Outtake

The Writers' Retreat

The Foundation, the letter read, would like to invite you to participate in our Artists Residency Program. We have just purchased a detached house in a beautiful, secluded village in the New Mexico desert twenty-five miles south of Santa Fe. We offer you a period of time wholly dedicated to writing. We pay your travel, provide a $50 per diem stipend, and supply a car for your use.

I read the letter carefully. I hate this kind of hoax.

'Tedi,' I tell Hania. 'And Mike. This is just their kind of milarkey.'

'I don't know,' she says. 'Whoever it is has got hold of headed paper. To me, it's got Louis written all over it.'

'Wait a minute. We might be missing something. Okay, women don't know how to play practical jokes, but maybe that's what they want us to think. Greta could have cooked this up.'

'Be serious,' my wife advises. 'It's infantile. It's male. It's Geoff.'

They all deny it, including Geoff. 'Writers don't want a retreat,' he says. 'We want an advance.'

So I replied to The Foundation, hesitantly, requesting more details. Just talking to Geoff, however, had made me realise it wasn't a hoax. No, far more likely was a case of mistaken identity. It had happened before.  Not that long ago Geoff rang me.

'Great news!' he said. 'I've been asked to take part in a literary festival in Italy.  We were talking, and it turns out they want you too. We'd even do a couple of readings together. Five star hotel. Your own interpreter. The works.'

'Wonderful,' I said.

A week later Geoff called again. 'Bad news,' he said. 'They thought you were Tim Parks.'

'I should have known,' I sighed. 'I've never even been published in Italy. And he bloody lives there.'

'Well, I'm looking forward to it,' Geoff said helpfully.

Time went by. The phone rang. 'Good news!'

'Really?'

'For you, anyway. Tim Parks can't make it. So I suggested they get you, and they liked the idea. You'll hear from them in the next few days.'

'Thanks, mate,' I said. 'I owe you one.'

I didn't hear anything for days. Many days. I phoned Geoff.
'Yes,' he said. 'I'm off to the festival tomorrow.'

'Oh,' I said. 'They didn't call me.'

'No,' he said. 'Sorry.'

'They didn't even want me as a substitute.'

'They must have read your books.'

'I guess.'

Another letter came from America.

Please state when you would like to come, for any period from two weeks to three months. As great admirers of your work, we urge you to take advantage of this opportunity to get away from your home, family, and other distractions, and work in unique peace.

So I wrote back, I'm about to start a family. My wife is eight months pregnant with our first child. Would I be able to bring them?

Hania is a dance teacher, and had decided to take at least four months off work; we'd been thinking about getting away somewhere in the late autumn. I aimed to complete my third novel, A Revolution of the Sun, by August 3rd, Hania's expected date of delivery. In the event I was overdue by two days but so, fortunately, was she: I posted the typescript; that afternoon her waters broke.

Hania's labour began as an active natural childbirth at home in the aromas of incense and oils, and ended five painful, sleepless days and nights later in hospital, at the epicentre of an episode of ER.  One of the grim crescent of green-masked medics tried to pull our baby from his or her hiding place with what looked like a sink plunger. In the midst of great commotion, the suction snapped loose from the baby's head, the doctor propelled himself backwards across the room, and Hania pushed it - him - out herself. A second doctor caught the baby and made to pass him to a paediatrician ready with trolley, infra-red lamp, oxygen. Our midwife, seeing the baby was actually okay, dived into the scrum of medics and grabbed the slithery body. 'Skin to skin,' she intercepted, and placed Gabriel on Hania's belly.

When I got home and stumbled through the after-battle debris of our flat towards bed, my hand automatically checked the answer phone. 'The Foundation would like you to come to the writers' retreat,' said a sweet woman's voice. 'Bring your family.'

Eight hectic weeks later we took off from Heathrow. Gabriel seemed to know to suckle on take-off and descent, to counteract ear-popping. 'Isn't he adorable?' said friendly American fellow passengers. After changing planes in Chicago, we eventually touched down in Albuquerque.  I say touched down, but in fact it's so high here the plane had to climb up on to the great mesa of northern New Mexico. Our ears were popping at an alarming rate: we were ascending and descending at the same time. Gabriel suckled furiously.

After a sleepless night in a featureless hotel we power-steered our white Avis Oldsmobile along the Turquoise Trail towards the village and our brown, single storey adobe house in a walled garden. DeeDee from the Foundation had left the keys under a log. We entered, and said nothing intelligible for some minutes, as we gasped from white, light-filled living-room - with kitchen behind a serving bar at one end - to airy studio to wood-ceilinged bedroom. Two bath/shower/loos. Capacious closets.

'I love this house,' said Hania. 'This is a dream house.'

'What's the law on squatting here?' I wondered.

After weeks of proudly sharing/showing Gabriel to family and friends, the peace was an amazing relief. All around the dusty village, desert stretched towards distant hills. The still wide space was mesmerising. Tension drained away.

For a writer, having a child (even - especially - at the late age of forty-two) is terrifying. Not because one won't be able to schedule actual writing time,  which only amounts to a few hours in a day, but because most of one's days are spent reading, making notes, musing, which can look to outsiders like a lazy dosser lying on the sofa staring at the ceiling, unaware as they are of the ferment of ideas bubbling behind his slack gaping mouth. One is furthermore obliged, as a novelist of the present, to watch too much tv,  browse entire newspapers without skimming over cappucinos in various cafés, stroll through town, meet other layabouts for lunch, play tennis in the daytime. It is from these essential pursuits that a baby will pilfer time.

Let's face it, most activities are excuses to avoid writing: being with one's own child must rate as one of the best, and I intended to wrestle Gabriel from Hania at every opportunity when we weren't actually sharing him.

The other great worry one has is whether it is possible to make a smooth transition, perhaps many times a day, from imbecilic coochy-coo diddums with baby to the state of concentration necessary to accomplish even the most mediocre novel.

