Idiopathy

by Byers, Sam

  He went back inside and sat down with his father, who was reaching the end of his Mad Cow and jabbing commands into his iPhone with a forefinger so accurate that Nathan wondered if his father’s hands had gone through a rapid physical evolution.

  ‘More messages,’ said Nathan.

  ‘Oh,’ said his father. ‘I’m inundated.’

  ‘Are they about me?’

  His father shrugged. ‘Superficially,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t really like it, you know,’ said Nathan.

  ‘Who does?’ said his father with a shrug.

  Nathan nodded. ‘She always gets her way.’

  His father swilled his Mad Cow. Nathan seemed to have pity enough for everybody this evening.

  ‘I might go away at the weekend,’ he said.

  ‘You’ll have to ask your mother.’

  ‘No,’ said Nathan. ‘I don’t think I will.’

  His father nodded.

  ‘You probably think I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘But I do. It’s just …’

  ‘I know, I know. You have to live with her.’

  His father looked at him with a directness that was both unusual and unsettling.

  ‘I don’t have to live with her,’ he said, ‘I want to.’ He gave Nathan another glare. ‘It’s very easy to be judgemental.’

  ‘Or not to be,’ said Nathan. ‘It’s very easy not to be, too.’

  The pub was well carpeted; lit by an open fire. The chairs were deeply padded and seemed to exude a warmth of their own. The ceiling was low enough to afford a sense of security yet not so low as to feel oppressive. Nathan did not feel uncomfortable. His father looked a little sweaty. He pinched the zip of his yachting jacket and then clearly thought better of it, as if he didn’t have the stomach for that particular battle at this particular moment.

  ‘That’s not entirely true,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t want a semantic argument,’ said Nathan.

  His father may not have known what that meant, Nathan realised.

  ‘You know your problem?’ said his father.

  ‘Everyone seems very keen to tell me,’ said Nathan.

  ‘Not just you. All of you. Your generation. The Me generation.’

  ‘I thought you were the Me generation.’

  ‘Whatever,’ his father waved his hand. ‘Your lot. The perpetual adolescents. You go on and on about your parents, about society, about global this and global that and you don’t even understand the most basic fact of life.’ He pointed at Nathan. ‘You don’t understand the world until you have children,’ he said. ‘You don’t stop being a child until you have one.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s true,’ said Nathan, who had very little evidence either way.

  ‘Of course you don’t,’ said his father, draining the dregs of his Mad Cow. ‘Anyway, we should go. Your mother’s on the television.’

  If Nathan’s mother could have been said to have lived by any sort of overarching credo or outlook, it would have been the importance of presentation over content and appearance over actuality. Returning home from another strained and no doubt unacceptably boozy dinner with her alleged friend Rita and Rita’s once strikingly confident and now merely boorish husband Tony, Nathan’s mother would comment that it was not the disintegration of their marriage that bothered her per se, since this could, after all, happen to the best of us, but rather what she saw as their absolute determination not to conceal it. Why, she would ask, for perhaps the fifth or sixth time, did Rita and Tony feel moved to push their problems in everyone else’s faces by getting soused and saying things like, Well of course that’s something Tony’s never understood or For God’s sake, Rita, no one’s interested in anything you’re saying? It was, Nathan’s mother would say, not on.

  Over time, her attitude to Nathan’s so-called condition had shifted along very similar lines, and the only way she’d been able to deal with it was to give herself the sense that, even if she was unable to manage it medically, she was at least able to seize control of its public presentation and reshape her mortification into martyrdom. Because, as she’d said so many times, what separated the wheat from the chaff in life wasn’t what life threw at you, since life threw all sorts of things at all sorts of people, but the way you carried yourself through it, or, to put it another way: having an afflicted son was no excuse to start letting yourself go.

