Idiopathy

by Byers, Sam

  ‘We need to, ah, we need to have a quick discussion about …’ Nathan’s father would say.

  ‘Roger,’ his mother would say, as if her husband had been completely ignoring her and she now needed to get his attention. ‘Have we had any news from …’

  ‘… next Saturday. Because I’ve got here …’

  ‘… Jacinta and Gregory re: …’

  ‘… that we’re supposed to be going to …’

  ‘… next Saturday. Because I’ve got here that we’re supposed to …’

  ‘… Jacinta and Gregory’s for dinner, and I was just wondering …’

  ‘… go round there for dinner, and I’m not sure we’ve …’

  ‘… if that’s confirmed or …’

  ‘… confirmed it. Have we?’

  ‘… if we still need to. Do we?’

  Each of them felt, and frequently said, that the only way to really get anything done was simply to do it yourself, yet each of them also seemed to find doing anything without alerting the other to what they were doing rather difficult, resulting in a continual barrage of occluding updates. One of them was going shopping and would talk about this when they got back. The other was going to the post and would also talk about this when they got back. The precise nature of ‘this’ would never quite be defined, yet both would return with the ticklish idea that something would need to be discussed. Later, when it became clear that there had been something they should have discussed, and that problems had arisen as a result of not discussing it, they would debate whether they’d discussed it.

  ‘Oh, Roger,’ Nathan’s mother would say. ‘Do we have to go over this again? I specifically remember going over this at the time.’

  ‘Well I don’t. I don’t remember talking about this at all. When did we talk about this?’

  ‘Last Tuesday.’

  ‘What happened last Tuesday?’

  ‘We went to that thing, and then we came back, and we had this exact conversation then.’

  ‘Couldn’t have been last Tuesday. I was out last Tuesday.’

  ‘You were out on Monday.’

  ‘No. You were out on Monday.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Roger. Will you try and concentrate? You were out on Monday and we were both out on Tuesday, but when we got back …’

  ‘There’s nothing in the diary.’

  ‘For when?’

  ‘For Monday.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean you weren’t out. But anyway, look, this is beside the point. The point is …’

  ‘We’re wasting time by arguing about this, really.’

  ‘We are. That’s what I’m saying.’

  ‘I think we should stick to the point at hand.’

  ‘I am. It’s you that’s straying off to try and find out what you were doing last week.’

  ‘I’m just trying to establish whether we might have discussed this.’

  ‘Roger, I came up to you on Tuesday, and I specifically said this was something we needed to discuss, and you agreed, and you said …’

  ‘Ah! Yes, I remember. We agreed to discuss it the next day because I was going out. Now, where was I going?’

  ‘That was Monday. Tuesday was the next day and that’s why we discussed it, because we’d agreed on Monday to discuss it but you were going out.’

  ‘And then we went out on Wednesday and forgot to discuss it.’

  ‘Tuesday.’

  ‘No, Helen, we were in on Tuesday.’

  Nathan could only assume there was a kind of comfort in the ritual. To him, however, either sitting upstairs reading his mother’s book (‘Communication,’ she noted on page 84, ‘is the bedrock of any stable family’), or trying to make a cup of tea in the kitchen without becoming embroiled in what was taking place around him, there was a mounting feeling that, thanks to the circuitous, incantatory conversations around him, time itself was beginning to form loops from which it was difficult to escape. Downstairs, the loops were made of seconds, minutes and hours. He could make a cup of tea, return to his room, drink his tea, and then go back downstairs to find that the previous conversation regarding a previous conversation had started up again exactly where it either had or hadn’t left off. Upstairs, the loops were made of years, as he opened his mother’s book and encountered episodes from his childhood which, if he remembered them at all, he remembered very differently.

  The overall effect was therefore not simply one of dislocation, but of dislocation repeated; an increasingly familiar oddness heightened by the simple fact of Nathan’s not having been a part of the wider world for several months, and by his parents’ not having been a part of the wider world for several years. Coincidentally, Nathan’s reluctant return to society coincided with his mother’s not-so-reluctant entry into the public domain, and so both she and he found themselves exposed at the same moment, although the nature of exposure was, for each of them, both different and differently received.