The trouble is, it already takes me three years to complete a novel. How long will it take now? A decade? Most writers are washed up some time in their fifties: how many more books do I have left? How many babies? Candia McWilliam, perhaps our finest writer, has said that each of her children represented an unwritten book. You know what I say? I say, Ha! I say that each of my books represents an unborn child. Anyway, J.S. Bach had twenty children. And at least ten of them survived infancy.

Now, however, newly arrived in New Mexico, these thoughts were put behind me. I was under no pressure. I had books to read for research for the next novel, about which I knew only that it was to feature two brothers - one the narrator - who, beginning as little more than market traders, build a company retailing, wholesaling, distributing and ultimately manufacturing food. I wanted to explore the impulse towards growth at the pumping heart of our capitalist economy and our civilisation. Is endless growth  pro- or anti- evolution? A function or aberration of our genes? Biotechnology exemplifies our genius, our flaw. Genetic modification of food is a beautiful promise, perhaps chimeric, certainly hubristic; will it feed the world or bring the sterile seeds of destruction?

That's all I know. Having completed a kind of English trilogy about home, about finding our place in the world, I intend to loosen up, widen my field of vision. The desert seems a perfect place to start this book. A desert into which the cities are sprawling.

Hania's started telling friends, 'Tim's writing the first GM novel.' And I think, if only I could. Fiction, science, metaphysical speculation.  Eco-thriller, environmental treatise, satire. The most radical and unnatural re-engineering of genres yet. A truly mutant novel. 
 
We planned to settle slowly in over the weekend ahead, explore the area the following week, get to know Santa Fe. Despite (or because of) the jet-lag, however, I began writing within hours of moving into our dream house. I sat down in an easy chair in the studio, exhaled into the light space, and started scribbling. And time expanded into the space, with just Hania, our son and my work to fill it. On the first entry in my notebook the narrator's voice spoke; his character formed; incidents, other people, in his life materialised, the uncanny history of fiction.

I should admit early on, he wrote, that the title of this book is not mine. It came from my wife. In a roundabout way. I stole it, I suppose. She has this habit of telling me, whenever I do or say something she thinks silly, 'Wake up.'  Though it's usually embellished. 'Oh, wake up, man,' she'll say. 'Wake up, why don't you?' It's a line of hers that ends up just where it came from, an ambiguous spot midway between a partner's private joke and spousal put down.

And then one time she said it and I thought, Hey, that'd be a good title for this book I have commenced writing.

 On Tuesday DeeDee appeared.
 
'How are ya?' she asked.

'Listen,' I said, 'I've already done the best work I've done for a year or more. This place is amazing.'

'Gabriel is happy,' Hania told her. 'I'm happy. It's so peaceful here.' Where I am tunnel visioned, Hania is multiply - compulsively - creative. She for her part was already taking photographs and devising choreography.

'Just a couple of practical things,' said DeeDee. 'A guy'll be coming to turn the gas furnace on tomorrow. And an Appliance guy needs to check out a leak in the washing machine.'

DeeDee left. Mary Alice, meanwhile, had arrived: the cleaning lady. A venerable member of the Anaya clan, which we'd already gleaned from the village directory compiled by the Volunteer Fire Brigade was the big Hispanic family in the village. As Mary Alice wiped and dusted at that sluggish peasant pace that looks lazy - except, abracadabra, the job gets done - she told us about the incomers to the village. 'All these artists,' she drawled, 'when they come here they was just a whole bunch of hippies. All they did was party. Then,' she shrugged, shaking her head, 'they must have stopped partying and started working.' She made it sound like she and her people had turned their backs on the hippies for a day or two and missed the crucial moment. 'I don't know what happened. See: now,' she concluded, 'they're rich.' It was true, the tiny village was packed with notable American artists. Post-modern expressionist Bruce Nauman and his partner neo-expressionist Susan Rothenberg, landscape painter Woody Gwyn, photographer Nicholas Trofumik. Actor Judge Reinhold has an adobe house across the street from us. Not that we see them. We keep ourselves to ourselves out here.

My narrator's voice was emerging through the mist of words and thoughts at a canter. He is ill with a mysterious disease that moves through his body. Is it in some way analogous to the growth of his company? Is it connected to his newborn son? He's a man both self-confident and perplexed. I need to understand how evil is done, great destruction wrought, by men who are not evil in either character or nature. This is how we find ourselves. Hurtling towards ruin in a train run by faceless drivers.
 I was interrupted by a knock at the door. 'Name's Joel,' he introduced himself. 'I'm the Appliance guy.' In t-shirt, jeans, tool-belt and moustache Joel looked like a Village People guy. 'Let's have a look at this here washing machine.' In the bathroom, with rapid, precise movements Joel undid screws, removed panels, in that efficient manner that is both compulsively watchable and sweetly reassuring. 'Yep. See, here's your problem,' he said. 'You got a leak from the drum. I can't fix it. And if I can't fix it, no-one can. You need a new drum, hell, you may's well get a new washing machine. But it's a tiny leak you got. You put a bowl underneath, it'll take two, three washes to fill. Empty it in between. That's what I'd recommend.'

'Mary Alice said there was water all over the floor,' I told him.

Joel smiled indulgently. 'I don't think so,' he said. 'The leak here's minute. Take three washes to fill a bowl.'

He agreed, however, to join us in the living-room while the machine took a spin or two. 'No tea for me, thanks. Had one in the truck.' We asked Joel whether he was a New Mexican. He chuckled. 'Hell, no, I'm an old big city guy.' He told us he used to come out to visit his brother in Santa Fe from California. 'We'd hike up in the mountains. You know what? I just got so sick of being stuck in traffic, one day I upped and settled out here.' Next thing he knew, he said, winking at Gabriel, he was a family man, found himself married to a Russian woman with a ten-year-old daughter. Joel looked contentedly bemused about this. I asked him how it was building up his own business in a strange place. 'I work six days a week, and I love my work. I'm always in demand, cos when I say I'll come, I come.' Joel held out his arms in a genial shrug.
'Hell, I got no competition in Santa Fe,' he bragged modestly.

