2002 - Wake up (8 page)

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 him.

“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, Glint, 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, Glint 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, Glint 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.

“HP ELL ME about the loss of appetite,” the doctor said.

J. “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 that, 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?

But for whom? For what? For profit? No. For growth. Turnover is essential. And I think of this short-termism, unnecessary for profit but necessary for the growth of the system itself, as individual companies’ contribution to the greater good of the organic whole of capitalism. The moguls, after all, are fierce individualists behind their suits. Drakes and Raleighs. Buccaneers. They’re mavericks who at the same time are captains of drone ships on the expanding ocean of capitalism on this enormous, this tiny, planet spinning in space.

§

Until now we were shadows of each other. Grandparents. My father. My brother. Did I mention what Greg just bought for our mother? Mum enjoys a low-level hypochondria that I’m sure gets on everyone’s nerves, and not just mine. She doesn’t like to be without something to moan about.

“How are you, Mum?”

“I’ve got a bit of a throat, John,” she tells you. What a surprise. “Liver’s been playing up again, love.”

So Greg likes gadgets. Well, he just got Mum hooked up to medical telecare. He persuaded her private health clinic to get set up for bidirectional cable TV; there’s a little camera stuck on top of her telly and a microphone beside it, and every day she has an online conference call with the nurse to check her blood pressure and heart-rate, and discuss any worries she has. She’s been on this telecare for less than three weeks but already she’s complaining less about her loneliness and her arthritis.

It was a stroke of genius to use television, since Mum watches it all day long. I don’t have time for TV; the only time I ever see it is in the background when I visit my mother. Her favourite programmes are gameshows: she gawks at TV quizzes all afternoon. While her poor grandsons are groaning through tests at school, Mum—who surely hated exams herself just as much as they do—laps up puzzles, general knowledge, word-games on the goggle box. And what’s so clever of them, these programme makers, is that they make sure their questions are so easy even my mother can answer them.

Anyway, credit where credit is due: my brother hits the spot sometimes. Though that’s not all he hits. We’ve had video conferencing facilities in the company for a while, but recently a friend of Greg’s was looking for someone to test his new prototype, so before we knew it
Spudnik
had upgraded from video to virtual conferencing with all necessary cameras installed in offices in each of our six centres: here and in Perthshire, Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire, Herefordshire and Cornwall. So that meetings could be held with people—with their holo-grammatic counterparts—at any time. At the shortest notice.

At the moment we’re making our first move into processing. We have a lot of growers in East Anglia, and we were wondering what market there was for the spuds that don’t make the retail grade. And I said to Greg, “Let’s create our own.”

We’re opening a potato processing plant in Cambridgeshire this May: the factory will process potatoes into dehydrated flakes and flour for use in snack manufacturing. We plan at full capacity to convert over fifty thousand tonnes of raw spuds a year into eight thousand tonnes of finished product, for export to Europe; we’ve signed a contract with a major snack company. If this doesn’t make money, nothing will.

“We’re launching a snack attack!” Greg declared.

We’re creating twenty-five, maybe thirty, new jobs. We want to hit the ground running and my brother’s concerned about storage problems so, last week, he called the Packing Heads together. Clutching the last agronomy update and the latest crop report, Greg paced around our almost empty boardroom: the only other live entities were myself and our Marketing Director, but the rest of the seats were filled with ethereal figures. The ghostly heads of the Packing chiefs turning to follow my brother’s impatience, his irritation.