Us

by David Nicholls

  I did not tell Connie of my whereabouts. In Siena, I had told her to expect me home the following day, and wouldn’t it be better to phone her with Albie by my side? I’m not at Heathrow, I’m in Madrid! It’s a long story. Wait a minute, I have someone here to speak to you … That was the plan, and so I was absurdly cheerful and optimistic that night, my mood lifted by the lavish hotel suite – a suite! Two rooms! – that I had booked on a whim and at a surprisingly reasonable price. At the marble and gold reception desk there seemed to be some doubt that this rather shabby, worn-out solitary guest could afford such decadence. No luggage? Were there any other guests with me? No, I was all alone, but there was a sofa-bed for Albie. Only if he wanted it, of course.

  The room – no, the suite – was all white marble and cream leather, a dream of modern living from 1973. Closing the door, I set about repairing the damage of the last few days. I eased my partially sunburnt self into the cool onyx bath, washed my hair, shaved, and dressed the wounds on my feet. I put on the last of my clean clothes and sent the others to be laundered. In the shopping streets below I found a department store and bought a new shirt, a tie, some trousers and, back in my room, laid them out on a chair as if preparing for a job interview. So giddy and excited was I that I broke the central guiding principle of my life and took vodka and tonic from the mini-bar then, dizzy with decadence, the peanuts too, and like some modern-day Caligula sat on the balcony and watched the traffic on the Gran Vía fourteen floors below. At the junction ahead of me stood a fine modern building, a rounded wedge – art deco, Connie, is that right? – with a huge neon sign on its top floor, and as evening fell I caught the moment when the neon sputtered into life, exclaiming Schweppes! against a rainbow background, so that the street resembled a milder, more laid-back Times Square.

  The Spaniards, I knew, had a reputation for late dining and I contemplated taking a ‘disco nap’, as Albie would put it, then setting out to explore. But the bed was so large and comfortable, the sheets cool and white and of such a high thread count, that I found myself lowering the mechanical shutters and settling down at nine fifteen. Plenty of time for tapas tomorrow, when I’d see my son again. I fell asleep, lulled by the most wonderful, unshakeable faith in the future.

  151. the future

  There has never been a shortage of topics to keep me awake at night, but as a teenager I was especially haunted by the prospect of nuclear war. The public information films intended to educate and reassure the populace sent everyone, us children in particular, into a frenzy of morbid fantasy and I was convinced that at some point, whether in Washington, Peking or Moscow, a button would be pressed – I imagined an actual button, large and red, like the stop button on an escalator – and soon my mother and father and I would be hunting for mutant rats in the smouldering remains of Ipswich city centre. There’d be no more ‘don’t touch that, it’s dirty’ in the post-apocalyptic Petersen family cave. The only question would be: do we eat Douglas or Karen first? So worried was I by this prospect that, unusually, I confessed my night terrors to my father. ‘Well, if it does happen, you won’t have time to do anything about it. Three minutes of panic and then you’ll be crispy bacon!’ he reassured me. Given three minutes’ warning, what would we say to one another, my family and I? I imagined my father rushing to turn off the central heating.

  Rightly or wrongly, that specific fear has faded. But the anxiety has not passed and now the face that I imagine in that future wasteland is not my own, but Albie’s.

  Over the years I have read many, many books about the future, my ‘we’re all doomed’ books, as Connie liked to call them. ‘All the books you read are either about how grim the past was or how gruesome the future will be. It might not be that way, Douglas. Things might turn out all right.’ But these were well-researched, plausible studies, their conclusions highly persuasive, and I could become quite voluble on the subject.

