Idiopathy

by Byers, Sam

  Nathan’s mother didn’t know how he took his tea. He noted that he was affronted by this yet not particularly surprised.

  ‘Milk two sugars,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll give you one,’ she said, as if this were the very definition of kindness.

  The chairs matched the dining table but, due to concerns about the linoleum (an off-white affair with a very pale yellow mosaic), had been outfitted with felt pads on their feet in such a way as to ensure that not a single chair in the room sat level, leading to a situation where Nathan was unable to stop gently rocking his chair from side to side.

  ‘Stop that,’ said his mother.

  He stopped it, then started it, then concentrated very hard on stopping it and keeping it stopped.

  ‘You know,’ said Nathan’s mother, turning from the fridge with a pint of milk aloft. ‘You can freeze milk and it comes out just fine. It’s worth remembering.’

  Nathan nodded.

  ‘And cheese,’ she said. ‘Cheese freezes ever so well.’

  His father entered through the back door and began to struggle gamely with the zip of his coat, first wrenching it, then pausing as if to lull it into a false sense of security, then suddenly attempting to force it downwards with all his strength, as if surprise might have been the vital element missing from the battle.

  ‘Arms up,’ said Nathan’s mother, motioning with her hands.

  Nathan’s father raised his arms and frowned as his wife yanked his jacket over his head.

  ‘Now, Nathan,’ said Nathan’s mother, returning to the kettle and tarrying with a teabag. ‘We want you to make yourself at home. I know you haven’t been here in quite some time, and that coming home at thirty must come with its own, shall we say, disappointments, but I do honestly think you can be very happy here, and I want you to know that we’re glad to have you, and that however long you want to … PUT THAT DOWN THIS INSTANT, ROGER.’

  Nathan turned to the fridge, where his father was upending a flagon of neon orange fluid into his gaping face.

  ‘Honestly,’ said Nathan’s mother, marching towards him and snatching the drink from his grip, ‘it’s just full of agent orange. Where did you get it?’

  ‘Garage,’ said Nathan’s father. He pointed lamely at the label. ‘It has added vitamin C.’

  ‘Do you want to have a stroke, Roger? Is that what you want?’

  ‘I could go into a home,’ said Nathan’s father slightly wistfully.

  ‘Oh, darling, don’t be silly, you know I’d never allow that.’

  Nathan traced a whorl on the tabletop and tried not to look at anything with excessive focus. Colours could be deceiving, he thought. It was possible to bring discomfort with you into a room that wasn’t technically uncomfortable, although, that said, he thought the room probably was uncomfortable, one potential cause of which may have been the fact that the floor tilted imperceptibly but slightly tipsily downwards in one corner, creating an angle that opposed the angle of the ceiling’s slope and gave the impression of being inside a student maths project completed without the aid of a protractor.

  He rolled a cigarette.

  ‘No,’ said his mother simply. Then, ‘Outside if you must.’

  He took his tea with him. He was trying not to do memories, but at times they seemed to do him. He liked the cold. The house was too hot. The Sanctuary had been too hot. There was something immediate about being cold. It was good to stand and think; to breathe deeply. Suffolk skies seemed kind in their expanse; generous somehow; unfurling into scattered occurrences of cloud. His tea wasn’t sweet enough and not worth enjoying alongside his cigarette. Most of the plants were gone but his mother was growing beans under teepee’d canes. She’d hung out old compact discs, presumably to keep the birds away. They spun in the gentle breeze. When he was eight he’d planted grape pips because his father had told him he could grow a vine. When the vine failed to appear his mother told him it was probably because he hadn’t been good enough. He spent over a week being as good as he thought it possible to be, at the end of which, when there was still no vine, Nathan did not feel he had learned anything particularly positive. He looked at the CDs as they spun. On two of them, in black marker, was written: Happy Mother’s Day, Love Nathan. He switched off several thoughts and went back to the kitchen. His mother was sitting at the dining table.

  ‘Aha,’ she said. ‘He returns.’

