by Matt Haig
‘But they’re diazepam. That’s valium. You can’t overdose on valium, you’d need a thousand.’
‘No. I know that.’ I was drinking a cup of tea. I actually enjoyed tea. It was so much better than coffee. It tasted like comfort.
Isobel nodded. She too was drinking tea. The tea seemed to be making things better. It was a hot drink made of leaves, used in times of crisis as a means of restoring normality.
‘Do you know what they told me?’ she said.
‘No. What? What did they tell you?’
‘They told me he could stay in.’
‘Right.’
‘It was up to me. I had to say if I thought he was a suicide risk or not. And I said I thought he would be more of a risk in there than out here. They said if he tried anything like this again then there’d be no choice about it. He’d be admitted, and they’d watch him.’
‘Oh. Well, we’ll watch him. That’s what I say. That hospital is full of mad people. People who think they’re from other planets. Stuff like that.’
She smiled a sad smile, and blew a brown tide of ripples across the surface of her drink. ‘Yes. Yes. We’ll have to.’
I tried to understand something. ‘It’s me, isn’t it? It was my fault, for that day I didn’t wear clothes.’
Something about this question switched the mood. Isobel’s face hardened. ‘Andrew, do you really think this was about one day? About your breakdown?’
‘Oh,’ I said, which I knew wasn’t in context. But I had nothing else to say. ‘Oh’ was always the word I resorted to, the one that filled empty spaces. It was verbal tea. The ‘oh’ should have really been a ‘no’, because I didn’t think this was about one day. I thought it was about thousands of days, most of which I hadn’t been there to observe. And so an ‘oh’ was more appropriate.
‘This wasn’t about one event. This was about everything. It’s not obviously solely your fault but you haven’t really been there, have you, Andrew? For all his life, or at least since we moved back to Cambridge, you’ve just not been there.’
I remembered something he’d told me on the roof. ‘What about France?’
‘What?’
‘I taught him dominoes. I swam with him in a swimming pool. In France. The country. France.’
She frowned, confused. ‘France? What? The Dordogne? Two weeks in the Dordogne and a box of bloody dominoes. Is that your “Get Out of Jail Free” card? Is that fatherhood?’
‘No. I don’t know. I was just giving a . . . a solid example of what he was like.’
‘He?’
‘I mean I. What I was like.’
‘You’ve been there on holiday. Yes. Yes you have. Unless they were working holidays. Come on, you remember Sydney! And Boston! And Seoul! And Turin! And, and, Düsseldorf!’
‘Oh yes,’ I said, staring at the unread books on the shelves like unlived memories. ‘I remember them vividly. Of course.’
‘We hardly saw you. And when we did see you, you were always so stressed about the lecture you were going to give or the people you were going to meet. And all those rows we had. We have. Until, you know, you got ill. And got better. Come on, Andrew, you know what I’m saying. This isn’t breaking news, is it?’
‘No. Not at all. So, where else have I failed?’
‘You haven’t failed. It’s not an academic paper to be assessed by your peers. It’s not success or failure. It’s our life. I’m not wrapping it in judgemental language. I’m just trying to tell you the objective truth.’
‘I just want to know. Tell me. Tell me things I’ve done. Or haven’t done.’
She toyed with her silver necklace. ‘Well, come on. It’s always been the same. Between the ages of two and four you weren’t back home in time for a single bath or bedtime story. You’d fly off the handle about anything that got in the way of you and your work. Or if I ever came close to mentioning that I had sacrificed my career for this family – at that time when I had been making real sacrifices – you wouldn’t even so much as postpone a book deadline. I’d be shot down in flames.’
‘I know. I’m sorry,’ I said, thinking of her novel, Wider Than the Sky. ‘I’ve been terrible. I have. I think you would be better off without me. I think, sometimes, that I should leave and never come back.’
‘Don’t be childish. You sound younger than Gulliver.’
‘I’m being serious. I have behaved badly. I sometimes think it would be better if I went and never returned. Ever.’