We went back to the bathroom. There was water all over the floor. 'You got a mop?' Joel asked. 'Why, this ain't the leak I was told about.' After further inspection he came back to the living-room beaming.

'See, that's not a leak at all. The leak I was told about I already showed you. This is a blocked drain.'

'Can you unblock it?' we asked.

'I'm an Appliance guy,' Joel explained patiently. 'You need a Plumber guy.' On his way out Joel winked at Gabriel. 'Blow your trumpet, little feller,' he said.

I told DeeDee, who said she'd send someone. 'Oh, also,' I said, 'the Gas guy didn't show up.'

'Talking of gas,' Hania said from the sink when I put down the phone. 'The bottoms of the saucepans keep getting black.'

As the afternoon cooled we went for a walk. We'd brought a Wilkinet sling, with which you strap the baby to your chest. Or rather, Hania does. It was clearly designed, like so many baby things, by a woman who has no idea that men take an active role in parenting.  With a mother, the baby fits snugly between breasts and down over a rounded belly. With a father, the poor baby bumps his head on the man's breastbone, jiggles against ribs and, if he's lucky, kicks him in the balls. The man develops acute back ache, along with severe breathing problems. It's just fortunate for us that whereas I have a long thin spine wrecked by a lifetime sitting at desks and playing tennis incorrectly, Hania's short, strong frame has been honed by yoga and aerobics.

We got back as the desert dusk fell, like a cloak, whereupon the electricity cut out.  In the dark I looked for trip-switches.

'Call DeeDee,' Hania suggested, lighting a candle.

'Phone's dead,' I discovered. 'It's an answerphone. It needs power.'
'By the way,' she added. 'The water seems to have stopped running.'

We survived the night, with all its nappy-changing manoeuvres without light or water. In the morning the power had come back on, though not the water. 'Also,' I told DeeDee on the now functioning phone, 'the computer printer's kaput.'

'Could have been the power surge,' she reckoned. 'I'll send the Computer guy we use. Name of Chad.'

Instead of writing, I filled empty Evian bottles with a dribble of water from one tap that seemed still to be eking forth cloudy liquid. No longer able to either machine- or hand-wash Gabriel's clothes or our own piling up in a smelly corner, Hania looked through the Yellow Pages for a laundromat in Santa Fe.

A gardener turned up as we were leaving, a pleasant bearded man armed with a vast array of implements. We returned with a bootful of water and clean clothes some hours later, as he was driving away. The elegant, walled garden, which consists of trees  and a couple of small lawns, looked the same as it did before.

'No, look, he cut the grass,' Hania pointed out.

'It didn't need cutting.'

'And he's cleared the leaves.'

'Why?' I asked, as more brown leaves fluttered from the trees.

At least, I thought, we're lucky that sleep is no problem. Hania and I rail at the books, popular in England, that advocate sleep training: forcing reluctant babies to cry themselves to sleep in their own cots, alone in a cold universe. We prefer the natural, loving arrangement of three in a bed. What this means is that we force Gabriel to share our bed; it's the toughest training there is. He snuffles and snorts, kicks and frets. Most of which I'm oblivious to, waking with a luxurious stretch in the morning, to be enlightened by Hania as to the torrid goings on, the miniature thrashings about, with which she'd contended.

'And there was all that clunking,' she says sleepily.

'What clunking?'

'I don't know. Didn't you hear it?' She yawns. 'Sounded like it was coming from the kitchen.'
 While Hania finally gets some sleep, I wash Gabriel, massage him,  gurgle at his nappy-free kicking time, let him watch me shave. The three of us have breakfast in bed together. Afterwards, Hania meditates while Gabriel and I listen to a Philip Glass CD looking out of our favourite window into the garden, all browns and greens in front of sheer blue sky, from the sofa, where we fall asleep.

After taking advantage of Gabriel's morning kip to cook lunch, Hania said she didn't feel too well. 'There's a funny smell,' she said, but insisted on taking Gabriel for their usual walk. With a cup of coffee, I got down to work. My narrator, I discovered, is forty-five. I am, he wrote, as the optimists in our biotech division assured me on my last birthday, in the middle of my life. Indeed, they ventured, such was the accelerating pace of their research there was real hope that I may remain in this hypothetical median for some years to come. Whatever, and allowing for their geeky humour, I am surely in my prime.

('His prime,' my wife hiccuped upon my reading aloud the first draft of this to her. 'In the life of your libido?' she asked. 'Oh, of your writing life, you mean?' Then, turning to an imaginary figure who took up residence in our marriage a year or two ago and seems to lurk in a corner of our bedroom, she said, 'His first book. No, the first paragraph of his first book, and he's in his prime already.' She turned back to me. 'Sweetheart,' she said. 'Wake up, why don't you?')

It's funny, as with my previous book, without thinking I've made the character closest to myself three years older than me when I begin writing. So that when I finish writing, we'll be the same age. Except for the amount he ages within the book. Which, I imagine, will be about a year. That means that when the book is finally published - probably about a year after I hand over the typescript - we'll be the same age again.

As long as the character too does not age between completion and publication, that is.

This is the kind of moronic digression a writer gets himself involved in when he lets his concentration slip. I returned to my notebook, but was relieved by the arrival of the Plumber guy. Dennis was short, shy, with a 70s Kevin Keegan haircut feathering out from under his cap.

'Hear you got two problems,' he said quietly. 'No water. Blocked drain.'

'That's right,' I confirmed. 'Hey. Maybe they're the same problem.'

'Don't think so,' Dennis whispered. He didn't look me in the eye; he was shyly scanning the scene for clues. We went outside, to a shed wherein were housed the furnace and boiler and pump and a hundred pipes, gauges, taps.