  Take, for instance, the fate of the middle-class, into which Albie and I were born and to which Connie now belongs, albeit with some protest. In book after book I read that the middle-class are doomed. Globalisation and technology have already cut a swathe through previously secure professions, and 3D printing technology will soon wipe out the last of the manufacturing industries. The internet won’t replace those jobs, and what place for the middle-classes if twelve people can run a giant corporation? I’m no communist firebrand, but even the most rabid free-marketeer would concede that market-forces capitalism, instead of spreading wealth and security throughout the population, has grotesquely magnified the gulf between rich and poor, forcing a global workforce into dangerous, unregulated, insecure low-paid labour while rewarding only a tiny elite of businessmen and technocrats. So-called ‘secure’ professions seem less and less so; first it was the miners and the ship- and steel-workers, soon it will be the bank clerks, the librarians, the teachers, the shop-owners, the supermarket check-out staff. The scientists might survive if it’s the right type of science, but where do all the taxi-drivers in the world go when the taxis drive themselves? How do they feed their children or heat their homes and what happens when frustration turns to anger? Throw in terrorism, the seemingly insoluble problem of religious fundamentalism, the rise of the extreme right-wing, under-employed youth and the under-pensioned elderly, fragile and corrupt banking systems, the inadequacy of the health and care systems to cope with vast numbers of the sick and old, the environmental repercussions of unprecedented factory-farming, the battle for finite resources of food, water, gas and oil, the changing course of the Gulf Stream, destruction of the biosphere and the statistical probability of a global pandemic, and there really is no reason why anyone should sleep soundly ever again.

  By the time Albie is my age I will be long gone, or, best-case scenario, barricaded into my living module with enough rations to see out my days. But outside, I imagine vast, unregulated factories where workers count themselves lucky to toil through eighteen-hour days for less than a living wage before pulling on their gas masks to fight their way through the unemployed masses who are bartering with the mutated chickens and old tin-cans that they use for currency, those lucky workers returning to tiny, overcrowded shacks in a vast megalopolis where a tree is never seen, the air is thick with police drones, where car-bomb explosions, typhoons and freak hailstorms are so commonplace as to barely be remarked upon. Meanwhile, in literally gilded towers miles above the carcinogenic smog, the privileged 1 per cent of businessmen, celebrities and entrepreneurs look down through bullet-proof windows, accept cocktails in strange glasses from the robot waiters hovering nearby and laugh their tinkling laughs and somewhere, down there in that hellish, stewing mess of violence, poverty and desperation, is my son, Albie Petersen, a wandering minstrel with his guitar and his keen interest in photography, still refusing to wear a decent coat.

  152. heritability

  ‘So what you’re saying,’ said Connie, looking up from her novel, ‘is that the future, basically, is going to be a bit like Mad Max?’

  ‘Not exactly. But it might have elements of that.’

  ‘So Mad Max, it’s like a documentary, really—’

  ‘All I mean is the future world might not be as hospitable as the one that you and I grew up in. That dream of progress is dead. Our parents imagined holiday camps on the moon. We … we have to get used to a different notion of the future.’

  ‘And you want Albie to choose his GCSEs based on this Mad Max-like vision of the future.’

  ‘Don’t tease me. I want him to do subjects that are useful and practical; I want him to do something that will get him a job.’

  ‘You want him to be up in the gilded tower. You want him to have a robot butler.’

  ‘I want him to be successful,’ I said. ‘Is that a strange ambition for my son?’

  ‘Our son.’

  ‘Our son.’

  At that time, Albie was not doing well. Instead of providing a sense of calm, the countryside enraged him. He showed no interest in learning the binomial
names for the common British birds, and the frogspawn I procured for him held no appeal. He missed his friends, the cinema, the top deck of buses; he missed eating chips on the swings in the playground. But wasn’t the countryside one wonderful giant playground? Apparently not. Albie went for walks with great reluctance, glaring at warblers, kicking the heads off flowers as he passed. If he could have burnt the countryside down, he would have. At school his grades were consistently poor, as were reports of his behaviour. He did not work, he did not concentrate, sometimes he didn’t even turn up. Connie, though concerned, took all this in her stride, but I was angered and shocked by it. I had not expected obedience to be genetic but neither had I anticipated these calls from the headmaster’s office, these letters home. My own son took me by surprise. He was not what I had expected, was not like me at all. Most hurtfully of all, he seemed to take a perverse pride in this.

