Idiopathy

have to go over this again? I
specifically remember
going over this at the time.’
    ‘Well I don’t. I don’t remember talking about this at all. When did we talk about this?’
    ‘Last Tuesday.’
    ‘What happened last Tuesday?’
    ‘We went to that thing, and then we came back, and we had this
exact
conversation then.’
    ‘Couldn’t have been last Tuesday. I was out last Tuesday.’
    ‘You were out on Monday.’
    ‘No.
You
were out on Monday.’
    ‘For God’s sake, Roger. Will you try and concentrate?
You
were out on Monday and we were
both
out on Tuesday, but when we got back …’
    ‘There’s nothing in the diary.’
    ‘For when?’
    ‘For Monday.’
    ‘That doesn’t mean you weren’t out. But anyway, look, this is beside the point. The point is …’
    ‘We’re wasting time by arguing about this, really.’
    ‘We are. That’s what I’m saying.’
    ‘I think we should stick to the point at hand.’
    ‘I am. It’s you that’s straying off to try and find out what you were doing last week.’
    ‘I’m just trying to establish whether we might have discussed this.’
    ‘Roger, I came up to you on Tuesday, and I
specifically
said this was something we needed to discuss, and you agreed, and you said …’
    ‘Ah! Yes, I remember. We agreed to discuss it the next day because I was going out. Now, where was I going?’
    ‘That was Monday. Tuesday
was
the next day and that’s why we discussed it, because we’d agreed on Monday to discuss it but you were going out.’
    ‘And then we went out on Wednesday and forgot to discuss it.’
    ‘Tuesday.’
    ‘No, Helen, we were
in
on Tuesday.’
    Nathan could only assume there was a kind of comfort in the ritual. To him, however, either sitting upstairs reading his mother’s book (‘Communication,’ she noted on page 84, ‘is the bedrock of any stable family’), or trying to make a cup of tea in the kitchen without becoming embroiled in what was taking place around him, there was a mounting feeling that, thanks to the circuitous, incantatory conversations around him, time itself was beginning to form loops from which it was difficult to escape. Downstairs, the loops were made of seconds, minutes and hours. He could make a cup of tea, return to his room, drink his tea, and then go back downstairs to find that the previous conversation regarding a previous conversation had started up again exactly where it either had or hadn’t left off. Upstairs, the loops were made of years, as he opened his mother’s book and encountered episodes from his childhood which, if he remembered them at all, he remembered very differently.
    The overall effect was therefore not simply one of dislocation, but of dislocation repeated; an increasingly familiar oddness heightened by the simple fact of Nathan’s not having been a part of the wider world for several months, and by his parents’ not having been a part of the wider world for several years. Coincidentally, Nathan’s reluctant return to society coincided with his mother’s not-so-reluctant entry into the public domain, and so both she and he found themselves exposed at the same moment, although the nature of exposure was, for each of them, both different and differently received.
    ‘Nathan,’ said his mother, looking up from her laptop. ‘Are you on Facebook?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘I don’t believe you,’ she said. ‘How did you get up to all that mischief without being on Facebook?’
    ‘It was different then. There were chat rooms.’
    ‘I see. Well perhaps you could join Facebook?’
    ‘I don’t really want to.’
    ‘Right. It would be very helpful if you joined Facebook.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Well, my book’s coming out, and I’ve started a Facebook page for it, and obviously I’ve got everyone from my Twitter feed to like the Facebook page, but it seems to me that if you could get some of your friends to like it too I’d be tapping into a whole new circle.’
    ‘But I’m not on Facebook.’
    ‘What about these chat rooms? Couldn’t you start a new thread?’
    ‘They’re not really book-related.’
    ‘Right, OK. I can see you’re going to be no help with this whatsoever.’
    Nathan said nothing. Being no help whatsoever was, of course, pretty central to his approach as far as the whole book issue went.
    He spent whole days dedicated to the task of spending his days. He sat in his bedroom and read. He sat downstairs and listened to his parents. He sat in the garden and smoked.