  So it came as little surprise to Nathan to see, as the studio lights went up to reveal the luridly perma-tanned Dr Dave and Nathan’s immaculately trouser-suited mother seated side by side on a salmon-pink couch that clashed violently with Dr Dave’s skin tone, that his mother had now perfectly completed the transition from frustrated parent to crusading author, and, far from being in any way overwhelmed by the television studio experience, was smiling with the kind of radiance that comes only from the perfect balance of supreme self-confidence and an utter dearth of self-awareness, an expression both absorbed and returned tenfold by Dr Dave, who had, as anyone who watched his show regularly knew, completed a particularly spectacular transition of his own by moving, through the medium of emotional televised confession, from disgraced conman to national treasure.

  Even before securing his own weekly television programme, Dr Dave was something of a big noise on the Development scene. He’d written two books (Smile Yourself Thin, and his breakthrough, C.H.A.N.G.E: Calling a Halt to All Negative and Gloomy Experiences) and was a regular fixture on the popular daytime TV show Sit Down With Sally, hosted by the perennially agog Sally Duvall, where he dispensed well-rehearsed off-the-cuff advice to a ‘variety’ of callers whose diversity, in Nathan’s opinion, was severely limited by the daytime TV demographic: housewives, the unemployed, the temporarily sick, the permanently sick, and those in long-term residential care.

  It was on this show that Dr Dave not only developed his theory of C.H.A.N.G.E. but also demonstrated the notorious level of tactical disclosure that had turned a C-list TV shrink into an A-list celebrity in his own right. Dr Dave, it transpired in the gutter press, had not always gone by the name of Dr Dave. He had, for several years in his twenties, gone by the name of The Penetrator, and had been a specialist in certain speed-seduction techniques designed to con perfect strangers into sleeping with him within approximately three minutes. He’d perfected a slouchy walk, a controlled loucheness of posture. He’d breezed up to women of all ages, at parties, in bookshops, in the supermarket, and entered into conversations coldly designed to elicit the maximum spreadage of leg within the minimum possible elapsement of minutes using complicated matrices of waking hypnosis and linguistic suggestion. He talked about his ‘new direction’ so that the programmable subject heard, unconsciously, ‘nude erection’. He turned to talk of the stars just so he could say ‘constellation’, on the basis that what his target probably but unknowingly heard was ‘cunt’s dilation’. He was, it transpired, so good at this that he had conned literally hundreds of ‘open’ young women, many of whom later bravely sold their stories for undisclosed sums to drooling dailies, into bed, and had formed a relationship with not a single one of them. Somewhere around thirty, however, he had experienced his Moment of Insight and come to the conclusion that his powers, impressive as they were, should be used for good as opposed to evil. He had reverted to his given name, enrolled on a distance-learning doctorate in behavioural psychology and, as he was at great pains to point out, taken a vow of chastity that forswore not only sex but all contact with women which might in any way be taken as flirtatious, including warm smiles, charming comments and any even remotely sexual or intimate conversations, unless of course it was within a recognised therapeutic context, in which case all bets were off. As Dr Dave himself put it on a brilliantly conceived crisis-limitation Sit Down With Sally special dedicated entirely to his own Personal Struggle that pulled in even more viewers than Sally Duvall’s harrowing and award-winning live interview with convicted celebrity rapist Timothy ‘The Terror of Television Centre’ Turner, former children’s TV presenter-tu
rned-social-pariah-slash-cash-machine, the powers of The Penetrator were so … (here he struggled for words) … powerful, that they could not simply be ‘switched off’ but instead had to be placed in a kind of sexual vacuum so that no more harm could befall any impressionable young ladies, a subject he went on to write about in a much-praised and oft-cited article in Personal Growth Monthly entitled ‘The Dick in the Jar: Putting Away the Penis for the Sake of Others’. It was, even Nathan had to admit, a publicity masterstroke, and the very next day the same opinion columns that had mocked and denigrated his manipulative tendencies, his shonky credentials, his, dare they say it, hypocrisy, were falling over themselves to praise his honesty, his courage, his sincerity. Within six months, although he continued his Sit Down With Sally appearances, he was given his own programme, which ran to a rigid and extremely successful formula of two parts telephone counselling to one part inspirational interview, which latter slot was today occupied by Nathan’s mother.

