by Byers, Sam
Nathan’s possessions: one holdall containing three complete changes of clothes, two books and basic toiletries; a packet of rolling tobacco that also contained papers, filters and a Zippo lighter; and his wallet. The coat that had once seemed adequate was no longer sufficiently effective despite the body heat generated by the brisk three-mile walk on which Nathan had embarked because he didn’t want his parents to collect him directly from The Sanctuary and didn’t want any of The Sanctuary’s staff to drive him anywhere. He’d thought that walking to the nearest village would make him feel good. He did not feel good.
For much of Nathan’s adult life people had stared at him and as a general rule he accepted this, just as he also accepted that it was likely to occur more frequently given certain developments and alterations in his physical presentation. Keeping his coat on had not entirely concealed the tattoos and scars that crept vine-like out of his collar and sleeves. His beard was shaggy and wiry; his hair neck-length and pushed back off his face using some Brylcreem he’d borrowed from another resident. People could have surmised a lot from his eyes, he thought, if they’d been looking at his eyes.
The café was greasily steamed and smelled strongly of damp rag. Nathan had ordered a breakfast the menu described as Olympian. There were four other people there: an elderly couple with mugs of tea, dividing the Sun between them according to sections of interest; the woman who ran the place, wearing a blue tabard and a hair net and a smile that looked like she might have to sit under the drier every morning to have it set; and in the opposite corner a stubbly, thick-set man eating a bacon roll and peering at Nathan over the crest of his bap. This wasn’t how Nathan had imagined his first meal outside, but when he thought about it he realised this was partly because he hadn’t imagined much at all. He felt tired. The conditions were draining. You probably had to wash the walls in a place like this, he thought, but in a place like this that probably didn’t happen. He wondered if the café offered brown sauce and if they did what sort of symbolic dispenser it would be served in. Bap-man was chewing ostentatiously, perhaps even aggressively. The woman with the styled smile brought his breakfast and the cutlery that went with it. It was not the first time Nathan had not been trusted with cutlery outside of the circumstantially appropriate setting of a meal. The resonance of this was notable but not particularly upsetting. The newspaper couple were now doing the crossword together. Bap-man asked for another cup of tea. Nathan’s eggs were fried just to the point of congealing and no further. The sausages were of the cheap supermarket variety and contained indeterminate pieces of hard matter which he took to be bone. The bacon was not crispy. After asking, he determined that brown sauce was not an option. He’d eaten very healthily for several months and the grease was a shock and the shock was a disappointment because the anticipated emotion was happiness. He was careful to chew his food and to pay attention to what he was eating but the bone in the sausages might have been a reality too far. His coffee was hot and he burned his mouth and then experienced that sandy feeling on his tongue which would last, he expected, about a day.
When Nathan was six years old his mother had discussed with him in detail the Chambers Concise English Dictionary definition of disappointment and his exact relationship to the word with reference to his relationship to her. During his time away Nathan had at one point redefined the word sadness as plural rather than singular and now continued to think about sadness as a sort of extended family of which some members were more approachable than others. His hands had a twisted, tightened look as he ate and after a long period spent abandoning his self-consciousness he realised that he was again self-conscious. It was possible that the man with the bap was not looking at him, just as it was possible that the dimensions of the café were not in themselves unsettling, although the fact that the table and chairs were uncomfortable was certain. It was very strongly possible that he did not want his parents to arrive, although it was also true that he did not want to remain in this particular café or even this village for a moment longer than was strictly necessary. Mustard would have made the sausages more palatable but after failing to secure brown sauce he noted a certain reluctance to ask for mustard.
He finished his breakfast by using a carefully saved slice of fried bread to mop grease and egg yolk and the cooled juice of baked beans from his plate. He finished his coffee although the black void of his mug made this difficult to determine, leading to a sense of exploration when he tipped the mug towards his mouth. The sandy feeling on his tongue remained and in turn caused an itchy sweat across his cheeks. He ordered a can of Pepsi and paid using the money from his wallet which he had not thought to check but which thankfully was sufficient. A cloud moved briefly across the sun and dimmed the extent to which the other patrons were backlit and rendered the face of the man with the bap more focused and less sinister and made it clear he was not necessarily staring. A claret-coloured Rover pulled up to the kerb outside. Nathan drank all of the Pepsi and put the can on the table. He picked up his bag and put his free hand in his pocket and left the café just as his mother, neatly resplendent in a powder-blue skirt suit that sadly accentuated the arterially blown mayhem of her calves, unfolded herself from the passenger seat and opened her arms for a hug with which Nathan was only physically able to engage and so for which he could not really be said to be present.
‘Darling,’ said his mother. ‘We’ve missed you so much.’
She looked back at the car, where Nathan’s father was visible in the driver’s seat. ‘Roger,’ she said. ‘Get out of the car.’
