by Matt Haig
‘Dad, why did you do it?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘School is going to be hell now.’
‘Oh.’
‘Is that all you can say? “Oh?” Are you serious? Is that fucking it?’
‘No. Yes. I, I fucking don’t fucking know, Gulliver.’
‘Well, you’ve destroyed my life. I’m a joke. It was bad before. Ever since I started there. But now—’
I wasn’t listening. I was thinking about Daniel Russell, and how I desperately needed to phone him. Gulliver noticed I wasn’t paying attention.
‘It doesn’t even matter. You never want to talk to me, apart from last night.’
Gulliver left the room. He slammed the door, and let out a kind of growl. He was fifteen years old. This meant he belonged to a special sub-category of human called a ‘teenager’, the chief characteristics of which were a weakened resistance to gravity, a vocabulary of grunts, a lack of spatial awareness, copious amounts of masturbation, and an unending appetite for cereal.
Last night.
I got out of bed and headed upstairs to the attic. I knocked on his door. There was no reply but I opened it anyway.
Inside, the environment was one of prevailing dark. There were posters for musicians. Thermostat, Skrillex, The Fetid, Mother Night, and the Dark Matter his T-shirt referenced. There was a window sloped in line with the ceiling, but the blind was drawn. There was a book on the bed. It was called Ham on Rye, by Charles Bukowski. There were clothes on the floor. Together, the room was a data cloud of despair. I sensed he wanted to be put out of his misery, one way or another. That would come, of course, but first there would be a few more questions.
He didn’t hear me enter owing to the audio transmitter he had plugged into his ears. Nor did he see me, as he was too busy staring at his computer. On the screen, there was a still-motion image of myself naked, walking past one of the university buildings. There was also some writing on the screen. At the top were the words ‘Gulliver Martin, You Must Be So Proud’.
Underneath, there were lots of comments. A typical example read, ‘HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! Oh almost forgot – HA!’ I read the name next to that particular post.
‘Who is Theo “The Fucking Business” Clarke?’ Gulliver jumped at my voice and turned around. I asked my question again but didn’t receive an answer.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked, purely for research purposes.
‘Just go away.’
‘I want to talk to you. I want to talk about last night.’
He turned his back to me. His torso stiffened. ‘Go away, Dad.’
‘No. I want to know what I said to you.’
He sprang out of his chair and, as the humans say, stormed over to me. ‘Just leave me alone, okay? You’ve never been interested in a single thing about my life so don’t start now. Why fucking start now?’
I watched the back of him in the small, circular mirror staring out from the wall like a dull and unblinking eye.
After some aggressive pacing he sat back in his chair, turned to his computer again, and pressed his finger on an odd-looking command device.
‘I need to know something,’ I said. ‘I need to know if you know what I was doing. Last week at work?’
‘Dad, just—’
‘Listen, this is important. Were you still up when I came home? You know, last night? Were you in the house? Were you awake?’
He mumbled something. I didn’t hear what. Only an ipsoid would have heard it.
‘Gulliver, how are you at mathematics?’
‘You know how I fucking am at maths.’
‘Fucking no, I don’t. Not now. That is why I am fucking asking. Tell me what you fucking know.’
Nothing. I thought I was using his language, but Gulliver just sat there, staring away from me, with his right leg jerking up and down in slight but rapid movements. My words were having no effect. I thought of the audio transmitter he still had in one ear. Maybe it was sending radio signals. I waited a little while longer and sensed it was time to leave. But as I headed for the door he said, ‘Yeah. I was up. You told me.’
My heart raced. ‘What? What did I tell you?’
‘About you being the saviour of the human race or something.’
‘Anything more specific? Did I go into detail?’
‘You proved your precious Rainman hypothesis.’
‘Riemann. Riemann. The Riemann hypothesis. I told you that, fucking did I?’
‘Yeah,’ he said, in the same glum tone. ‘First time you’d spoken to me in a week.’
‘Who have you told?’
‘What? Dad, I think people are more interested in the fact that you walked around the town centre naked, to be honest. No one’s going to care about some equation.’
‘But your mother? Have you told her? She must have asked you if I’d spoken to you, after I’d gone missing. Surely she asked you that?’
He shrugged. (A shrug, I realised, was one of the main modes of communication for teenagers.) ‘Yeah.’
‘And? What did you say? Come on, speak to me, Gulliver. What does she know about it?’
He turned and looked me straight in the eye. He was frowning. Angry. Confused. ‘I don’t fucking believe you, Dad.’
‘Fucking believe?’
‘You’re the parent, I’m the kid. I’m the one who should be wrapped up in myself, not you. I’m fifteen and you’re forty-three. If you are genuinely ill, Dad, then I want to be there for you, but aside from your new-found love of streaking and your weird fucking swearing you are acting very, very, very much like yourself. But here’s a newsflash. You ready? We don’t actually care about your prime numbers. We don’t care about your precious fucking work or your stupid fucking books or your genius-like brain or your ability to solve the world’s greatest outstanding mathematical whatever because, because, because all these things hurt us.’
‘Hurt you?’ Maybe the boy was wiser than he looked. ‘What do you mean by that?’