'Pump brings water up from the well,' Dennis explained. 'If you had a power cut, you'd a got no water.'

'Even the water supply depends on electricity?'

'No power: total shut down.'

'Does the power often get cut off?'

'This is New Mexico,' Dennis grinned as he disappeared among the bubbling entrails of the shed.

'That's another thing,' I called forth. 'You're a plumber, Dennis. How can so many people live in a desert?
The urban sprawl. Where's their water come from?'

'That's what a lot of us is asking,' Dennis replied with a metallic echo.

'Well, I'd better leave you to it, get back to work myself,' I told him. Inside, Hania was putting her body through the untenable contortions of ashtanga yoga, Gabriel chuckling up at her like it was the funniest thing he'd ever seen. Which it probably was. Back at my desk, I dreamed of water in the desert. Dennis soon reappeared.

'Your water's back,' he said quietly. 'Guess the pressure was thrown by the power shut down. Valve got busted. Now let's look at those drains. Know where the septic tank is?'

'The what?'

'Guess not.'

Dennis spent the next hour clearing drains with old fashioned connecting rods, but powered by a small motor. 'With all these trees, you get roots sneaking in the pipes. The end of this rod'll wrap around and cut em. ' I heard Gabriel crying, and went to relieve Hania. 'Yeh, got three of my own,' Dennis said. An hour later he bundled his rods. 'Done about as much as I can do here. I've pushed your blockage far's I can. Reckon the tank's full.'

'When can you empty it?' I asked.

'Me?' Dennis smiled. 'I'm a plumber. You need a Septic Tank guy.'

Dennis left. Gabriel slept, Hania cooked a long, involved and delicious Mexican meal while in the artists' village I stared at that writer's sardonic colour field, the blank page.
 
The next day Hania was ill. It wasn't the water. That's right, we didn't have any. But anyhow, she'd been drinking bottled water. Whether or not you could drink the tap water depended upon who you asked. I tended to ask locals - members of the Anaya clan - who said they'd been drinking it for centuries. Hania asked our incomer artist neighbours - who wouldn't touch the stuff for pesticides in the water table. Unless she was ill from drinking too much water. Because of the elevation and the dryness here one is constantly, unknowingly, dehydrating. Of course in the sweating heat of the desert day you want to drink, but even in the cold night you're meant to imbibe inordinate amounts of liquid. You have to keep glugging it down. Maybe Hania had overdone it, and was suffering the terrible fate of some of the early ecstatic clubbers: an overdose of water.

We were certain it wasn't anything she'd eaten. We'd discovered Wild Oats in Santa Fe, one of a chain of supermarkets selling mostly organic food. A bewildering emporium where you're faced with sixteen varieties of organic apple, twenty three makes of organic coffee, fifty three choices of yoghurt. A dazzling deli counter.

One of the things that's most impressed me already on this trip is the readiness of Americans to launch into unfeasibly large sandwiches. That first bite takes an evolved jawline and plenty of nerve. I couldn't wait to have a go myself. One wouldn't want to do it in public, obviously, so Hania and I made ourselves multi-decked sandwiches at home, outdoing each other with tasty layers of salad leaves, beansprouts, lo-fat lettuce, grated carrot, mayo, crunchy bits.

What then was wrong with Hania? She'd never felt healthier in her entire life, she said; it was just that she felt so ill: nausea, headache, giddiness.

'It must be altitude sickness,' I pronounced, and was forced to confine her to bed. What I didn't tell her was that, according to our Lonely Planet, although Hania had the correct symptoms, altitude sickness is something people suffer in the first day or two of arriving in a high place. It lasts a couple of days while you acclimatise. We'd been here ten days by now.

I took full care of Gabriel, between feeds from his sick mother. We'd been reading this book about child care, The Continuum Concept, by an American woman called Jean Liedloff, who lived with Yekhana Indians in the Venezuelan rainforest, and who puts civilisation's woes down to not keeping our babies in continual physical contact with us. The Yekhani don't play with their children, they just get on with their lives, but with the babies in attendance until they move away of their own accord. Western civilisation would be healed if parents took their children to work with them. This ridiculous idea is one I find myself in total agreement with (think it through, it's beautiful.) While Hania tried to doze without throwing up - wishing she could throw up and stop feeling queasy - I, like a proud Yekhana tribesman, took Gabriel to work with me. Unfortunately, watching his father chewing the end of a biro proved less captivating to a boychild than hunting tapirs with bow and arrow through dense jungle. Gabriel's voice soon drowned out my tenuous narrator's.

He was feeding, fortunately, when our next visitors arrived: the Septic Tank guys were here. Ed and Felipe located the buried lid in a corner of the garden and ran a pipe over the wall from their tanker. Ed was a big fat gentle old chap, about three times the size of Felipe, whom he instructed in a courteous manner. Felipe then worked silently while Ed explained to me the mysterious workings of the septic tank.
 'Solids are over on this side,' he said, as we peered down into the clogged darkness. Ed leaned on a long pole, which he occasionally poked around below. 'Liquids over there. The solids build up, but they break down.' Standing over the tank, I couldn't work out whether Ed was ignoring or actively enjoying the noxious fumes that arose towards us. Perhaps one comes to relish them in time.
 
'The liquids drain off into the leak field,' Ed continued. He waved his pole in a general direction beyond the wall. 'I'd guess your leak field's about over there.'

The blindingly obvious then occurred to me. 'Do you think the fumes could have backed up into the house?' I asked Ed. 'And made my wife ill?'

Ed shook his monumental head indulgently, as little Felipe took the pole and manoeuvred the heavy lid back on top of the tank. 'No chance of that,' Ed said. 'You can keep your city sewers. A septic tank's the finest, cleanest method of waste disposal there is.'
 
'The drains are unblocked,' I reported to DeeDee. 'The septic tank's emptied.'