  Like Nathan’s mother and her new-found penchant for snappy clothes, Dr Dave’s mutation carried with it a fashion element. Before his exposure (which he only ever referred to as a confession), he’d favoured pink, slightly formal shirts; brightly coloured ties; chinos. The aim was to give off an air of professionalism. If he dressed like a doctor, went the philosophy, he’d be able to talk like one too. At times, he was even seen with a stethoscope round his neck. Following his decision to share intimate details of his life with his fans, however (which was never referred to as him being forced by the press to fess up to the public), he began to favour jeans and slip-on shoes, T-shirts and, worst of all, extremely low-cut V-neck sweaters worn with nothing underneath, revealing a glowing isosceles of shaved, shined, tanned flesh that Nathan found very difficult to look at but by which Nathan’s mother, who was now only a metre or so away from it, seemed happily transfixed.

  ‘Hi,’ said Dr Dave to camera, giving a nonchalant wave and an intimate smile. ‘Welcome back. Now I for one am very excited about my next guest, because she absolutely exemplifies something I’ve been giving a lot of time to here on my show over the past few weeks, and something I’m going to go on talking about off and on for the next few months. Why? Because I feel in these difficult times it’s a theme we can all relate to, and something which I hope, in its own small way, might be of some help to the country. Because these are dark times.’ He nodded, as if he’d been unaware what he’d been about to say but, now that he’d said it, found himself happily in agreement. ‘Very dark times.’ He nodded again. Still in agreement. ‘And during times of difficulty or opposition or tragedy or …’ he shrugged the shrug of a man whose conclusions have reached such a level of profundity as to render mere words largely moot, ‘… badness, we can do one of three things.’ He held up his hand, counting them off, clearly coached to begin with the little finger so as to avoid any inadvertent embarrassing gestures that would then appear as screenshots across the web. ‘We can give in …’ Little finger. ‘We can battle on and survive …’ Ring finger. ‘Or …’ Middle finger. ‘… we can do better. We can take that negativity, that tragedy, that badness, and we can grow from it, we can prosper, we can blossom. Yes, it’s survival, but it’s also something more, something I like to call …’ he pointed down the barrel of the camera with both index fingers for emphasis, ‘… surthrival.’ He nodded; brought his hands together; then gestured towards Nathan’s mother. ‘And let me tell you people, this woman who I have with me here today is surthrival personified. But hey, don’t take it from me, because she’s here to tell you all about it herself. Author of the forthcoming book Mother Courage: One Woman’s Battle Against Maternal Blame, founder of the internet support group Mothers Who Survive, ladies and gentlemen, Helen Coverley.’

  The camera cut to Nathan’s mother’s face in close-up. On cue, she beamed.

  ‘Thank you, Dr Dave,’ she said. ‘I’m so happy to be here.’

  ‘So happy to have you,’ said Dr Dave.

  ‘My pleasure,’ said Nathan’s mother.

  ‘Keep smiling, that’s the way,’ said Nathan’s father, precariously perched on the very edge of the sofa and slightly obsessively rubbing his thumbs and index fingers together.

  Dr Dave’s ability to transition between facial expressions was, Nathan noted, remarkably fluid. He was like a human lava lamp. The smile peaked, blossomed, dissipated, and a glowing bubble of sympathy rose up from beneath to replace it.

  ‘So, Helen,’ he said, nodding again. ‘For those at home who don’t know, just share your journey with us briefly.’

  ‘Well, I have to gently correct you there, Dr Dave, and say that I don’t actually think of it as my journey at all, but our journey, the journey of mothers everywhere.’

  Dr Dave nodded.

  ‘That’s my girl,’ said Nathan’s father.

  ‘And really,’ said Nathan’s mother, folding her legs and resting her hands in her lap, ‘it’s also our journey in that it’s a journey I’ve shared with my son, Harry, as I call him in the book.’

  Nathan had found a stray thread in the hem of the armchair cover and was now gently teasing it out.

  ‘Tell us about Harry,’ said Dr Dave.

