Matt Haig - The Humans

‘Your mum told me that,’ I added. ‘I didn’t know that.’

‘I didn’t want you to save me.’

‘I didn’t save you. You were just lucky. But I really think you should ignore feelings like that. That was a moment in your life. You have a lot more days to live. About twenty-four thousand more days to live, probably. That’s a lot of moments. You could do many great things in that time. You could read a lot of poetry.’

‘You don’t like poetry. That’s one of the few facts I know about you.’

‘It’s growing on me… Listen,’ I said, ‘don’t kill yourself. Don’t ever kill yourself. Just, that’s my advice, don’t kill yourself.’

Gulliver took something out of his pocket and put it in his mouth. It was a cigarette. He lit it. I asked if I could try it. Gulliver seemed troubled by this but handed it over. I sucked on the filter and brought the smoke into my lungs. And then I coughed.

‘What’s the point of this?’ I asked Gulliver.

He shrugged.

‘It’s an addictive substance with a high fatality rate. I thought there would be a point.’

I handed the cigarette back to Gulliver.

‘Thanks,’ he mumbled, still confused.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said. ‘It’s fine.’

He took another drag, and suddenly realised it wasn’t doing anything for him either. He flicked the cigarette in a steep arc towards the grass.

‘If you want,’ I said, ‘we could play dominoes when we get home. I bought a box this morning.’

‘No thanks.’

‘Or we could go to the Dordogne.’

‘What?’

‘Go swimming.’

He shook his head. ‘You need some more tablets.’

‘Yes. Maybe. You ate all mine.’ I tried to smile, playfully, and try some more Earth humour. ‘You fucker!’

There was a long silence. We watched Newton sniffing around the circumference of a tree. Twice.

A million suns imploded. And then Gulliver came out with it.

‘You don’t know what it’s been like,’ he said. ‘I’ve got all this expectation on me because I’m your son. My teachers read your books. And they look at me like some bruised apple that’s fallen off the great Andrew Martin tree. You know, the posh boy who got expelled from his boarding school. The one who set stuff on fire. Whose parents gave up on him. Not that I’m bothered about that now. But even in the holidays you were never around. You were always somewhere else. Or just making everything tense and horrible with Mum. It’s just shit. You should have just done the right thing and got divorced years ago. You’ve not got anything in common.’

I thought about all this. And didn’t know what to say. Cars passed by on the road behind us. The sound was very melancholy somehow, like the bass rumble of a sleeping Bazadean. ‘What was your band called?’

‘The Lost,’ he said.

A leaf fell and landed on my lap. It was dead and brown. I held it and, quite out of character, felt a strange empathy. Maybe it was because now I was empathising with humans I could empathise with pretty much anything. Too much Emily Dickinson, that was the problem. Emily Dickinson was making me human. But not that human. There was a dull ache in my head and a small weight of tiredness in my eyes as the leaf became green.

I brushed it away quickly, but it was too late.

‘What just happened?’ Gulliver asked, staring at the leaf as it floated away on the breeze.

I tried to ignore him. He asked again.

‘Nothing happened to the leaf,’ I said.

He forgot about the leaf he might have seen the moment he saw two teenage girls and a boy his own age walking on the road that ran behind the park. The girls were laughing into their hands at the sight of us. I have realised that, essentially, there are two broad categories of human laughter, and this was not the good kind.

The boy was the boy I had seen on Gulliver’s Facebook page. Theo “The Fucking Business” Clarke.

Gulliver shrank.

‘It’s the Martin Martians! Freaks!’

Gulliver cowered lower on the bench, crippled with shame.

I turned around, assessed Theo’s physical structure and dynamic potential. ‘My son could beat you into the ground,’ I shouted. ‘He could flatten your face into a more attractive geometric form.’

‘ Fuck , Dad ,’ said Gulliver, ‘what are you doing? He’s the one who fucked up my face.’

I looked at him. He was a black hole. The violence was all inward. It was time for him to push some the other way.

‘Come on,’ I said, ‘you’re a human. It’s time to act like one.’

‘No,’ said Gulliver.

But it was too late. Theo was crossing the road. ‘Yeah, you’re a comedian now, are you?’ he said as he swaggered towards us.

‘It would be fucking amusing to see you lose to my fucking son, if that’s what you fucking mean,’ I said.

‘Yeah, well, my dad’s a Taekwondo teacher. He taught me how to fight.’

‘Well, Gulliver’s father is a mathematician. So he wins.’

‘Yeah right.’

‘You will lose,’ I told the boy, and I made sure the words went all the way down and stayed there, like rocks in a shallow pond.

Theo laughed, and jumped with troubling ease over the low stone wall that bordered the park, with the girls following. This boy, Theo, was not as tall as Gulliver but more strongly built. He was almost devoid of neck and his eyes were so close together he was borderline cyclopic. He was walking backwards and forwards on the grass in front of us, warming up by punching and kicking the air.

Gulliver was as pale as milk. ‘Gulliver,’ I told him, ‘you fell off a roof yesterday. That boy is not a forty-foot drop. There is nothing to him. No depth. You know how he is going to fight.’

‘Yes,’ said Gulliver. ‘He’s going to fight well.’

‘But you, you’ve got surprise on your side. You aren’t scared of anything. All you’ve got to do is realise that this Theo symbolises everything you’ve ever hated. He is me. He is bad weather. He is the primitive soul of the Internet. He is the injustice of fate. I am asking, in other words, for you to fight him like you fight in your sleep. Lose everything. Lose all shame and consciousness and beat him. Because you can.’

‘No,’ said Gulliver, ‘I can’t.’

I lowered my voice, conjured the gifts. ‘You can. He has the same bio-chemical ingredients inside him as you do, but with less impressive neural activity.’ I saw that Gulliver looked confused, so I tapped the side of my head and explained. ‘It’s all about the oscillations.’

Gulliver stood up. I clipped the lead to Newton’s collar. He whined, sensing the atmosphere.

I watched Gulliver walk over the grass. Nervous, tight-bodied, as if being dragged by an invisible chord.

The two girls were chewing something they didn’t plan to swallow, and were giggling excitedly. Theo too was looking thrilled. Some humans not only liked violence, but craved it, I realised. Not because they wanted pain, but because they already had pain and wanted to be distracted away from that kind of pain with a lesser kind.

And then Theo hit Gulliver. And he hit him again. Both times in the face, sending Gulliver staggering backwards. Newton growled, seeking involvement, but I kept him where he was.

‘You are fucking nothing,’ said Theo, raising his foot fast through the air to Gulliver’s chest. Gulliver grabbed the leg, and Theo hopped for a while, or at least long enough to look ridiculous.

Gulliver looked at me through the still air in silence.

Then Theo was on the ground and Gulliver let him stand up before the switch flicked and he went wild, punching away as if trying to rid himself of his own body, as if it were something that could be shaken away. And pretty soon the other boy was bleeding and he fell back on the grass, his head momentarily tilting back and touching down on a rose bush. He sat up and dabbed his face with his fingers and saw the blood and looked at it as if it were a message he’d never expected to receive.