Matt Haig - The Humans

‘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.

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 religion, 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:

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.

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?’