  ‘Nathan,’ said his mother, looking up from her laptop. ‘Are you on Facebook?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ she said. ‘How did you get up to all that mischief without being on Facebook?’

  ‘It was different then. There were chat rooms.’

  ‘I see. Well perhaps you could join Facebook?’

  ‘I don’t really want to.’

  ‘Right. It would be very helpful if you joined Facebook.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, my book’s coming out, and I’ve started a Facebook page for it, and obviously I’ve got everyone from my Twitter feed to like the Facebook page, but it seems to me that if you could get some of your friends to like it too I’d be tapping into a whole new circle.’

  ‘But I’m not on Facebook.’

  ‘What about these chat rooms? Couldn’t you start a new thread?’

  ‘They’re not really book-related.’

  ‘Right, OK. I can see you’re going to be no help with this whatsoever.’

  Nathan said nothing. Being no help whatsoever was, of course, pretty central to his approach as far as the whole book issue went.

  He spent whole days dedicated to the task of spending his days. He sat in his bedroom and read. He sat downstairs and listened to his parents. He sat in the garden and smoked. Time both passed and lingered. It was empty; fleeting. People stubbornly existed and were absent. He wondered if he should make calls. He’d been told that effort was important.

  His mother was a self-described fount of wisdom. A well-planned meal could see you through several days. You could be inventive with leftovers and it never really felt like you were eating the same thing. Home-baked bread was both economical and reassuring in that one had far more control over the ingredients. Laundry was best done on a ‘little and often’ basis, as were other household tasks, particularly cleaning. Financially, economically, emotionally and nutritionally, staying on top of things was infinitely preferable to allowing them to mount up. The idea seemed to be that you filled time with the simple act of existence. The quotidian was profoundly demanding. Saving time seemed to take a lot of time. He kept checking his phone but nothing ever happened. He lay awake late into the night and sometimes got up and opened the window for a winter rush. He wondered if he’d ever claimed not to like winter, just for convenience or conversation, because people always said they didn’t like winter. He felt strongly that he did like winter and was going to say so from now on.

  Of course, Nathan’s mother wrote in her book, there will always be those dissenting yet misinformed voices who say: But, Helen, this is your fault, you didn’t do enough, you could have done more. And to those people I say: What more could I possibly have done?

  His mother said he should set a budget. He told her he had no income. She said that she and his father were going to help until Nathan got back on his feet, which was something she seemed to delight in saying. They were going to give him fifty pounds a week but out of that he had to give them twenty in upkeep. This was to help him develop independe
nce. She handed him fifty quid in clean notes. He folded twenty and handed it back. He walked to the shop and spent ten on tobacco and then went to the pub because there was nothing really worth saving for at this point. The light had that oddly vivid, vibratory quality that seems to arrive at the greying of a winter’s day – dimmer than full sunlight, but tuned to a higher contrast, the land looming out in buzzing relief. He could see his breath in front of his face and stepped through the little clouds as he walked. There was no noise aside from the occasional bird. The ground was tough and iced underfoot. Existence seemed very clear, very simple. He felt quite calm, he noticed, when he looked at his feelings as if they were objects.

  The pub was called The Rover. Nathan had been in there maybe twice in his life. The barman didn’t seem overly friendly.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, distracted by Nathan’s hands. ‘Are those burns?’

  ‘No, just scars.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Pint of Guinness, please.’

  ‘Right.’

  He stuck a pint glass under the tap and let it fill, no pause, no time to settle. Nathan paid and sat at a little round table on a little round stool in the corner, near the door. He looked around for a newspaper. There wasn’t one. He wasn’t quite sure what to do with himself in the absence of a newspaper and so watched the brown breath of his Guinness as it sought its level. He thought about taking off his coat but he had his shirtsleeves rolled up underneath and he didn’t want to upset anyone. Noting that he didn’t want to upset anyone made him feel pleased. He thought about phoning Katherine again. She hadn’t called, but she would call. If she didn’t call there would be a good reason, and that reason wouldn’t necessarily have much to do with him.