'Great,' she said.

'The Gas guy didn't show up again.'

'I'll get onto it. Meanwhile, we've got Chad coming out there with a new printer tomorrow.'

'The Computer guy.'

'Right. Plus an Electric guy. Gonna fix the jacuzzi.'

'Jacuzzi? I didn't know we had one.'

'In the bath. It doesn't work. Ask Mary Alice.'
 
The nights were growing colder. Being English, and possessed back home of neither central heating nor double glazing, we didn't mind. The thick adobe walls kept the house cool in the heat of the day, retained a certain amount of warmth at night. It would have been nice to light a fire in the evening, and DeeDee had ordered us a delivery of half a cord of wood.

The next morning we woke to three inches of snow in the desert. Hania looked out of the window, shivered and curled up.

A little later, Mary Alice arrived. She stepped through the door, began to take off her jacket and stopped dead. 'Hasn't that Gas guy come yet?' she trembled. 'I can't work in this.' She pulled her jacket back on. 'Where's that furnace?' she demanded as if someone might have moved it, and stumped off to the shed.

'Did you find it?' I asked, when she returned.

'There's too many switches in there,' she said. 'I dunno what I did. I went in there, and something clicked.'

'I don't really understand about this furnace,' I admitted. 'What is it? I mean, what does it do exactly?'

Mary Alice stared at me impassively. 'It heats the house,' she explained slowly.

'But what? How? I can't see any radiators.'

Mary Alice frowned as if I'd asked her to explain the invention of electricity, or something equally outside the bounds of what she needed or was required to understand. 'I dunno,' she shrugged. She led the way from room to room of the house she'd been cleaning for ten years. Together, we found one overhead heater in the bathroom.

'I dunno,' Mary Alice said. 'But the house heats up when the furnace is on.'

I asked her about the jacuzzi. 'Yes, I came in one time to clean when the old owners weren't here, and the jacuzzi was going. All on its own. I couldn't turn it off. I called the owners in California, they told me to get someone to turn it off. I tried, I couldn't get anyone.'

'And the jacuzzi was just bubbling away all this time?'

'Bubbling away, yes, but without water. So I called my daughter. She came over, she took off the front of the switch. That plate.'

'Yes?'

'Then she got a hammer and she hit it. Right there. I dunno what she did, but she stopped it.'

At lunchtime, Hania prised herself out of bed and forced herself to eat something. 'Altitude sickness,' she explained to Mary Alice, who didn't seem to have heard of such a thing.

'Good job these adobe houses are bungalows,' I pointed out, 'or it could've been worse.' The house, meanwhile, was warming up - though we still couldn't figure out how.

'I dunno what I did,' Mary Alice shrugged.

'Mary Alice did some Spanish magic,' I told Hania.

'I just went in the shed, and something clicked,' she repeated as she left.
 
That afternoon I returned to the novel. I recalled a conversation I had with Glenn Ellis some twelve or thirteen years earlier, when we were making videos together. He told me that in his opinion the best option for the future would be for mankind to wipe itself out, and leave the rest of the planet to get on fine without us, before we destroyed everything. I couldn't understand how he could remove his perspective from that of his own species; for me, however destructive mankind was, we were the centre, the very point of life; without us, the universe lacked meaning. I thought Glenn lacked something essentially, necessarily, human.

This conversation had nagged at me for years, and I now felt I understood that my viewpoint then was merely an extension of egocentricity, not much less childish. If Glenn lacked something, maybe it was something we should all lack. Without it, we might be less human, less destructive.

Next year, we're told, scientists will have a map of the human genome. All our chromosomes laid out. Already companies are taking out patents on segments of the genetic code, to be reproduced and used in astounding ways. Eternal middle-age awaits,  selective offspring. Just juggle the drugs and the genes. Are these things to be celebrated?

The ideas were exciting me, I was actually sweating as I scribbled notes, which is, I've discovered, always a good sign. Until I realised that it wasn't me, it was the house. The house was heating up, but too much. In the hallway I met Hania.

'It's like a greenhouse in here,' I wailed.

'You know what?' she gasped. 'It's the flaw.'

'In adobe construction, you mean?' I asked.

'It's the flaw.' Hania looked both too hot and too pale; feverish yet somehow blue.

'What, my love, this house in particular? Tell me.'

'Feel the flaw,' she said.

'I want to feel the flaw,' I assured her. Whatever the hell was wrong with her, it was clearly worse than any altitude sickness. A lot worse. 'Show me the flaw,' I told my poor wife. 'So I can feel it too.'

Hania sank to her knees. I followed. What else could I do? She touched the ground. 'See?' she said.

'Underflaw heating. It's turned up too high.'

'Of course,' I said. 'We've got to find the regulator.'

'First get me some ice,' Hania begged. 'I need ice.'

The freezer door wouldn't open. I pulled at it, broke the handle, found a crowbar in the garage and tried to lever the door open. Finally it gave. The freezer was full of cubes of ice melded together into one great block.

'That's what the clunking was,' Hania surmised. 'Ever since the power went off and on, the ice-making machine's been going crazy.'

Even as we watched, there was a clunk and another load of ice-cubes dropped on top of the existing ice-pack and spilled on the floor .

Chad the Computer guy, a handsome young geek who looked like he worked out but already had grey screen-dazed bags under his brown eyes, turned up that evening. He stilled the frenzied ice machine instantly. 'This lever goes up,' he showed me kindly. Over at the desk he unwrapped a new laser printer and sat on his haunches in front of the computer punching the keyboard like Chico Marx playing the piano. It wasn't pretty, but it worked, somehow.

'Would you like a chair?' I asked.

'I'm used to doing it like this,' Chad declined.

'Can I get you something to drink? Coffee, juice?'

'No, I'm all set,' he said, staring at the screen.