  Sensing an air of upcoming instruction, Nathan sat down opposite her and did four cycles of calming breathing.

  ‘Now,’ she said.

  She took a deep breath, tapped one index finger against her pursed lips. Someone who knew her less well than Nathan would have assumed she was trying to think of what to say.

  ‘Nathan,’ she said.

  ‘Hello there,’ said Nathan.

  ‘I need to brief you,’ she said. ‘Ever so quickly. Won’t take long.’

  ‘Brief me?’

  ‘The most important thing,’ she said, ‘is that no matter who calls or what they offer you redirect them to me, OK?’

  ‘What do you mean, what they offer?’

  ‘No matter how much money, or how big the spread, we absolutely do not accept opening offers. Are we agreed?’

  ‘Opening offers of what?’

  ‘It’s rather like when the government says they won’t negotiate with terrorists. They do, of course. They have to. But it’s important that they say they don’t in order to dissuade time-wasters.’

  ‘Are we going to be contacted by terrorists?’

  ‘No. It’s a metaphor. For journalists.’

  Nathan wondered if four cycles of calming breathing might have been optimistic and considered doing another four.

  ‘Did I not explain this over the phone?’ said his mother.

  ‘You said something, but, to be honest, I wasn’t really listening.’

  His mother blinked three times in an even rhythm.

  ‘I’ll reiterate,’ she said. ‘During your time away, there have been considerable developments. Mothers Who Survive has been very successful. I have nearly four thousand followers on Twitter.’

  ‘What do you tweet about?’

  ‘Well, largely I just link back to my blog, you know. But what with the book coming out I’ve also been trying to leverage social media as a promotional tool. The response has been excellent.’

  Nathan felt slightly unwell in his stomach.

  ‘Now, you can see this two ways,’ said his mother. ‘And I’m very aware of that. You could see it as selfish, or opportunistic. You could say that I’ve shown a callous disregard for your dignity and feelings. And if you did say that, I’d understand.’ She shrugged. ‘It’s nothing that hasn’t been said by certain bleeding-heart columnists already. But you could also look at it another way, Nathan. You could look at it as my gift to you. You could look at it as me putting myself on the line, exposing myself, for you, just as I always have. Do you see?’

  Nathan did not see and said so. His mother reached across the table and took his hand in hers. He had absolutely no idea how to respond.

  ‘Just give it a chance,’ she said.

  Nathan’s father ambled into the kitchen.

  ‘We can take your stuff up,’ said his father.

  ‘Yes, good idea,’ said Nathan’s mother, releasing his hand. ‘We can pick this up later. Just remember: no first offers, that’s the main thing. Take his bag, Roger.’

  ‘It’s just one bag,’ said Nathan.

  His father had already picked up the bag and was not to be dissuaded. He was like an ocean liner: a change of mind was painfully slow and required a complex pattern of braking and turning before thrust could be reapplied. The stairs were lined with photos. Nathan watched his parents getting married; watched himself at some family function; watched himself graduate. There was a cavernous distance. Things sparked; faded; failed to echo.

  ‘We can change it, if you want,’ said his father, opening the bedroom door.

  ‘No,’ said Nathan. �
�It’s …’

  He let the ellipsis hang. Somehow he could shape it with his lips. He saw it notated: ‘…’ or ‘–’. Considerable and slightly misguided effort had been made. The duvet and pillows were gunmetal grey. He pictured his mother commenting that it was a good boys’ colour. The bookshelves were metal; mildly industrial. His books were alphabetised and so were his CDs. On the bed was a toilet bag filled with the brand of men’s scented products (Logger: For The Woodsman In You) his mother had bought him every Christmas since he was fifteen. When he swallowed it felt like a small animal had fashioned a nest in his larynx.

  ‘Anyway,’ said his father, and left.

  There was a book on the pillow: hardback, its title embossed in blue above a picture of his mother inexplicably looking out to sea, wrapped in a scarf, the collar of her Barbour jacket turned up against what Nathan could only assume was a squall of spume-flecked adversity.

