Free The Humans by Matt Haig Page A

at a nipple that offers no milk. You want the world to know you. You want to be a great man.’
    She said this in quite a cool tone. I wondered if this was how people always talked to each other, or if it was just unique to spouses. I heard a key enter a lock.
    Isobel looked at me with wide, astonished eyes. ‘
Gulliver
.’

Dark matter
    Gulliver’s room was at the top of the house. The ‘attic’. The last stop before the thermosphere. He went straight there, his feet passing the bedroom I was
in, with only the slightest pause before climbing the final set of stairs.
    While Isobel went out to walk the dog I decided to phone the number on the piece of paper in my pocket. Maybe it was Daniel Russell’s number.
    ‘Hello,’ came a voice. Female. ‘Who’s this?’
    ‘This is Professor Andrew Martin,’ I said.
    The female laughed. ‘Well hello, Professor Andrew Martin.’
    ‘Who are you? Do you know me?’
    ‘You’re on YouTube. Everyone knows you now. You’ve gone viral. The Naked Professor.’
    ‘Oh.’
    ‘Hey, don’t worry about it. Everyone loves an exhibitionist.’ She spoke slowly, lingering on words as if each one had a taste she didn’t want to lose.
    ‘Please, how do I know you?’
    The question was never answered, because at that precise moment Gulliver walked into the room and I switched off the phone.
    Gulliver. My ‘son’. The dark-haired boy I had seen in the photographs. He looked as I had expected, but maybe taller. He was nearly as tall as me. His eyes were shaded by his hair.
(Hair, by the way, is very important here. Not as important as clothes obviously, but getting there. To humans, hair is more than just a filamentous biomaterial that happens to grow out of their
heads. It carries all kinds of social signifiers, most of which I couldn’t translate.) His clothes were as black as space and his T-shirt had the words ‘Dark Matter’ on them.
Maybe this was how certain people communicated, via the slogans on their T-shirts. He wore ‘wristbands’. His hands were in his pockets and he seemed uncomfortable looking at my face.
(The feeling, then, was mutual.) His voice was low. Or at least low by human standards. About the same depth as a Vonnadorian humming plant. He came and sat on the bed and tried to be nice, at the
start, but then at one point he switched to a higher frequency.
    ‘Dad, why did you do it?’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘School is going to be hell now.’
    ‘Oh.’
    ‘Is that all you can say? “Oh?” Are you serious? Is that fucking
it
?’
    ‘No. Yes. I, I fucking don’t fucking know, Gulliver.’
    ‘Well, you’ve destroyed my life. I’m a joke. It was bad before. Ever since I started there. But now—’
    I wasn’t listening. I was thinking about Daniel Russell, and how I desperately needed to phone him. Gulliver noticed I wasn’t paying attention.
    ‘It doesn’t even matter. You never want to talk to me, apart from last night.’
    Gulliver left the room. He slammed the door, and let out a kind of growl. He was fifteen years old. This meant he belonged to a special sub-category of human called a ‘teenager’, the
chief characteristics of which were a weakened resistance to gravity, a vocabulary of grunts, a lack of spatial awareness, copious amounts of masturbation, and an unending appetite for cereal.
    Last night
.
    I got out of bed and headed upstairs to the attic. I knocked on his door. There was no reply but I opened it anyway.
    Inside, the environment was one of prevailing dark. There were posters for musicians. Thermostat, Skrillex, The Fetid, Mother Night, and the Dark Matter his T-shirt referenced. There was a
window sloped in line with the ceiling, but the blind was drawn. There was a book on the bed. It was called
Ham on Rye
, by Charles Bukowski. There were clothes on the floor. Together, the
room was a data cloud of despair. I sensed he wanted to be put out of his misery, one way or another. That would come, of course, but first