His eyes stayed on me. His chest rose and fell with visible intensity.
‘Nothing,’ he said at last. ‘But, the answer is no, I didn’t tell Mum. I said you said something about work. That’s all. I didn’t think it was relevant information right then to tell her about your fucking hypothesis.’
‘But the money. You know about that?’
‘Yeah, course I do.’
‘And you still didn’t think it was a big deal?’
‘Dad, we have quite a lot of money in the bank. We have one of the biggest houses in Cambridge. I’m probably the richest kid in my school now. But it doesn’t amount to shit. It isn’t the Perse, remember?’
‘The Perse?’
‘That school you spent twenty grand a year on. You’ve forgotten that? Who the hell are you? Jason Bourne?’
‘No. I am not.’
‘You probably forgot I was expelled, too.’
‘No,’ I lied. ‘Course I haven’t.’
‘I don’t think more money’s going to save us.’
I was genuinely confused. This went against everything we were meant to know about the humans.
‘No,’ I said. ‘You’re right. It won’t. And besides, it was a mistake. I haven’t proved the Riemann hypothesis. I think in fact it is unprovable. I thought I had, but I haven’t. So there is nothing to tell anyone.’
At which Gulliver pushed the audio-transmission device into his other ear and closed his eyes. He wanted no more of me.
‘Fucking okay,’ I whispered and left the room.
Emily Dickinson
I went downstairs and found an ‘address book’. Inside were addresses and telephone numbers for people, listed alphabetically. I found the telephone number I was looking for. A woman told me Daniel Russell was out but would be back in around an hour. He would phone me back. Meanwhile, I perused some more history books and learnt things as I read between the lines.
As well as reli
gion, human history is full of depressing things like colonisation, disease, racism, sexism, homophobia, class snobbery, environmental destruction, slavery, totalitarianism, military dictatorships, inventions of things which they have no idea how to handle (the atomic bomb, the Internet, the semi-colon), the victimisation of clever people, the worshipping of idiotic people, boredom, despair, periodic collapses, and catastrophes within the psychic landscape. And through it all there has always been some truly awful food.
I found a book called The Great American Poets.
‘I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars,’ wrote someone called Walt Whitman. It was an obvious point, but something about it was quite beautiful. In the same book, there were words written by another poet. The poet was Emily Dickinson. The words were these:
How happy is the little stone
That rambles in the road alone,
And doesn’t care about careers,
And exigencies never fears;
Whose coat of elemental brown
A passing universe put on;
And independent as the sun,
Associates or glows alone,
Fulfilling absolute decree
In casual simplicity.
Fulfilling absolute decree, I thought. Why do these words trouble me? The dog growled at me. I turned the page and found more unlikely wisdom. I read the words aloud to myself: ‘The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.’
‘You’re out of bed,’ said Isobel.
‘Yes,’ I said. To be a human is to state the obvious. Repeatedly, over and over, until the end of time.
‘You need to eat,’ she added, after studying my face.
‘Yes,’ I said.
She got out some ingredients.
Gulliver walked past the doorway.
‘Gull, where are you going? I’m making dinner.’ The boy said nothing as he left. The slam of the door almost shook the house.
‘I’m worried about him,’ said Isobel.
As she worried, I studied the ingredients on the worktop. Mainly green vegetation. But then something else. Chicken breast. I thought about this. And I kept thinking. The breast of a chicken. The breast of a chicken. The breast of a chicken.
‘That looks like meat,’ I said.
‘I’m going to make a stir-fry.’
‘With that?’
‘Yes.’
‘The breast of a chicken?’
‘Yes, Andrew. Or are you vegetarian now?’
The dog was in his basket. It went by the name of Newton. It was still growling at me. ‘What about the dog’s breasts? Are we going to eat those, too?’
‘No,’ she said, with resignation. I was testing her.
‘Is a dog more intelligent than a chicken?’
‘Yes,’ she said. She closed her eyes. ‘I don’t know. No. I haven’t got time for this. Anyway, you’re the big meat eater.’
I was uncomfortable. ‘I would rather not eat the chicken’s breasts.’
Isobel now clenched her eyes closed. She inhaled deeply. ‘Give me strength,’ she whispered.
I could have done so, of course. But I needed what strength I had right now.
Isobel handed me my diazepam. ‘Have you taken one lately?’
‘No.’
‘You probably should.’
So I humoured her.
I unscrewed the cap and placed a pill on my palm. These ones looked like word-capsules. As green as knowledge. I popped a tablet in my mouth.
Be careful.
Dishwasher
I ate the vegetable stir-fry. It smelt like Bazadean body waste. I tried not to look at it, so I looked at Isobel instead. It was the first time that looking at a human face was the easiest option. But I did need to eat. So I ate.
‘When you spoke to Gulliver about me going missing did he say anything to you?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘What was it that he said?’
‘That you came in about eleven, and that you’d gone into the living room where he was watching TV and that you’d told him that you were sorry you were late, but you’d been finishing something off at work.’
‘Was that it? There was nothing more specific?’
‘No.’
‘What do you think he meant by that? I mean: what I meant by that?’
