Idiopathy

said Nathan.
    ‘Not just you. All of you. Your generation. The Me generation.’
    ‘I thought you were the Me generation.’
    ‘Whatever,’ his father waved his hand. ‘Your lot. The perpetual adolescents. You go on and on about your parents, about society, about global this and global that and you don’t even understand the most basic fact of life.’ He pointed at Nathan. ‘You don’t understand the world until you have children,’ he said. ‘You don’t stop being a child until you have one.’
    ‘I don’t think that’s true,’ said Nathan, who had very little evidence either way.
    ‘Of course you don’t,’ said his father, draining the dregs of his Mad Cow. ‘Anyway, we should go. Your mother’s on the television.’

    I f Nathan’s mother could have been said to have lived by any sort of overarching credo or outlook, it would have been the importance of presentation over content and appearance over actuality. Returning home from another strained and no doubt unacceptably boozy dinner with her alleged friend Rita and Rita’s once strikingly confident and now merely boorish husband Tony, Nathan’s mother would comment that it was not the disintegration of their marriage that bothered her per se, since this could, after all, happen to the best of us, but rather what she saw as their absolute determination not to conceal it. Why, she would ask, for perhaps the fifth or sixth time, did Rita and Tony feel moved to push their problems in everyone else’s faces by getting soused and saying things like,
Well of course that’s something Tony’s never understood
or
For God’s sake, Rita, no one’s interested in anything you’re saying
? It was, Nathan’s mother would say, not on.
    Over time, her attitude to Nathan’s so-called condition had shifted along very similar lines, and the only way she’d been able to deal with it was to give herself the sense that, even if she was unable to manage it medically, she was at least able to seize control of its public presentation and reshape her mortification into martyrdom. Because, as she’d said so many times, what separated the wheat from the chaff in life wasn’t what life threw at you, since life threw all sorts of things at all sorts of people, but the way you carried yourself through it, or, to put it another way: having an afflicted son was no excuse to start letting yourself go.
    So it came as little surprise to Nathan to see, as the studio lights went up to reveal the luridly perma-tanned Dr Dave and Nathan’s immaculately trouser-suited mother seated side by side on a salmon-pink couch that clashed violently with Dr Dave’s skin tone, that his mother had now perfectly completed the transition from frustrated parent to crusading author, and, far from being in any way overwhelmed by the television studio experience, was smiling with the kind of radiance that comes only from the perfect balance of supreme self-confidence and an utter dearth of self-awareness, an expression both absorbed and returned tenfold by Dr Dave, who had, as anyone who watched his show regularly knew, completed a particularly spectacular transition of his own by moving, through the medium of emotional televised confession, from disgraced conman to national treasure.
    Even before securing his own weekly television programme, Dr Dave was something of a big noise on the Development scene. He’d written two books (
Smile Yourself Thin
, and his breakthrough,
C.H.A.N.G.E: Calling a Halt to All Negative and Gloomy Experiences
) and was a regular fixture on the popular daytime TV show
Sit Down With Sally
, hosted by the perennially agog Sally Duvall, where he dispensed well-rehearsed off-the-cuff advice to a ‘variety’ of callers whose diversity, in Nathan’s opinion, was severely limited by the daytime TV demographic: housewives, the unemployed, the temporarily sick, the permanently sick, and those in long-term residential care.
    It was on this show that Dr Dave not only developed his theory of C.H.A.N.G.E. but also demonstrated the notorious level of tactical disclosure that had turned a C-list TV shrink into an A-list celebrity in his own right. Dr Dave, it transpired in the gutter press, had not always gone by the name of Dr Dave. He had, for several years in his twenties, gone by the name of The Penetrator, and had been a specialist in certain speed-seduction techniques designed to con perfect strangers into sleeping with him within approximately three minutes.