Idiopathy

by Byers, Sam

  Then Katherine went quiet, and stared at him coldly, and gave her thin smile and cock of the head and told him in her most cutting and bile-filled yet still oddly calm and polite voice that not everyone was as able, or willing, as he seemed to be, of going through the whole of their lives consistently selecting the appropriate emotion from a fucking drop-down menu.

  Unbeknownst to Nathan, it was after exactly one of these episodes (the initial subject shifted, so it could have been about a book or a film or the way Daniel always put sauce on his chips despite knowing full well that Katherine hated sauce on her chips and so wouldn’t be able to eat any of his chips, but the routine that followed was usually fairly standard) that Katherine and Daniel decided they needed to get out more and possibly talk to a few people since they were, quite clearly, going stir-crazy within the admittedly rather close confines of their relationship. They had friends, of course, but these had dwindled somewhat over time. Apparently some of their friends found Daniel and Katherine a bit oppressive, and the ones who didn’t find them oppressive, or who even seemed actually to be comfortable around them, Katherine and Daniel found a bit weird. It occurred to Daniel and Katherine that they might have been putting too much pressure on themselves; that, possibly, they were each looking to the other to provide a totality of human interaction, despite the fact that, quite obviously, no single person could ever be capable of this.

  ‘Especially,’ said Katherine, ‘and I don’t mean this in an aggressive way, you.’

  ‘Me? What do you mean especially me?’

  ‘Well, it’s not like you’re some kind of social dynamo, is it? I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m not having a go, but, you know.’

  Daniel did know. Daniel knew very well, thank you very much. He found it difficult to socialise in an unpressured manner. This was complicated, and had to do with the fact that whenever he socialised with women he felt as if Katherine’s eyes were boring into his vital organs, and whenever he socialised with men all his usual issues with men (their coded language, their constant joshing, the ever-present possibility of violence) got in the way.

  ‘Can’t we just go out and talk to some people?’ said Katherine, lighting another one of Daniel’s cigarettes because she was not, at that time, smoking.

  ‘What people?’

  ‘People people. As in people.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I don’t know. Where people are. In a pub or something.’

  ‘You want to go to the pub and meet people?’

  ‘Not necessarily Meet, as in capital M, but small-M meet maybe, yeah.’

  ‘People will think we’re swingers.’

  ‘So what? We’ll meet some swingers then.’

  ‘Why the fuck would I want to meet swingers?’

  ‘This is what you do. You take things and then totally dampen them.’

  ‘Are we going to argue about this?’

  ‘I’m not arguing, I’m just saying.’

  ‘But obviously if you say something like that then I have to say something back and then that’s an argument.’

  She shrugged. ‘So don’t say anything back,’ she said. ‘Just get your coat.’

  It was easier, at times like this, to go along with what Katherine said. Her attention span and ability to commit were limited; her enthusiasm quickly exhausted. Often it was not so much the execution of the idea itself that mattered so much as Daniel’s hypothetical willingness to give the idea a go. Frequently, in Daniel’s experience, a notion such as this one would take them as far as the pub for one drink and then, with Katherine satisfied that Daniel was indeed prepared to go with her, they could simply return home refreshed.

  On this particular evening, of course, that was not the case, because standing in the corner of the bar, alone and staring oddly, knocking back what was very clearly not his first Guinness of the evening, was the living embodiment both of Daniel’s nightmare-man and of Katherine’s dream-object of oddness: a hulking, bearded, heavily tattooed bear of a man-boy with a glint in his eye that spoke of, if not actual danger, then at least a pleasing (to Katherine) degree of risk, which presented the perfect opportunity to test the extent of Daniel’s love for her through an exploration of the limits of his commitment.

  ‘Go and talk to him,’ she instructed Daniel once he’d bought her a drink.

  ‘Fuck that,’ offered Daniel.

  ‘We came here to talk to people and that’s who I want to talk to.’

  ‘Well go and talk to him then.’

  ‘He’ll think I’m trying to chat him up. You go and talk to him.’

  ‘What if he thinks I’m trying to chat him up?’

  Katherine laughed.

  ‘It wouldn’t be funny,’ said Daniel.

  ‘If you loved me,’ said Katherine, ‘you’d go over there and talk to him.’

  ‘If you loved me,’ said Daniel, ‘you wouldn’t be so keen to see me get my sodding head kicked in.’

  ‘If you loved me,’ said Katherine, ‘you’d do anything to make me happy.’