  The door opened, and amidst his usual muted applause of synthetic jacketing, Nathan’s father strolled into the pub. When he saw Nathan he looked briefly guilty, then came and stood beside his table.

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I was um …’

  Nathan looked at him, smiled.

  ‘Don’t come in here often,’ said his father, jamming his hands in his jacket pockets and looking around. ‘Not a bad place, is it?’

  ‘It’s nice enough,’ said Nathan.

  ‘Hello Roger,’ called the barman. ‘Usual, is it?’

  Nathan’s father did a little double-take, then looked down at Nathan’s pint, which was over half full.

  ‘Well, I suppose now I’m here …’

  ‘Go ahead,’ said Nathan. ‘I’m drinking slowly.’

  ‘Righto.’

  He ambled off to the bar and returned a minute later with a pint of something red and a packet of dry-roasted peanuts which he spread open on the table as if performing a post-mortem.

  ‘Have some nuts,’ he said.

  Nathan had a few nuts.

  ‘Nice to get out,’ said his father after a while.

  ‘What do you tell her?’ said Nathan.

  His father looked guilty. ‘She just assumes I’m in the garage. She’s not there now, though. She’s gone to the TV studio.’

  ‘If she never looks for you in the garage, why don’t you just go there?’

  ‘Not the same is it? Not really.’ He tossed another handful of nuts in his mouth.

  ‘What are you drinking?’

  ‘Bulmer’s cider and Red Bull with a dash of crème de menthe. I call it a Mad Cow. Have a sip?’

  Nathan raised a hand. ‘Might stick to the Guinness,’ he said.

  ‘They don’t have a pool table here,’ said his father.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I suppose that’s nice though, isn’t it, because then you have to talk.’

  Nathan nodded.

  ‘I know some people,’ said his father. ‘See them here sometimes. We don’t arrange it, mind. Just leave it to chance. It’s nice to have a flexible arrangement, isn’t it? I mean, not everything has to be set in stone all the time, does it?’

  ‘No,’ said Nathan. ‘Not at all.’

  His father smacked his lips as he sipped his Mad Cow. ‘That hits the spot,’ he said.

  They looked at their drinks for a bit.

  ‘I prefer dry-roasted peanuts,’ said his father. ‘They’re more interesting in a lot of ways. Helen says they give you cancer, but what doesn’t?’ He tossed back another handful and then looked at Nathan. ‘We get on, don’t we?’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Nathan. ‘Of course we do.’

  ‘Good. That’s good, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m supposed to, you know. I’m supposed to say more things.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘They keep saying that. You know. It’s good to talk. Good to say more. But they don’t really tell you what to say, you see.’

  ‘Who’s they?’

  Nathan’s father waved a hand vaguely. ‘You know. All those people.’

  Nathan’s phone rang.

  ‘Go on,’ said his father, looking a little disappointed. ‘I’m alright.’

  Nathan walked outside as he answered.

  ‘Hello?’ he said.

  ‘Buddy,’ said a familiar voice. ‘It’s Daniel.’

  ‘Oh,’ he faltered. ‘I mean hi.’

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘OK, I think. How, um, how are you?’

  ‘Yeah, OK.’

  ‘I heard about … you know.’

  ‘What, me and Katherine? Yeah.’

  ‘Sorry to hear it.’

  ‘Yeah, well. For the best really.’

  ‘Really?’

  Daniel seemed to think about this.

  ‘Probably,’ he said.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Anyway,’ said Daniel, up-shifting rapidly. ‘Never mind all that. How are you? Where have you been?’

  Nathan sat down on a wall and breathed.

  ‘I’m OK,’ he said. ‘I was away for a while.’

  ‘We gathered that,’ said Daniel. ‘Away where?’