Back in England, I never met a workman who refused a cuppa. I was a manual worker myself, I never refused one. Here, not a single one of the guys had accepted a drink. They all had, or will have, they say, something back in the truck. What's going on? Is it like these trick'n'treat  paediophobes putting razor blades in Halloween cookies? Do house owners poison the guys who work for them? Is it another modern American phenomenon?

Chad integrated the printer for Windows, but it took him a little longer to integrate it for the Locoscript programme I get ridiculed for still using. About two hours longer. I watched him, sat on his haunches, punching the keyboard at an alarming rate, taking in each new configuration displayed upon the screen in a nanosecond and then punching new keys. I saw the difference between computer experts and the rest of us, who simply use a computer without having the slightest idea how it actually works - Mary Alices in the microchip house: we are scared that if we push the wrong sequence of buttons we'll insult the software, send our programme into some irretrievable sulk of cyberspace. What the Chads know is how to get it back, and so they pummel keys fearlessly.

The next morning I hadn't even time to get to my desk before there was a big young blobby white man filling the porch. He had a grey uniform and a redneck moustache.

'Hi. I'm Darren. The Gas guy. I've come to switch your furnace on.'

'Well, actually,' I began, 'I think the cleaning lady -'

'- That's okay,' Darren smiled. 'I know where the shed is.'

He came back a moment later, smiling. 'Someone already switched the furnace on,' he said. 'You didn't need me. No thanks, I got a cola in the truck.'

We told him about Mary Alice, and how she put the heating on. High.

'Is she Hispanic?' Darren asked.

Early-warning hairs pilo-erected on the back of our liberal English necks. We prepared ourselves to be outraged. 'Er, yes,' we said.

'Yeh,' said Darren. 'My wife's Hispanic. She loves it hot. We're always fighting over the heat. She likes it up around eighty. I'm sitting there sweating. I like it at sixty eight degrees, sir. So we compromise - hell, she's not so mean. She lets us have it down around seventy eight, seventy nine.'

We asked Darren if he'd take a look at the stove.

'Sure. I ain't got it on my sheet, but I'll do that.' He went over and lit a ring on top, and started laughing. Darren shook his head. 'I'm afraid I'm going to have to shut this down, sir.'

Hania and I stared blankly at him.

'This beauty's set up for natural gas. But you got propane.'

'You can't just turn it off,' I said.

'It's the law, sir,' he replied.

'But we have to be able to make a cup of tea,' Hania explained.

'I could only leave it on if you promised not to use it, Ma'am,' Darren told us. I thought I glimpsed some room for negotiation, but not for long. 'Then you might use it after I'd gone, and get yourselves poisoned.' He shook his head. 'I can't allow that.'

'You're saying it's dangerous,' Hania understood.

'I've left one of these propane fed stoves set up for natural gas on once before. This family went on their knees, they begged me. What we gonna do? It was winter, they was a little place out on the prairie. How we gonna manage? I left it on. Next thing, they're all in hospital.'

We could see Darren's point. 'But how's it dangerous?'

'Why, carbon monoxide,' he told us. 'It's a poison.'

'What are the symptoms?'

'Oh, first off, a headache. Then a kind of giddiness. And after that a nausea in the stomach, Ma'am. You do much cooking around a stove like this, you better get yourself some fresh air real fast. You need oxygen.'

Hania and I looked at each other. I nodded, she shook her head, but we were thinking the same thing. Before we could voice it, the door was knocked upon. It was two older chaps in matching plaid shirts and caps who introduced themselves as Frosty and Bob, the Electric guys.

'They're coming in pairs now, for Christ's sake,' I whispered to Hania, as Darren called them over to the stove.

'Look at this beaut,' he told them. 'Been here ten years, never been converted to propane. These good people need their gas, but I told them, I can't allow that.'

Bob and Frosty didn't stay long. We told them about Mary Alice's daughter. They took the front plate off the jacuzzi switch and stared at it a while. 'She must have hit it real good,' said Frosty.
'We'll need to take this away,' Bob decided.

DeeDee fixed us up with an electric hot plate: it was like being on a camping holiday. The cord of wood hadn't been delivered, but we didn't really need to light a fire now that the underfloor heating was on. We were able to use the washing-machine, as long as we remembered to empty the bowl of water from underneath. Hania, recovered from her carbon monoxide poisoning, bought one of these three-wheeler baby joggers at half the price they are in England, and started running around the village pushing Gabriel before her.

A US West Telephone guy came and installed a fax machine and connected the computer to the Internet. And the new laser printer operated in a smooth, expensive kind of a way. Not that I had anything to print out. My notes were disconnected doodles in an exercise book.

Now that we were plugged to the net, I checked the Guardian website. There was a big GM story: Monsanto's share price was plummeting. Wall Street analysts were urging it to sell off the agricultural chemicals component of its business, because of the effect of European anti-GM campaigns - or "GMO hysteria," according to the financial consultant quoted, "in the European Union as well as the USA, Brazil, Japan and other key markets."

This was the best news I'd read for weeks, and deliriously shared it with Hania before returning to my desk, where I pondered the hope it signalled for the future, not to mention its worrying implications for my novel. The telephone rang.

'This is Bob.'

'Yes?'

'Appliance guy.'

'Yes?'

'Gas stove.'

'Right,' I caught on. 'You're going to fix the stove.'

'What's wrong with it?'

There was something familiar about Bob's tersely aggressive voice, but I couldn't identify, presumably, the acquaintance or famous person he was reminding my brain of, because he didn't speak for long enough. Whereupon another part of my brain decided it was on a police tap and tried to tell me, Keep him talking. All I did, though, was keep myself talking.

'It's fed on propane,' I explained, and told him about Darren's visit. 'But it's set up for natural gas.'

'That's a bunch of garbage,' the strangely familiar voice said crossly.

'Excuse me?' I quailed.

'I been servicing that stove for ten years. Ain't nothing wrong with that stove.'

'There is now,' I said apologetically. 'It's been cut off.'