  Mother Courage: One Woman’s Battle Against Maternal Blame

  Nathan opened the book to the first page of the first chapter and read:

  Looking back, I probably should have known that Harry, as I’m going to call my only son in this book, would be a difficult child. Perhaps it all began with his conception – a lengthy, at times exhausting process made all the more difficult by …

  He closed the book and lay back on the bed. After a few moments he put the book under the bed. He thought about his mother. She’d aged; found new interests; expanded her vocabulary and social circle; modulated her voice from self-taught social bray to whooping aspirational blare, but had not, as far as anyone who knew her well could see, changed. She still favoured tottering, precarious heels that caused her to tilt aggressively forward at all times and which led to people reactively leaning backwards when they were addressed by her, as one might from a person with particularly toxic breath. She still smiled with a surprisingly limited array of facial muscles.

  Nathan’s memories of her during his childhood were centred on his schooling. Here she was marching him in by his wrist and pulling up his shirt to show off the bruises he’d received at the hands of Benjamin Hollingdale during a disagreement on the school playing field which Nathan would have been very happy to forget. Here she was at parents’ evening, expressing dissatisfaction at certain teaching methods employed by Nathan’s middle school which, she said, through their refusal to ‘stream’ or ‘set’, disadvantaged the more able students, such as Nathan, by forcing them to learn alongside certain individuals from certain families who in all honesty, without being unkind or passing judgement, were never really going to progress. Here she was at Nathan’s upper school explaining to a gathering of three senior teachers why Nathan was ‘different’ and why, although he didn’t need to be treated differently, certain factors did need to be borne in mind when making decisions about group activities and involvement versus individual work and – she didn’t want to say special attention but, well – special attention.

  In his late teens, twice in his twenties and finally very firmly after the events of what she would only ever refer to as ‘That Night’, Nathan’s mother had attempted to explain to him that because a fairly key characteristic of what she only started referring to as his ‘condition’ very late on in proceedings was that he didn’t actually think he had any sort of condition at all, he couldn’t really make what she would later, after much reading and research, call an informed choice about what should be done about it. There was, admittedly, a certain difference in approach. When Nathan was ten she might have said something like, Why don’t you at least try and be normal, whereas by twenty-five she was becoming more adept in what she saw as the language of understanding, and so would have been at greater pains, if not actually to empathise, then at least to dress her language in the clothes of empathy and continually reiterate how she and Nathan’s father were ‘there’ for him, and how they wanted to ‘support’ him, but how, if they were going to support him, he would have to take certain things ‘on board’ and basically stop trying to pretend he was normal, although the word normal had by then disappeared from her vocabulary. But these were minor changes and served only to mask what Nathan saw as the basic unchanging nature of the woman who had now taken early retirement in order to devote her life to changing his life.

  Just as she was never one to let facts stand in the way of an opinion, Nathan’s mother was disinclined to let tragedy stand in the way of potential opportunity. Mere days after That Night, as Nathan was swimming back up from what he regarded as an unnecessarily heavy dose of tranquillisers and attempting to flex his hands and arms under the bandages, his mother had seized the moment of him being at his lowest possible ebb and presented him with a face of such finely crafted tragedy that he was unable to refuse when she near-ordered him to do what she described as one favour and submit to a period of experimental residential treatment. At the time, Nathan was beginning to wonder if he had inflicted unnecessary misery on those around him, and so had agreed, some small part of him wondering if she might be right: perhaps he did need to change; perhaps it was the least that he owed her.

  The spare bedroom had not previously been referred to as his. The change was not one with which he felt comfortable. The effort that had gone into the room’s creation was both touching and oppressive. His possessions seemed unfamiliar in a new context. He couldn’t be sure he had been the person who had owned these things: incense pots; empty jars; a pair of khukuri knives; a gyroscope. He stood and wandered. The bedside table contained a single drawer in which he found his mobile phone. Turning it on, he was surprised to find that his mother hadn’t wiped it. He scrolled through the messages. They asked him where he was. They asked him why he hadn’t replied. They dried up. One stood out:

  Nathan. Hope you’re OK. Call sometime. K x x. PS: Broke up with Dan.

