing over, ears sealing off my droning tongue. “You’re talking pants again, Uncle John.”

For they have proof. Television betrays me. It doesn’t matter what I tell them about, say, Don Revie’s Leeds United, that mean but brilliant team who humiliated opponents yet ultimately stumbled, jittered, and failed to win the trophies they were ambling towards at the turn of the seventies. No, it doesn’t matter what I say of Gray or Cooper’s dribbling panache, of Giles’ vision, of ‘Sniffer’ Clarke’s nose for goal. Because the boys have seen enough games and highlights and goals transmitted. What should be the evidence that proves me right only proves me wrong. They have seen the men who in their prime look old already; unfit veterans, strollers, kicking the ball then stopping to rest when today’s footballers run, run, run. These ghosts look more like park players than professional athletes. They look quaint, parodic.

The boys express an affection, however, which I didn’t at first understand, for Denis Law.

“The King’s great,” the younger one told me. He held the cuffs of his sixties special replica shirt tight to his palm with the nubs of his fingers. “King Denis!” Lee exclaimed, commentator on himself, and he stuck his right arm up ramrod straight, and walked away, grinning.

Yesterday I came across them watching one of my old videos, and stood quietly behind them. I saw that it wasn’t only the players who were unfit in those days. The cameramen were, too! Or the cameras were heavy, or the tripod hydraulics primitive. Whatever, the camera always seemed to get to Denis Law too late: his goals are all blurs. Someone in fuzzy black and white—Crerand, Aston—passes the ball, the camera swishes after it, one sees that something’s happening but it’s impossible to say what. Like an uncertain particle Denis Law disappears from view and no one can predict his direction or speed. By the time the camera’s come to rest the ball is in the goal, the goalkeeper and one or two defenders are hauling themselves up from the mud, and Denis Law is walking away, grinning, with his right arm raised.

And what my nephews liked doing was rewinding, jogging the video back and forth on the Home Edit Suite, forwarding it in Xtreme Slo-Mo, and revealing for themselves what happened. Creating their own interactive TV; solving what Glint called the First Denis Law of Motion.

Yes, for this reason, at least, they rate him.

§

I mentioned already that I saw our vocation as a holy one. It would be easy to drift in the opposite direction, to see one’s customers, one’s consumers, as animals. Like those magazine photos of someone standing beside the mountain of food they consume in a year. The thought of it all passing through them.

Greg and I did kid about diversifying into waste disposal. It was a running joke between the two of us for years. Drains. Water closets. Septic tanks.

“It’s irresponsible to provide what’s fed in one end,” Greg agreed, “but neglect what craps out the other.”

We considered too the possibility of moving further, into the treatment of waste, the transformation of matter into manure, that could then be applied to the soil in which potatoes grew, and so complete a cycle. Gain control of the whole loop. A daydream alternative to growth, I hear people say? What do they know about economics? Better for them to keep quiet in the face of superior knowledge, I’d suggest. There is no alternative.

§

I was reminded of this speculative cycle recently, however, by a sardonic echo. We live in a village outside town, my wife and I and our baby son. In the Old Rectory, a crumbling Victorian pile we should never have shelled out for. No au pairs, no nanny, we do more ourselves than anyone I know, but we do employ a gardener. An enterprising young man in his late twenties, Richard, with a ponytail and trimmed beard and intelligent eyes, who in turn employs a raggle-taggle team of hired hands.

In the late autumn Richard’s people came to us each week, and a couple of other gardens in the village, and did little other than bag up leaves. It was a major operation; a minor industrial process. There was one guy with a kind of hoover that blows instead of sucks leaves into swirling piles, a girl all padded up against the cold with a wide rake, another chap with wooden paddles with which he embraced huge armfuls of leaves that he then put into black bags. They bagged up the leaves and took them away.