There was a long, hostile pause. 'Tomorra,' Bob said. 'Eight'o'clock.'

'That is rather early for us,' I ventured.

There was another long pause. 'In the evening.' The phone went dead. A voice in my brain said, Damn.
He knew exactly how long he had. We couldn't trace him.

The next day turned out to be the first free one I'd had in a while, and I wrote furiously. Growth is intrinsic to life. Growth is life. Unless it becomes cancerous, out of control. What is the alternative to growth? Tribal societies, stone-age, Yekhani, existing in cycles, without what we would recognise as development? Is that, in fact, the appropriate pattern for evolution?

Are we simply talking about the wrong kind of growth, or is growth itself the problem? What then is the solution? To accept, to embrace, a lifestyle without growth. I'll always come back to writing about England, part of one of the most beautiful islands in the world, with its incredible variety of landscape, wheeling through the seasons. The island I come from and will return to. Being ruined by over-development, over-population, over-consumption.

My narrator is as enthralled by bio-technological possibilities as I am by those in modern music. I'm not content with the same music coming into my ears, but despise my propensity towards nostalgia and ride the surf of the present, in a small realm of techno that I find life-affirmingly new. The narrator, too, has a baby son - and is as enraptured as I am by Gabriel. He has as much invested in the future as I do. He doesn't intend at all to mess it up, only to enrich it.

Here's a question: does one wish to leave the world a better place for one's presence in it? Or simply no worse a place? Is it really as simple as this, that it's people who'd say the former that are the problem?
Humility.

I checked the Guardian website. More amazing news. Arpad Pusztai's research paper on snowdrop-potatoes damaging rats' stomachs has been published in The Lancet. After all the official vilification, the outcast is being rehabilitated. Although one has serious misgivings about a counter-culture icon being made out of someone who's spent his working life inflicting scientific research on small rodents.
This is infuriating. I've come away to work on a novel that will be a searing indictment of the way we live our lives, a prophecy of doom. I've hardly had a chance to get started and everyone's waking up already. Hang on.

It was lunchtime. Hania was making retablos - paintings on wood. I offered to  scramble eggs for lunch. 'I'm getting nowhere,' I told Hania. 'I can't work with all these visitor guys, and then when I do work my mind's like an omelette.'

'Try not to break the eggshells,' she asked. 'Blow them if you can.'

Gabriel never sleeps at our mealtimes. He likes to sit on one or other of our laps and watch the other person eat. 'I'm not rushing back to work,' I said. 'Let me look after him.' Hania washed-up. Then she got the eggshells, and started painting them.

'Why don't you get some sleep?' I  suggested. 'Shouldn't you rest?'

'You know I don't like sleeping in the daytime,' she said. 'Anyway, I feel fine.'

At eight'o'clock that evening there was a loud knock on the door from out in the darkness. Even though we were expecting it, it was still a surprise. The desert night is so black and forbidding, you just don't expect anything to come out of it.

Bob brushed aside minimal pleasantries and made straight for the stove. He was middle-aged, slim, with green eyes, short, dyed blond hair and a scowl. 'Where'd he disconnect it?' he demanded, and started wrenching things around.

'Do you know what the problem is?' I asked.

'I gotta look at it first,' he muttered, so I left him to it. Gabriel was getting sleepy. Hania was getting sleepy. I was a little tired myself. 

'I know who he reminds me of,' I whispered to Hania.

'Who?'

'It really is Bob. From Twin Peaks. Obviously, he's had a hair dye and cut.'

Bob started bashing the stove. Gabriel woke up. I went back over. 'What's the trouble?' I asked.

'I said I gotta take a look,' he said in a forbidding way, and hit something.

As I watched him, the words, 'Fire walk with me,' flipped out of my mouth. But Bob was good. He didn't flinch. Not a flicker. He just yanked at something else. Which he proceeded to do for the next hour or so. He kept taking pieces of the stove outside, into the darkness, from where it sounded like he was bashing them with lumps of rock. Less mending the stove than punishing it for going wrong. Gabriel couldn't work out whether to go to sleep or stay awake, so he flipped between the two. Hania was growing irritable, and urged me to demand from Bob how long he intended to be, to tell him to come back in the daytime.

'I suspect Bob doesn't like the light,' I whispered. The next thing we knew, Bob was standing there with the top half of the stove under his arm. He'd dismembered it. He was a serial stove killer.

'Take it away to fix it,' he said. 'Can't fix it here.'

What? I wanted to ask, You've got bigger rocks back in your workshop?

'What do you have to do?' I enquired.

'Close up holes in the gas feeds.'

'You're trying to close up holes?'

'Where oxygen gets in.'

'Wait a sec, so is what you're saying is you're going to convert it?'

'Do it myself. This make ain't made now. Can't get a kit.'

'So it is set up for natural gas?' I asked timidly. I didn't want to antagonise Bob from Twin Peaks. But we needed to know the truth. 'It's not set up for propane?'

Bob's serpentine eyes flickered. 'No-one complained before,' he scowled, putting the blame squarely upon us, and left.

I felt guilty. Scores of inhabitants of this house have quite happily used the gas on the wrong setting for years, we moaning Brits come over and within a week we're causing trouble. Hania, luckily, was more clear-headed than I. Hania was livid.

'No-one complained before?' she repeated. 'Is that what that idiot said? He's been servicing it for ten years, people have been breathing in carbon monoxide, and all he can say is, No-one complained before?'

Gabriel was wide awake, gurgling at us. 'Ten weeks old,' Hania said. 'Imagine what could have happened.'

'You're right,' I said. 'This beautiful house is a death trap.'

Gabriel seemed to decipher what we were saying, and started grizzling.This was Hania's low point, and the three of us grumbled towards bed.

The next morning, while Hania caught up from another fitful night ('No-one complained before?' she kept teeth-grinding in her sleep) I took Gabriel for a stroll. Across the road a pair of Mexicans had started rebuilding an old wall. I stopped and chatted.