  He read it twice. Things rose; sank. He went to the window. The light was too strong. He turned back to the bed and unzipped his bag and then zipped it back up. He’d spent a lot of time being lonely, most of it around other people. He looked at the text again, thumb hovering over the call button. He felt relieved when his father tapped on the door and poked his head in.

  ‘Your mother feels we should have some man time,’ he said.

  ‘Oh,’ said Nathan.

  ‘Do you like darts?’

  ‘Sure.’

  His father led him out to the garage, his yachting jacket squeaking as he pushed open the door and gesticulated towards the changes he’d made to the interior.

  ‘This all came about when she made me get rid of my surf board,’ he said.

  ‘When did you ever have a surf board?’ said Nathan.

  ‘Oh, for a long time. One always thinks,’ he sniffed, ‘maybe one day I’ll get out there, you know, hit the surf. Then she comes along and puts a stop to all that.’

  Nathan pictured his father surfing in his yachting jacket.

  ‘Right,’ he said.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Nathan’s father. ‘There was something of a compromise. Because OK, maybe the time for surfing has passed. I can see that. But a man needs a retreat, a cave, so to speak.’

  He flicked a switch and three strip lights lit the space. It was concrete-floored, chilly and faintly industrial. In the corner was a makeshift bar. On the wall at the far end was a dartboard.

  ‘Let’s play darts.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘But first I need to piss.’

  He pottered over to the edge of the garage and tugged at a flimsy-looking plastic door.

  ‘You had a toilet put in?’ said Nathan.

  ‘Chemical toilet,’ said his father, ‘but the absolute best obviously. Very high waste-decomposition factor.’

  His father shut himself in the little white cabin. As Nathan wandered about, casting his eye over the small drinks collection and the quiver of Union Jack darts on the edge of the old slab of worktop that served as the surface of the bar, he could hear his father sighing loudly.

  ‘Let’s hope that’s the last o
f it,’ said his father, still zipping his fly as he emerged. ‘Don’t seem to be able to tell these days.’

  ‘Right,’ said Nathan.

  ‘OK, let’s play. Here’s your darts.’

  He passed Nathan what must have been a spare set, the flights frayed, the tips dulled by countless landings on the concrete floor. ‘Round the clock, OK? One to twenty then bull.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I’ll go first.’

  His father took a moment to position himself awkwardly with his toe on a strip of gaffer tape, tugging at his cuffs and waistline in order to throw unimpeded. ‘Here we go. Bugger. Bugger again. Bugger. No score. So anyway, your mother says we have to talk about your feelings. Do you want to talk about your feelings?’

  ‘Not really,’ said Nathan, placing his toe on the line. ‘One. No. Two. Two for me.’

  ‘Thank God for that,’ said his father, muscling up to the makeshift oche. ‘Frankly I was dreading it. Bugger. Bugger again. So close. No score.’

  ‘To be honest,’ said Nathan, ‘I’m pretty sick of talking about my feelings. Three. Four. No. Four for me.’

  ‘Well, I suppose that’s understandable. Shit. Bugger. FOR CRYING OUT LOUD. No score. Cocktail?’

  ‘Not for me, thanks.’

  ‘Mind if I have one?’

  ‘No.’

  While Nathan hit three in a row and took another go, his father moved to the bar and began sloshing a variety of fluids into a cocktail shaker, which he then vigorously agitated before decanting the frothy pink concoction into a highball glass and wedging a busted plum tomato onto the rim as a garnish.

  ‘What’s in that?’ said Nathan. ‘I’m on nine, by the way.’

  ‘Pink lemonade, gin, curaçao and a dash of Disaronno,’ said his father, toeing the oche. ‘I call it The Quiet Revolt because I’m not really allowed lemonade. One! Whahay! And he’s off the mark. Bugger. Whoops, almost. Score one for me. So, what are your plans?’