‘I don’t know. But I have to say, you coming home and being friendly to Gulliver. That’s already out of character.’
‘Why? Don’t I like him?’
‘Not since two years ago. No. Pains me to say it, but you don’t act very much like you do.’
‘Two years ago?’
‘Since he got expelled from Perse. For starting a fire.’
‘Oh yes. The fire incident.’
‘I want you to start making an effort with him.’
Afterwards, I followed Isobel into the kitchen putting my plate and cutlery in the dishwasher. I was noticing more things about her. At first, I had just seen her as generically human but now I was appreciating the details. Picking up things I hadn’t noticed – differences between her and the others. She was wearing a cardigan and blue trousers known as jeans. Her long neck was decorated with a thin necklace made out of silver. Her eyes stared deep into things, as though she was continually searching for something that wasn’t there. Or as if it was there, but just out of sight. It was as though everything had a depth, an internal distance to it.
‘How are you feeling?’ she asked. She seemed worried about something.
‘I feel fine.’
‘I only ask because you’re loading the dishwasher.’
‘Because that’s what you are doing.’
‘Andrew, you never load the dishwasher. You are, and I mean this in the least offensive way possible, something of a domestic primitive.’
‘Why? Don’t mathematicians load dishwashers?’
‘In this house,’ she said sadly, ‘no, actually. No, they don’t.’
‘Oh yes. I know. Obviously. I just fancied helping today. I help sometimes.’
‘Now we’re on to fractions.’
She looked at my jumper. There was a bit of noodle resting on the blue wool. She picked it off, and stroked the fabric where it had been. She smiled, quickly. She cared about me. She had her reservations, but she cared. I didn’t want her to care about me. It wouldn’t help things. She placed her hand through my hair, to tidy it a bit. To my surprise, I wasn’t flinching.
‘Einstein chic is one thing but this is ridiculous,’ she said, softly. I smiled like I understood. She smiled too, but it was a smile on top of something else. As if she was wearing a mask, and there was a near-identical but less smiling face underneath.
‘It’s almost like an alien clone is in my kitchen.’
‘Almost,’ I said. ‘Yes.’
It was then that the telephone rang. Isobel went to answer it and a moment later came back into the kitchen, holding out the receiver.
‘It’s for you,’ she said, in a suddenly serious voice. Her eyes were wide, trying to convey a silent message I didn’t quite understand.
‘Hello?’ I said.
There was a long pause. The sound of breath, and then a voice on the next exhalation. A man, talking slowly and carefully. ‘Andrew? Is that you?’
‘Yes. Who’s this?’
‘It’s Daniel. Daniel Russell.’
My heart tripped. I realised this was it, the moment things had to change.
‘Oh hello, Daniel.’
‘How are you? I hear you might be unwell.’
‘Oh, I am fine, really. It was just a little bit of mental exhaustion. My mind had run its own marathon and it struggled. My brain is made for sprints. It doesn’t have the stamina for long-distance running. But don’t worry, honestly, I am back where I was. It wasn’t anything too serious. Nothing that the right medication couldn’t suppress, anyway.’
‘Well, that is good to hear. I was worried about you. Anyway, I was hoping to tal
k to you about that remarkable email you sent me.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But let’s not do this over the phone. Let’s chat face-to-face. It would be good to see you.’
Isobel frowned.
‘What a good idea. Should I come to you?’
‘No,’ I said, with a degree of firmness. ‘No. I’ll come to you.’
We are waiting.
A large house
Isobel had offered to drive me, and had tried to insist on it, saying I wasn’t ready to leave the house. Of course, I had already left the house, to go to Fitzwilliam College, but she hadn’t known about that. I said I felt like some exercise and Daniel needed to speak to me quite urgently about something, possibly some kind of job offer. I told her I’d have my phone on me and that she knew where I was. And so eventually I was able to take the address from Isobel’s notebook, leave the house and head to Babraham.
To a large house, the largest I’d seen.
Daniel Russell’s wife answered the door. She was a very tall, broad-shouldered woman, with quite long grey hair and aged skin.
‘Oh, Andrew.’
She held out her arms wide. I replicated the gesture. And she kissed me on the cheek. She smelt of soap and spices. It was clear she knew me. She couldn’t stop saying my name.
‘Andrew, Andrew, how are you?’ she asked me. ‘I heard about your little misadventure.’
‘Well, I am all right. It was a, well, an episode. But I’m over it. The story continues.’
She studied me a little more and then opened the door wide. She beckoned me inside, smiling broadly. I stepped into the hallway.
‘Do you know why I am here?’
‘To see Him Upstairs,’ she said, pointing to the ceiling.
‘Yes, but do you know why I am here to see him?’
She was puzzled by my manner but she tried her best to hide it beneath a kind of energetic and chaotic politeness. ‘No, Andrew,’ she said, quickly. ‘As a matter of fact, he didn’t say.’
I nodded. I noticed a large ceramic vase on the floor. It had a yellow pattern of flowers on it, and I wondered why people bothered with such empty vessels. What was their significance? Maybe I would never know. We passed a room, with a sofa and a television and bookcases and dark red walls. Blood-coloured.