  I didn’t lose my temper, or only every now and then, and I was not disappointed by him, only by his behaviour, a semantic distinction that was probably lost on a thirteen-year-old boy. He was smart, sharp, he had a good brain, he just required some structure and application. I assessed the key areas requiring attention, took the matter in hand, and despite my fatigue I’d spend evenings and weekends with him at the kitchen table, working through chemistry, physics and mathematics in what I hoped was a supportive fatherly manner, Connie hovering nearby like a boxing referee.

  ‘How can you not do long division, Albie? It’s pretty basic stuff.’

  ‘I can do it, just not in the same way.’

  ‘So you write down four and you carry the three over.’

  ‘That’s the bit we don’t do any more, the carrying-the-three bit.’

  ‘But that is long division. That’s what long division is!’

  ‘Not now it isn’t. They do it differently.’

  ‘There’s only one way to divide, Albie, and this is it.’

  ‘It isn’t!’

  ‘So show me! Show me some other magical way to divide …’

  The pen would hover on the paper then be tossed across the table. ‘Why can’t we just use a calculator?’

  I’m not proud to say that a number of those evenings of supportive coaching ended in raised voices and red eyes; the majority of them, perhaps. On one occasion he even punched a hole in his bedroom wall. Not a supporting wall, of course, just a plasterboard partition, but I was shocked nonetheless, especially when I paused to consider that he must have been imagining my face.

  But I would not give up on him, I was sure of that. Each night we’d work, then argue. I’d patch things up as best I could and then lie in bed, kept awake by a vision of a boy of Albie’s age, Chinese or South Korean, sitting up late and working away at his algebra, his organic chemistry, his computer code; this boy against whom my own son would some day compete for his livelihood.

  153. colouring in

  My son’s faltering progress corresponded with a further cooling in our relationship. The little physical rapport we’d once shared, the tickling, the holding of hands, melted away with our growing self-consciousness, and I was surprised how much I missed it, especially the holding hands. I’d never been much of a wrestler, always too anxious about cracked skulls and sprained wrists, but now even a simple arm around the shoulder was shrugged away with a wince or a grunt. Bedroom and bathroom doors were locked and now instead of telling my son to go to bed at the weekend, I began to say goodnight and to leave the two of them downstairs on the sofa, Albie’s head in Connie’s lap or vice versa. Goodnight, everyone! I said goodnight! Goodnight! Goodnight!

  I had been bracing myself for Albie’s adolescence, but its arrival felt like the outbreak of a long-simmering civil war. We argued frequently. One example will be enough. I was making the case for why science and maths might make better qualifications than drama and art. A banal discussion, I know, the kind that every family has, but Connie was away in London, which made the topic dangerous.

  ‘My point is this,’ I said. ‘Put an average member of the general public in a room with paintbrushes or a camera, give them a stage or a pen and paper and they’ll achieve something. It might be inept or ugly or untutored, or it might show potential, or it might even reveal some hidden talent but everyone, anyone can knock up a painting or a poem or photo or whatever. Put someone in a room with a centrifuge, a selection of lab equipment, some chemicals and they’ll produce nothing, nothing worthwhile whatsoever, just … mud pies. That’s because science is methodical, it demands rigour, application and study. It’s more difficult. It just is. It is.’

  ‘So – what, you think, because you’re a scientist, you’re smarter than other people?’

  ‘In my field, yes! And so I should be! That’s what I studied for, that’s why I stayed up late for ten years. To be good at it.’

  ‘So if I drop a subject I hate and don’t understand, you’ll think less of me?’

  ‘I’ll think you didn’t persevere. I’ll think you gave up too soon.’

  ‘You’ll think I took the easy option?’

  ‘Maybe—’

  ‘Bit of a coward—’

  ‘I didn’t say that. Why are you twisting words like—?’

  ‘For doing what I’m good at, rather than what you’re good at?’

  ‘No, for doing what’s easy instead of what’s hard. It’s good to be challenged, to have your mind stretched.’

  ‘So what I can do, anyone can do? There’s nothing special about it.’

  ‘There might be, but that doesn’t mean you’ll earn a living. Success comes to those who work hard and stick at things that are difficult. And I want you to be a success.’