  ‘Well, I love Harry. I want to say that very clearly. I love him dearly. He’s my darling boy. My only child. But the truth is, and I think a lot of mothers out there can relate to this, he has hurt me deeply. And it’s taken me years to be able to say that. I mean literally years. Years of asking myself: is this my fault? Years of being told it’s my fault. You know, at one stage, we had employed four separate counsellors to talk to my son, all at great expense, and all they ever did was listen to my son’s side of events. Would you credit it? It was almost as if … as if they weren’t interested in me at all. And that’s the balance I want to redress with my book, because I know for a fact there are hundreds of mothers out there going through the same thing, and feeling all the same feelings of shame and guilt as I felt.’

  ‘Your son had addiction issues,’ said Dr Dave, whose nodding by this point seemed to have reached the level of physiological necessity.

  ‘Oh, you name it,’ said Nathan’s mother. ‘Drugs, tattoos. At one point he was living in a squat, selling drugs, organising these … raves I suppose you would call them. I mean it was. Just. Absolutely. Hor. Rendous.’

  The stray thread turned out to be quite long and Nathan now faced a choice between continuing to draw it out and simply snapping it off.

  ‘You know,’ said Dr Dave, ‘when I work with parents of what I call morally challenged children in my clinic, the thing that comes up for them time and again is just how guilty they feel. Is that something you experienced?’

  ‘Unquestionably,’ said Nathan’s mother. ‘Without question. The guilt is enormous, and very difficult to overcome without being a very strong person indeed. But I think what I really want to stress is the shame. You know, at one point, when he was at his worst, I actually told people I didn’t have a son, because it was so much easier than trying to explain.’

  Nathan had opted to continue tugging the thread, which was now approximately a foot long.

  ‘We call that emotional disownership,’ said Dr Dave. ‘A very common response to filial trauma. But then there was a breakthrough, was there not?’

  Here Nathan’s mother’s face clouded expertly with the cumulonimbi of grief. She took a long breath.

  ‘There was,’ she said valiantly.

  ‘And is that,’ said Dr Dave, leaning forward, placing a hand on her knee. ‘Is that something you feel able to share?’

  Nathan’s mother nodded.

  ‘What a surthrivor,’ said Dr Dave, awed.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Nathan’s mother. ‘It’s … it’s not something I’ve really talked about much, although … although it is in the book, but … Well, after years, I mean literally years of all this stuff going on, my son, my boy …’

  ‘We hear you,’ said Dr Dave.

  ‘I can’t even describe what he did to himsel
f,’ said Nathan’s mother. ‘But it was harm. Very serious harm. And when we saw him next he was in the hospital. Covered in bandages. His hands. His arms. His chest. And at first he was on a lot of medication, obviously. But slowly he came round. And me and my husband were there, and …’

  Nathan remembered his father ambling around the private room they’d somehow secured at the hospital, asking him if he wanted his dinner and then helping him finish it off lest it go to waste.

  He gave the thread a sharp yank but only succeeded in exposing more of its length.

  ‘Stop pulling the furniture to bits,’ said his father, who had begun jiggling his knees and rubbing his hands.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Nathan.

  ‘And I looked at his face,’ Nathan’s mother was saying.

  ‘That’s it, girl,’ said Nathan’s father. He looked at Nathan shiftily. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘And I knew he finally understood. That it had taken this awful moment to … to …’

  ‘I don’t want to watch this any more,’ said Nathan.

  His father looked at him.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘But, um … There’ll be questions afterwards, if you know what I mean, so …’

  Nathan nodded. ‘You go ahead,’ he said, standing up.

  Upstairs he texted Daniel to say he would be coming. After only a couple of minutes he heard his father emit a long-drawn-out moan. He went back downstairs and found him staring at footage of a transfixed lamb.

  ‘This just in,’ said the voice-over. ‘The disease previously known as Bovine Idiopathic Entrancement has jumped the species barrier. What you see here is the first recorded case of Ovine Entrancement. Scientists have announced that …’