'It's like dry stone walling,' I said. 'Back in England. Except for the cement, of course. That is cement, is it?'

'Que?'

'That brown stuff.'

They shook their heads. 'That's mud, mister.'

Their beaten-up old yellow sedan was parked twenty yards away - twenty yards nearer us - and its stereo was tuned to a Hispanic music station. As I returned to the house a different guy parked his pick-up a little further along the road and got out with a chainsaw.

Mary Alice arrived. It was cleaning day again. 'What happened to the furnace?' she said, teeth chattering.

'It's fine,' we told her. 'We like it like this. We're from England.'

But Mary Alice was already surging at her unstoppable peasant pace towards the regulator. 'I can't work in this cold,' she said, jamming it up to eighty.

I went to the studio, and started work. Our lives are haunted, my narrator wrote. There is a haunting quality to our lives. It is us, of course. The strangeness of the self, the frightening depths of the unknown within us, how little we know of what we are made. Most of the time we sidle along, but now and then it happens: we spook ourselves.

It's most obvious with new parents - that haunted look, composed of something more than the sum of hollowed eyes, sore heads, movement made awkward from muscles torn by the ridiculous positions in which they've held their baby and the quizzical cast to their faces indicating the obvious question: where did I go, my life is that of a drone, subaquatic, so what happened to the real, the authentic, the heretofore me? This haunted look, it comes from even more than any or all of these things, it's just that like little pockets of air they attach themselves and help bring it slow, the submerged moon of the self, to the surface.

Mary Alice started hoovering. I took my notebook through to the over-heated living room. The bassline from the Mexicans' radio dribbled through the window. Then it was drowned out by the scream of a chainsaw.

'This is what you call a retreat?' I demanded. Hania was serenely drawing a cartoon. As pregnant women approach labour they're encouraged to compile a birth plan: to think about what kind of drugs and other intervention they might welcome, and so on, and write it down, so that both they and those in attendance will know what the woman wants. Hania did hers in the form of a cartoon, a copy of which was then requested by every midwife and medic who saw it. A number wanted to use it as a teaching tool. They all said it was the most original and striking they'd seen. It was probably also, with its music and oils and baths and belly dancing, the most wildly divergent from subsequent reality.
'I'm doing one that'll show what actually happened,' she told me. Every now and then she helped Gabriel turn a page of the cardboard book of animals in which he was impressively engrossed - less in reading than chewing, admittedly.

'How can you concentrate with that noise?' I asked him. Mary Alice pushed her vacuum cleaner out of the studio and into the bathroom. I tried to write. The chainsaw whined intermittently. The bass plodded into my eardrums. Hania drew. My low point was approaching. So was the hoover, along the hallway.
That was when the Gardener guy came. He had a colleague with him this week, a woman who was as pleasant as he was, and they had even more implements. He went around the back of the house with a lawnmower. She worked her way around the front with a machine for vacuuming the leaves.

'They've got us surrounded,' I said.

Hania, intent upon her maternal episode of the Beano, didn't hear me. Mary Alice started hoovering the living room.  The male gardener mowed the grass. The female gardener came up to the window beside me with her leaf vacuum. It didn't suck up the leaves at all: it was blowing them! When she saw me through the glass, she smiled.

I mean, honestly, I am not precious. Ask anyone. It was just that my head hurt. I staggered away from the window with my head in my hands, literally, like a ham actor in some terrible thirties movie. Except that I understood suddenly that they were great actors. That there are times in this life when the mental pain is such that holding your head in your hands is the only thing a man can do.

'Help me,' I implored my wife. 'I am trying to write a major novel here!'

Some hours later, I lay neurasthenically on the sofa. Gabriel lay on top, staring into my eyes. I had the feeling he knew too much about me. Hania stretched across the room.

'What am I going to do?' I asked.

'Relax, babe,' she said. 'Read. Walk. I love you, don't take it badly, but you're just a little inflexible.' She said this from the lotus position. A position I've been unable to reach since about the age of six.

'Look,' I said. 'It's not over. Bob from Twin Peaks is coming back. Frosty and Bob have still got to fix the jacuzzi. There's wood to be delivered. Chimneys to be swept. Maybe they'll get Joel back to have a fresh look at the washing-machine.'

'That'd be nice,' Hania said. 'I liked Joel. He was nice to Gabriel.'

'That's not the point, woman! I mean, it's all right for you. You can turn your hand to anything.'

'Yes. Oh, did I tell you?' she asked. 'I'm going to write a short story.'

'You are what?' I thought I was going to have to hold my head in my hands again. 'Bloody marvellous. What about, anyway?'

'The guys,' she said.

'Guys?'

'The Appliance guys,' she smiled.

'I don't get it,' I said. 'What'll you say about them?'

'Well, I'm going to write about Michael, the Chimney Sweep guy that's going to come, who's a white-water rafting guide in the summer and sweeps chimneys in the winter. Who's going to come looking like Merlin with his long hair and top hat and feathers. Who'll tell us about the coyotes on the roof.'
'Oh, yeh,' I say. 'And the racoon he disturbs who's been sleeping in our chimney, and who leaves his sooty pawprints on the roof. What else?'

'I'm going to write about the Wood guy, who never delivers the cord of wood we're waiting for. But it doesn't matter, because Michael's told us the chimney's not safe to light a fire in anyway.'

'Yes,' I said. 'Go on.'

'I'm going to write about Joel,' she said.

'Enough about Joel, already!'

'The way he said to Gabriel, Blow your trumpet, little feller.'

'Yes, yes. What about a title?' I asked. 'What are you going to call it?'

'I don't know yet,' Hania admitted. 'Yoga in the Desert, maybe. Me and My Men. I'm not sure. The Writers' Retreat. It's not important,' she said. 'Not now. It'll come.'
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