Idiopathy

Confrontation is OK, Nathan. It’s nothing to be scared of.’
    ‘I’m not being confrontational,’ said Nathan.
    The angle of the setting sun was such that flipping down the little screens to either side of the rear-view mirror, as Nathan’s parents had done, was essentially pointless. The car’s dashboard readout showed an external temperature of zero degrees Celsius and an internal temperature of twenty-eight. Nathan had not removed his coat and now felt too restrained to do so. His reluctance to unfasten his seatbelt could not be entirely explained but may have related to a sense of both security and enforced restraint that he found comforting.
    ‘Mothers Who Survive,’ said Nathan’s mother.
    ‘Who are mothers who survive?’
    ‘Mothers Who Survive
dot com
. The website.’ His mother’s voice was strategically calm to the point where it aroused the exact opposite sense in Nathan. ‘It’s for mothers who have, at one time or another, as the name suggests,
survived
.’
    ‘Survived what?’
    ‘Survived what, he says,’ said Nathan’s father.
    ‘Their children,’ said Nathan’s mother.
    A copse of trees split the dwindling sunlight into smithereens and initiated a strobe effect not dissimilar to rapid blinking. The sense of reality-as-gauze-screen was not going anywhere fast. When Nathan clenched his fists the scar tissue stretched across the knuckles in a way that reminded him of parma ham wrapped round a chicken breast. There was no pain. Use of his fingers, arm, or other bodily parts had not been affected. He said, ‘As in what. As in they outlived their children? Or as in their children tried to kill them?’
    ‘Both. Either. All sorts.’
    ‘But I’m not dead.’
    ‘You don’t need to be.’
    ‘And I haven’t tried to kill you.’
    ‘It’s a very inclusive organisation. It’s about sharing, not ring-fencing.’
    His mother was still talking to the windscreen. Anything to which she didn’t pay attention would spiral out of control. Approximately a year ago she had explained to Nathan that failing to think of himself as having a condition was itself a symptom of his condition.
    ‘Sharing what?’ said Nathan.
    ‘Our trauma,’ said Nathan’s mother.
    ‘What trauma?’
    ‘The trauma we’ve been through.’
    ‘That’s not an answer.’
    ‘The trauma,’ said Nathan’s father bluntly, ‘of you.’
    Fields rushed by, furrowed, stripped of life. The sense that there had once been crops in fields that were now bare made them appear as places where something had already happened: post-evental; forlorn. Things arrived; departed. The sense of abrasion on his tongue. The way the sun can seem cold. The way things occurred and were forgotten.
    ‘Nearly there,’ said his father.

    N athan’s parents’ home was a once-beautiful cottage on the Cambridgeshire–Suffolk border that they’d bought cheap and ruined at great expense. Trawling around for their ideal retirement location after celebrating Nathan’s departure from what his mother called, without a hint of irony,
the family nest
, they had stumbled on an increasingly frail and not entirely undemented ex-schoolmaster who, due to issues of mobility, sanity and convenience, was looking to sell fast and get the hell out before he was found, as he put it, half-rotted in a pool of his own juices. Struck by his plight, Nathan’s parents had immediately and selflessly haggled him down to approximately two-thirds the fair price and had told him, in his best interests, that he really needed to move quickly, and that the best way to move quickly, providing one had the luxury of two such reliable buyers as them, was to cut out the middleman and stay well away from estate agents. As he signed the rudimentary contract he made them promise to stay true to the old place. They’d promised, then gutted it. Beginning the very day he moved out they’d set in motion a process Nathan would later describe as an aesthetic massacre. Never known for their concessions to taste, his parents had, in working on what they quite openly described as their
final abode
, reached the very pinnacle of their ugly aspirations. Leaded windows with wooden frames were replaced by PVC and double glazing which, as Nathan’s father put it, kept the heat in and the noise out, although exactly what noise, given the house’s location at the far end of an isolated lane on the outer edge of a sleepy village, was never very clear. The Rayburn, which had been in