Nathan’s father, a man who wore a year-round yachting jacket despite never having set foot on a yacht, slid out of the car accompanied by the industrial rustle of chemically complex fabrics.
‘Kiddo,’ he said. ‘How goes it?’
He held out his hand to Nathan, who shook it.
‘OK,’ said Nathan. ‘Fine.’
‘Great,’ said Nathan’s father.
‘Well,’ said Nathan’s mother.
They stood in an approximately equilateral triangle and each somehow angled themselves so as to face the emptiness between the other two. Nathan’s father put his hands in the pockets of his yachting jacket. Nathan rubbed his beard. Nathan’s mother performed a sort of smile that in order to be complete would have required machinery her face simply did not possess. Nathan debated a cigarette and thought maybe no. Nathan’s father slid an iPhone in a protective pleather pouch from his Velcro-sealed pocket and stroked the screen.
‘There’s a window in the traffic,’ he said. ‘We should carpe diem.’
He loaded Nathan’s bag into the back of the car and popped the rear door so Nathan could get in. Nathan’s father drove, his mother sat in the passenger seat looking straight ahead. Nathan stared at the backs of their heads and necks, at his mother’s neat grey bob and his father’s wide, slightly red neck that always looked as if he were either angry or cooling off from sunburn. Duration of stay had not been discussed.
‘Your room’s looking lovely,’ said his mother without turning round. She tended to direct her conversation to the windscreen when they were in the car. She had, Nathan thought, a child’s sense of solipsism. She struggled with the concept of other minds. She thought if she didn’t watch the road her husband wouldn’t either.
‘I see,’ said Nathan.
‘I see, he says,’ said Nathan’s father.
‘What do you want me to say?’
‘I think your father’s just looking for a little bit of gratitude, that’s all,’ said Nathan’s mother. ‘Bus, Roger.’
‘Noted.’
Nathan’s mother unpeeled the pocket-flap of her husband’s yachting jacket and located the phone. She prodded and swiped at the screen with an efficiency that Nathan found unsettling.
‘Five new mails,’ she said shrilly.
Nathan thought his earlier decision re: having a cigarette might not have been the right one.
‘Thinking of you as you pass this milestone,’ his mo
ther said in a tone of voice that made it clear she was reading out loud.
‘Bless,’ said Nathan’s father.
‘Who’s that from?’ said Nathan.
‘Dear MotherCourage. I just wanted to tell you that you are an inspiration to me. I’ve read everything you’ve written. I hope so much you get your boy back, love Samantha69.’
‘What boy?’ said Nathan.
‘What boy, he says,’ said Nathan’s father.
‘At last count I only had one,’ said Nathan’s mother.
Nathan’s seatbelt greatly restricted forward movement and made it difficult to properly converse with his mother. Undoing his seatbelt would have led to an unnecessary conversation with one or other of his parents.
‘Are you MotherCourage?’
‘Of course I’m MotherCourage,’ said Nathan’s mother.
‘So who’s Samantha69?’
‘One of my followers.’
‘What followers?’
‘Now I want you to know,’ said Nathan’s mother, still caressing the phone and directing her speech to its screen while every second or so checking the road, ‘that we are here for you, and we are not seeking confrontation. But at the same time, if there is confrontation, then that is OK. Confrontation is OK, Nathan. It’s nothing to be scared of.’
‘I’m not being confrontational,’ said Nathan.
The angle of the setting sun was such that flipping down the little screens to either side of the rear-view mirror, as Nathan’s parents had done, was essentially pointless. The car’s dashboard readout showed an external temperature of zero degrees Celsius and an internal temperature of twenty-eight. Nathan had not removed his coat and now felt too restrained to do so. His reluctance to unfasten his seatbelt could not be entirely explained but may have related to a sense of both security and enforced restraint that he found comforting.
‘Mothers Who Survive,’ said Nathan’s mother.
‘Who are mothers who survive?’
‘Mothers Who Survive dot com. The website.’ His mother’s voice was strategically calm to the point where it aroused the exact opposite sense in Nathan. ‘It’s for mothers who have, at one time or another, as the name suggests, survived.’
‘Survived what?’
‘Survived what, he says,’ said Nathan’s father.
‘Their children,’ said Nathan’s mother.
A copse of trees split the dwindling sunlight into smithereens and initiated a strobe effect not dissimilar to rapid blinking. The sense of reality-as-gauze-screen was not going anywhere fast. When Nathan clenched his fists the scar tissue stretched across the knuckles in a way that reminded him of parma ham wrapped round a chicken breast. There was no pain. Use of his fingers, arm, or other bodily parts had not been affected. He said, ‘As in what. As in they outlived their children? Or as in their children tried to kill them?’
‘Both. Either. All sorts.’