This threw her. She had her hands on her hips but her glare softened. She took a big breath.
‘I need you here. You know I need you.’
‘Why? What do I give to this relationship? I don’t understand.’
She clenched her eyes shut. Whispered, ‘That was amazing.’
‘What?’
‘What you did there. Out on the roof. It was amazing.’
She then made the most complex facial expression I have ever seen on a human. A kind of frustrated scorn, tinged with sympathy, which slowly softened into a deep, wide humour, culminating in forgiveness and something I couldn’t quite recognise, but which I thought might have been love.
‘What’s happened to you?’ She said it as a whisper, nothing more than a structured piece of breath.
‘What? Nothing. Nothing has happened to me. Well, a mental breakdown. But I’m over that. Other than that – nothing.’ I said this flippantly, trying to make her smile.
She smiled, but sadness quickly claimed her. She looked up to the ceiling. I was beginning to understand these wordless forms of communication.
‘I’ll talk to him,’ I said, feeling kind of solid and authoritative. Kind of real. Kind of human. ‘I’ll talk to him.’
‘You don’t have to.’
‘I know,’ I said. And I stood up, again to help when I was supposed to hurt.
Social networking
Essentially, social networking on Earth was quite limited. Unlike on Vonnadoria, the brain synchronisation technology wasn’t there, so subscribers couldn’t communicate telepathically with each other as part of a true hive mind. Nor could they step into each other’s dreams and have a walk around, tasting imagined delicacies in exotic moonscapes. On Earth, social networking generally involved sitting down at a non-sentient computer and typing words about needing a coffee and reading about other people needing a coffee, while forgetting to actually make a coffee. It was the news show they had been waiting for. It was the show where the news could be all about them.
But on the plus side, human computer networks, I discovered, were preposterously easy to hack into as all their security systems were based on prime numbers. And so I hacked into Gulliver’s computer and changed the name of every single person on Facebook who had bullied Gulliver to ‘I Am the Cause of Shame’, and blocked them from posting anything with the word ‘Gulliver’ in it, and gave each of them a computer virus which I dubbed ‘The Flea’ after a lovely poem. This virus ensured the only messages they would ever be able to send were ones that contained the words ‘I am hurt and so I hurt’.
On Vonnadoria I had never done anything so vindictive. Nor had I ever felt quite so satisfied.
Forever is composed of nows
We went to the park to walk Newton. Parks were the most common destination on dog walks. A piece of nature – grass, flowers, trees – that was not quite allowed to be truly natural. Just as dogs were thwarted wolves, parks were thwarted forests. Humans loved both, possibly because humans were, well, thwarted. The flowers were beautiful. Flowers, after love, must have been the best advert planet Earth had going for it.
‘It doesn’t make sense,’ said Gulliver, as we sat down on the bench.
‘What doesn’t?’
We watched Newton sniffing the flowers, livelier than ever.
‘I was fine. No damage. Even my eye’s better.’
‘You were lucky.’
‘Dad, before I went out on the roof, I’d had twenty-eight diazepam.’
‘You’d ne
ed more.’
He looked at me, angry for saying this, as if I was humiliating him. Using knowledge against him.
‘Your mum told me that,’ I added. ‘I didn’t know that.’
‘I didn’t want you to save me.’
‘I didn’t save you. You were just lucky. But I really think you should ignore feelings like that. That was a moment in your life. You have a lot more days to live. About twenty-four thousand more days to live, probably. That’s a lot of moments. You could do many great things in that time. You could read a lot of poetry.’
‘You don’t like poetry. That’s one of the few facts I know about you.’
‘It’s growing on me . . . Listen,’ I said, ‘don’t kill yourself. Don’t ever kill yourself. Just, that’s my advice, don’t kill yourself.’
Gulliver took something out of his pocket and put it in his mouth. It was a cigarette. He lit it. I asked if I could try it. Gulliver seemed troubled by this but handed it over. I sucked on the filter and brought the smoke into my lungs. And then I coughed.
‘What’s the point of this?’ I asked Gulliver.
He shrugged.