  ‘Like you?’

  He said this with something of a sneer, and I felt a little twist of anger. ‘The future is … well, it’s terrifying, Albie, you have no idea, and I want you to be well prepared for it. I want you to have skills and information that will enable you to thrive and succeed and be happy in the future. And I’m afraid that spending all day colouring in does not count.’

  ‘So, to summarise,’ he said, blinking quickly now, ‘what you’re saying, basically, is that I should be shit-scared—’

  ‘Albie!’

  ‘And base my decisions on fear, because basically I’ve got no talent.’

  ‘No, you may well have a talent, but it’s a talent that is shared by millions of other people. Millions! That’s all.’

  And perhaps that was a poor choice of words. Perhaps this example does not present me in the best light, I would concede that. But as to the accusation that I wanted him to be something he was not? Well, yes, of course I did. Because what is a parent for if not to shape their child?

  154. how a father should be

  Connie and I also argued. Raising Albie accentuated the differences between us, differences that had seemed merely entertaining in the carefree days before parenthood. She was, to my mind, absurdly informal and laissez-faire. To take an analogy from botany, she imagined a child as an unopened flower; a parent had a responsibility to provide light and water, but also to stand back and watch. ‘He can do anything he wants,’ she said, ‘as long as he’s happy and cool.’ In contrast, I saw no reason why the flower should not be bracketed to a bamboo stick, pruned, exposed to artificial light; if it made for a stronger, more resilient plant, why not? Of course Connie cajoled and encouraged him and made him do his homework, but still she felt that his natural qualities and talents would make themselves known unaided. I did not believe in natural talents. For me, nothing had ever come naturally, not even science. I had been obliged to work hard, often with my parents standing at either shoulder, and saw no reason why Albie shouldn’t too.

  And Albie could be maddening, quite maddening; self-pitying, irresponsible, lazy, and was I really so oppressive and joyless, so short-tempered and ill-humoured? I’d meet other boys’ dads at school events, sports days and fundraising barbecues, note their avuncular ease, their joshing tone, like football managers coaxing a promising young pl
ayer. I’d watch them for clues.

  Albie’s best friend Ryan’s father was a farm-worker, handsome, stubbled, frequently topless for no good reason, always smelling of beer and engine oil. Mike was a widower, bringing up Ryan in a shabby bungalow at the edge of the village, and Albie became infatuated with this pair, would go there after school to play violent video games in a house where the curtains were perpetually closed and the weekly shop came from the petrol station. I went to pick Albie up one night, edging past the caravan, the dismantled cars and motorbikes and barking dogs to find Mike with his shirt off, sitting in a deckchair and smoking something other than tobacco.

  ‘Hello, Mike! Any sign of Albie?’

  He raised a can in greeting. ‘Last I saw he was on the roof.’

  ‘Okay. On the roof?’

  ‘Up there. They’re doing target practice.’

  ‘Oh. Okay. They have a gun?’

  ‘Only my old air rifle.’

  On cue I felt movement in the air near my ear as a pellet pinged off the cement mixer and ricocheted into the unmown grass. I looked up in time to see Albie’s grinning face disappearing behind the guttering. ‘What can I say?’ said Mike. ‘Boys’ll be boys.’

  Ryan’s house became a kind of paradise that summer, Ryan’s dad a kind of god. He let them drive the van, climb towering trees, go night-fishing; he’d drive them to quarries, the two of them bouncing around in an open-bed truck, and hurl them off high rocks into the black water. The rustier and sharper an object, the more exposed the wires and blades, the more suitable a toy for the boys to play with. They welded! He let them weld! Mike never sat Ryan down to patiently explain the periodic table; there were no ‘school nights’ in Mike’s domain. Oh no, life with Mike was just one long burning mattress. ‘I think Albie’s spending too much time at Ryan’s,’ I said, after one more revision session disintegrated into tears, bribes and acrimony. ‘We can’t ban him,’ said Connie. ‘Forbidding it will just make it more appealing.’ This was a notion that I found alien. When my father forbade something, it became forbidden, not appealing.