  Certain phrases linger in the head so long that we feel as if we’ve said them already.

  ‘I was a little unwell,’ said Nathan. ‘I had to have some treatment.’

  There was a pause. ‘What sort of treatment?’

  Another pause. Nathan told himself to say it. ‘Psychiatric treatment.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I wasn’t well. I’m better now.’

  ‘What, uh, I mean, what did you …’

  ‘I didn’t try to kill myself.’

  ‘Right. Well, I mean, that’s something, isn’t it?’

  ‘I tried to hurt myself.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘The difference is important.’

  ‘Well, yes, absolutely. I mean, obviously, that’s a big difference, isn’t it? Because you didn’t want to, um, you know …’

  ‘Die.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No, I didn’t want to die.’

  ‘Good. I mean, that’s good, isn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I see.’

  Nathan tucked his phone under his ear and rolled a cigarette without looking too hard at his hands. The cold had numbed the tips of his fingers. He fumbled; recovered; got it rolled.

  He said, ‘I wanted to change, to be different.’

  ‘I don’t know what that means,’ said Daniel.

  ‘Neither do I.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Nathan lit his cigarette. When he breathed he could feel the cold air pour down his throat like mercury and when he sniffed he felt the hairs in his nose stiffen with frost. In the raw chill, the skin of the world felt transparent and exposed.

  Daniel said, ‘So what are you up to now?’

  ‘Just sitting outside the pub,’ said Nathan. ‘Smoking.’

  ‘But generally, I mean.’

  ‘Oh,’ Nathan exhaled. ‘Little.’

  ‘No plans?’

  ‘I’m sort of waiting for some to emerge.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘How about you?’

  ‘Oh, you know.’ Dan
iel paused. ‘Actually you probably don’t really know, do you?’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘Ah, Nathan,’ said Daniel. ‘You old renegade. I guess it’s just parties and revolution for now, isn’t it?’

  ‘No,’ said Nathan. ‘That’s all over.’

  ‘Right.’

  Nathan exhaled; blew into his hands. He did not feel unsettled by the conversation.

  ‘To be honest,’ said Nathan, ‘I may be in danger of going completely out of my mind.’

  ‘Shit,’ said Daniel.

  ‘Although not literally.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I’m staying with my parents.’

  ‘Oh. Point taken.’

  ‘When was the last time you lived with your parents?’

  ‘With both parents? About twenty years ago.’ He paused. ‘And as far as Dad goes, well …’

  Daniel said it in an easy way that spoke of pain to which he was at least semi-reconciled.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Nathan. ‘I forgot. How is he?’

  ‘Comes and goes,’ said Daniel. ‘I don’t see him as much as I should, then I feel guilty, then I go and see him and I just sit there wanting to leave.’

  There was a pause in which Nathan noticed that the moon was making a daylight appearance.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Daniel. ‘How did we get onto this?’

  ‘My fault.’

  ‘Whatever. Have you seen anyone? Have you got out much?’

  ‘I’m in a pub with my dad having my first drink in six months.’

  ‘Christ.’

  ‘It’s nice.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Surprisingly.’

  ‘Do you need to go?’

  Nathan had finished his cigarette.

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘Well, it’s … It’s really good to hear from you, Nathan.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Nathan.

  ‘Look, why don’t you come and visit at the weekend? My girlfriend’s away, there’s plenty of room. We can drink ourselves stupid. It’ll sort you right out.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Nathan.

  ‘Think about it.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘You’ve got my number now.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  They signed off, promised to make contact again soon. Daniel again told Nathan to think about the invitation. Nathan again said he would. After Nathan hung up he thought about calling Katherine, then decided against it. He felt, without quite knowing why, a certain sense of pity for Daniel. His voice struck a certain note; the invitation seemed to carry an excessive heft. In some ways, Nathan thought, he had always felt slightly sorry for Daniel, although this was blunted somewhat by the suspicion that Daniel had always felt slightly sorry for him.