‘It’s an addictive substance with a high fatality rate. I thought there would be a point.’
I handed the cigarette back to Gulliver.
‘Thanks,’ he mumbled, still confused.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said. ‘It’s fine.’
He took another drag, and suddenly realised it wasn’t doing anything for him either. He flicked the cigarette in a steep arc towards the grass.
‘If you want,’ I said, ‘we could play dominoes when we get home. I bought a box this morning.’
‘No thanks.’
‘Or we could go to the Dordogne.’
‘What?’
‘Go swimming.’
He shook his head. ‘You need some more tablets.’
‘Yes. Maybe. You ate all mine.’ I tried to smile, playfully, and try some more Earth humour. ‘You fucker!’
There was a long silence. We watched Newton sniffing around the circumference of a tree. Twice.
A million suns imploded. And then Gulliver came out with it.
‘You don’t know what it’s been like,’ he said. ‘I’ve got all this expectation on me because I’m your son. My teachers read your books. And they look at me like some bruised apple that’s fallen off the great Andrew Martin tree. You know, the posh boy who got expelled from his boarding school. The one who set stuff on fire. Whose parents gave up on him. Not that I’m bothered about that now. But even in the holidays you were never around. You were always somewhere else. Or just making everything tense and horrible with Mum. It’s just shit. You should have just done the right thing and got divorced years ago. You’ve not got anything in common.’
I thought about all this. And didn’t know what to say. Cars passed by on the road behind us. The sound was very melancholy somehow, like the bass rumble of a sleeping Bazadean. ‘What was your band called?’
‘The Lost,’ he said.
A leaf fell and landed on my lap. It was dead and brown. I held it and, quite out of character, felt a strange empathy. Maybe it was because now I was empathising with humans I could empathise with pretty much anything. Too much Emily Dickinson, that was the problem. Emily Dickinson was making me human. But not that human. There was a dull ache in my head and a small weight of tiredness in my eyes as the leaf became green.
I brushed it away quickly, but it was too late.
‘What just happened?’ Gulliver asked, staring at the leaf as it floated away on the breeze.
I tried to ignore him. He asked again.
‘Nothing happened to the leaf,’ I said.
He forgot about the leaf he might have seen the moment he saw two teenage girls and a boy his own age walking on the road that ran behind the park. The girls were laughing into their hands at the sight of us. I have realised that, essentially, there are two broad categories of human laughter, and this was not the good kind.
The boy was the boy I had seen on Gulliver’s Facebook page. Theo “The Fucking Business” Clarke.
Gulliver shrank.
‘It’s the Martin Martians! Freaks!’
Gulliver cowered lower on the bench, crippled with shame.
I turned around, assessed Theo’s physical structure and dynamic potential. ‘My son could beat you into the ground,’ I shouted. ‘He could flatten your face into a more attractive geometric form.’
‘Fuck, Dad,’ said Gulliver, ‘what are you doing? He’s the one who fucked up my face.’
I looked at him. He was a black hole. The violence was all inward. It was time for him to push some the other way.
‘Come on,’ I said, ‘you’re a human. It’s time to act like one.’
Violence
‘No,’ said Gulliver.
But it was too late. Theo was crossing the road. ‘Yeah, you’re a comedian now, are you?’ he said as he swaggered towards us.
‘It would be fucking amusing to see you lose to my fucking son, if that’s what you fucking mean,’ I said.
‘Yeah, well, my dad’s a Taekwondo teacher. He taught me how to fight.’
‘Well, Gulliver’s father is a mathematician. So he wins.’
‘Yeah right.’
‘You will lose,’ I told the boy, and I made sure the words went all the way down and stayed there, like rocks in a shallow pond.
Theo laughed, and jumped with troubling ease over the low stone wall that bordered the park, with the girls following. This boy, Theo, was not as tall as Gulliver but more strongly built. He was almost devoid of neck and his eyes were so close together he was borderline cyclopic. He was walking backwards and forwards on the grass in front of us, warming up by punching and kicking the air.