‘But I’m not dead.’
‘You don’t need to be.’
‘And I haven’t tried to kill you.’
‘It’s a very inclusive organisation. It’s about sharing, not ring-fencing.’
His mother was still talking to the windscreen. Anything to which she didn’t pay attention would spiral out of control. Approximately a year ago she had explained to Nathan that failing to think of himself as having a condition was itself a symptom of his condition.
‘Sharing what?’ said Nathan.
‘Our trauma,’ said Nathan’s mother.
‘What trauma?’
‘The trauma we’ve been through.’
‘That’s not an answer.’
‘The trauma,’ said Nathan’s father bluntly, ‘of you.’
Fields rushed by, furrowed, stripped of life. The sense that there had once been crops in fields that were now bare made them appear as places where something had already happened: post-evental; forlorn. Things arrived; departed. The sense of abrasion on his tongue. The way the sun can seem cold. The way things occurred and were forgotten.
‘Nearly there,’ said his father.
Nathan’s parents’ home was a once-beautiful cottage on the Cambridgeshire–Suffolk border that they’d bought cheap and ruined at great expense. Trawling around for their ideal retirement location after celebrating Nathan’s departure from what his mother called, without a hint of irony, the family nest, they had stumbled on an increasingly frail and not entirely undemented ex-schoolmaster who, due to issues of mobility, sanity and convenience, was looking to sell fast and get the hell out before he was found, as he put it, half-rotted in a pool of his own juices. Struck by his plight, Nathan’s parents had immediately and selflessly haggled him down to approximately two-thirds the fair price and had told him, in his best interests, that he really needed to move quickly, and that the best way to move quickly, providing one had the luxury of two such reliable buyers as them, was to cut out the middleman and stay well away from estate agents. As he signed the rudimentary contract he made them promise to stay true to the old place. They’d promised, then gutted it. Beginning the very day he moved out they’d set in motion a process Nathan would later describe as an aesthetic massacre. Never known for their concessions to taste, his parents had, in working on what they quite openly described as their final abode, reached the very pinnacle of their ugly aspirations. Leaded windows with wooden frames were replaced by PVC and double glazing which, as Nathan’s father put it, kept the heat in and the noise out, although exactly what noise, given the house’s location at the far end of an isolated lane on the outer edge of a sleepy village, was never very clear. The Rayburn, which had been in excellent condition due to the fact that the ex-schoolmaster had taken to living entirely off Birds Eye meals for one which he prepared in the microwave, was quickly replaced, to much fanfare by Nathan’s mother, by an all-black electric hob with touch-sensitive controls. The original brick floors, which Nathan’s father found were cold enough to breach even the luxurious integrity of his slippers, were covered in a thick cream shag. Exposed beams were boxed in (‘so much neater’); soft pink Farrow and Ball walls were redone in an infinitely less dated Dulux magnolia; and the iron bath was replaced with something deeper, wider, and entirely more modern from B&Q. In the garden, which, much to Nathan’s parents’ consternation, turned out to be riddled with things that needed looking after, they ripped up, with the aid of a one-eyed man and his JCB, three apple trees, a greengage tree, a magnolia, and a rather complicated herb garden that was far too untidy to be saved. Appalled at the mess an untamed wisteria had made of the front of the house, Nathan’s father set about it with loppers and a hacksaw until all that remained were the stubborn shadowy prints where it had clung to the plaster, which mercifully was going to be redone anyway.
At the end of it all, they were happier than they had ever been, and even invited old Mr Rudge, the ex-schoolmaster, round for high tea so he could see, as Nathan’s mother put it, the potential that had been right under his nose all that time, but sadly Mr Rudge was off his food – an early warning as it transpired – and was dead less than a week later.
‘At least he lived to see it,’ said Nathan’s father, nodding sagely.
Such was the work that had gone into the final abode that Nathan’s mother was unable to enter it without a degree of show. She swept in, shedding her coat in a single, florid movement, hanging it on the peg Nathan’s father had screwed to the wall at a slightly improbable angle and, consciously or unconsciously, trailing her hand alongside her as if running her fingers through the eddies of a refreshing stream.
‘Tea,’ she said with grandeur, and threw the switch on the kettle.
The dining table, Nathan observed, was fractionally too large for the kitchen, meaning it functioned more as something that needed to be negotiated than something at which one might be inclined to sit. It seated six, despite Nathan’s mother’s strongly held belief that for an informal gathering four was the optimum. Formal gatherings no doubt went by different rules. The table was pine, b
ut had been varnished with a heat-resistant treatment so thick that it had the appearance of being synthetic. Despite the treatment, cups, plates and most certainly pans were not under any circumstances to be placed directly on the table, even if, as had happened to Nathan, you were foolish enough to have picked up a hot pan and needed to put it down before it burned you.