Gulliver was as pale as milk. ‘Gulliver,’ I told him, ‘you fell off a roof yesterday. That boy is not a forty-foot drop. There is nothing to him. No depth. You know how he is going to fight.’
‘Yes,’ said Gulliver. ‘He’s going to fight well.’
‘But you, you’ve got surprise on your side. You aren’t scared of anything. All you’ve got to do is realise that this Theo symbolises everything you’ve ever hated. He is me. He is bad weather. He is the primitive soul of the Internet. He is the injustice of fate. I am asking, in other words, for you to fight him like you fight in your sleep. Lose everything. Lose all shame and consciousness and beat him. Because you can.’
‘No,’ said Gulliver, ‘I can’t.’
I lowered my voice, conjured the gifts. ‘You can. He has the same bio-chemical ingredients inside him as you do, but with less impressive neural activity.’ I saw that Gulliver looked confused, so I tapped the side of my head and explained. ‘It’s all about the oscillations.’
Gulliver stood up. I clipped the lead to Newton’s collar. He whined, sensing the atmosphere.
I watched Gulliver walk over the grass. Nervous, tight-bodied, as if being dragged by an invisible chord.
The two girls were chewing something they didn’t plan to swallow, and were giggling excitedly. Theo too was looking thrilled. Some humans not only liked violence, but craved it, I realised. Not because they wanted pain, but because they already had pain and wanted to be distracted away from that kind of pain with a lesser kind.
And then Theo hit Gulliver. And he hit him again. Both times in the face, sending Gulliver staggering backwards. Newton growled, seeking involvement, but I kept him where he was.
‘You are fucking nothing,’ said Theo, raising his foot fast through the air to Gulliver’s chest. Gulliver grabbed the leg, and Theo hopped for a while, or at least long enough to look ridiculous.
Gulliver looked at me through the still air in silence.
Then Theo was on the ground and Gulliver let him stand up before the switch flicked and he went wild, punching away as if trying to rid himself of his own body, as if it were something that could be shaken away. And pretty soon the other boy was bleeding and he fell back on the grass,
his head momentarily tilting back and touching down on a rose bush. He sat up and dabbed his face with his fingers and saw the blood and looked at it as if it were a message he’d never expected to receive.
‘All right, Gulliver,’ I said, ‘It’s time to go home.’ I went over to Theo. I crouched down.
‘You are done now, do you understand?’
Theo understood. The girls were silent but still chewed, if only at half-speed. Cow-speed. We walked out of the park. Gulliver hardly had a scratch.
‘How are you feeling?’
‘I hurt him.’
‘Yes. How does that make you feel? Was it cathartic?’
He shrugged. The trace of a smile hid somewhere inside his lips. It frightened me, how close violence is to the civilised surface of a human being. It wasn’t the violence itself that was the worry, it was the amount of effort they’d gone to to conceal it. A homo sapiens was a primitive hunter who had woken each day with the knowledge he could kill. And now, the equivalent knowledge was only that he would wake up each day and buy something. So it was important, for Gulliver, to release what he only released in sleep out into the waking world.
‘Dad, you’re not yourself, are you?’ he said, before we got back.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Not really.’
I expected another question but none came.
The taste of her skin
I was not Andrew. I was them. And we woke, and the still light bedroom was clotted with violet, and though my head didn’t hurt exactly, it felt extremely tight, as though my skull was a fist and my brain was the bar of soap it contained.
I tried switching off the light, but the dark didn’t work. The violet stayed, expanding and leaking across reality like spilt ink.
‘Get away,’ I urged the hosts. ‘Get away.’
But they had a hold on me. You. If you are reading this. You had a terrible hold. And I was losing myself, and I knew this because I turned over in bed and I could see Isobel in the dark, facing away from me. I could see the shape of her, half under the duvet. My hand touched the back of her neck. I felt nothing towards her. We felt nothing towards her. We didn’t even see her as Isobel. She was simply a human. The way, to a human, a cow or a chicken or a microbe is simply a cow or a chicken or a microbe.