  Of course, throughout these little bartering moments of one-upmanship there was always the question, for Daniel at least, of why precisely he felt the need to go along with them given that they frequently turned on some potential for his humiliation or harm. The answer, which he only ever touched on long after the incident in question was over, when he would lie awake at night and fume both at Katherine and himself for ever going along with her in the first place, was that he wanted to be loved just as much as Katherine and, further, that he wanted to be the kind of man who was capable of loving and being loved, in the kind of relationship where such things were valued, unlike, of course (and he always felt this conclusion needed a sarcastic drum roll, such was the sheer extent of its obviousness), his parents. There, he always said to himself just after thinking this, I’ve said it.

  On top of all this was the further fact that Daniel looked up to Katherine. He felt lucky to have somehow persuaded her to be with him (despite the fact that he hadn’t had to persuade her, a fact that contributed both to his unease and to his willingness to persuade her whenever she asked now, which she did pretty regularly precisely because she was very aware of how little persuading he’d had to do in the early stages); and such was the extent to which Katherine both knew this and reminded him of it, Daniel actually came to believe that he needed to do these things to hang on to a woman he still, despite everything, loved and needed, because as everyone knew a relationship meant work and sacrifice and all the other honourable yet bad-faith traits Daniel associated not just with intimacy but with adulthood in general.

  ‘What shall I say?’ said Daniel.

  Katherine thought for some time, going over possibilities that might avoid Daniel coming off as creepy or dangerous (although the thought of Daniel coming off as dangerous was so comic as to be faintly tempting in its absurdity). Ultimately, the answer was obvious.

  ‘Go over there,’ she said, ‘and ask him for some drugs.’

  And Daniel, against whatever remained at the time of his better judgement, had gone over there and asked him for some drugs, and in doing so had found himself surprised at how mild-mannered Nathan seemed, and how willing to talk to a stranger, and so had asked Katherine over, and had arranged a time to buy some grass, on which occasion he’d hung around a bit and had a joint with Nathan, after which they felt like they owed him a favour and so offered to take him out for a beer, after which he told them about the parties he sometimes threw in remote and often rural locations, until the day, quite by accident and without any prior thought, they both simultaneously, in conversation, referred to him as a friend and, as much to their surprise as anyone else’s, meant it.

  In Katherine’s mind, necessity and loss had always been one and the same: what had to be done came always at the expense of what she wanted. Even if whatever it was that needed to be done had, at some time, been exactly what she wanted, the very sense of its shifting from desire to requirement would mean she no longer wan
ted it. The job she’d spent weeks fretting she wouldn’t get became drudgery in practice; the cashmere sweater she’d coveted for months became an annoyance the second she had to hand-wash it. Even Daniel, on whom she’d expended weeks of flirtation and tactical blanking when they’d both briefly temped in the same company and he’d caught her eye by apparently having no interest in catching her eye, became just another source of resentment once the excitement of snaring gave way to the effort of keeping. Disappointment was, disappointingly, something of a habit.

  So it was hardly surprising, given this long-standing and, in Katherine’s eyes, perfectly reasonable trait, that she experienced the gradual reality of her pregnancy not as an event, or even really as a crisis, but as a loss. Her decisions were no longer her own. She was unfree, and her unfreedom was an ache that woke her in the night and numbed her in the day.

  Acceptance was slow. She clung to what she could control. She was smoking heavily, drinking immodestly, eating too modestly by far. Rejection and disavowal were her dance partners. She was holding on, she knew, to all the wrong things. She was in denial about her denial. Daniel hadn’t called. Daniel would call, she was sure, but it had been four days and each was harder and colder than the last. Muddy with lack of sleep, she’d passed grainy pre-dawn hours imperviously googling pictures of babies. She thought she might have been born without a cuteness receptor. Where others saw gifts she registered only a ransom demand. A child’s needs were occult and various; the knowledge required to meet them arcane and unwelcome. There were patterns of feeding and weaning and putting down and picking up that were near Kabbalistic in their ritual complexity. It was important, she knew, to support the head. People kept saying they were a sponge at that age. She feared what the child might absorb. She imagined clasping its ankles and folding it in half and then juggling one-handed the awful array of wipes and creams and wadded packages of shit-filled nappies. People had special bags loaded with equipment. There was a commando element to the whole thing, a sense of technological and biological preparation. People lost their looks when they had kids. They aged; died a little. Katherine had seen it in the office. Zombies: pinched of eye and frayed of nerve; garbed in the rags of defeat. And never mind the psychological issues. That little sponge, sopping up everything you’d sloughed off, then spilling it all to their shrink after half a life of failed relationships and voguishly unfocused life choices. And this if the thing was even born right in the first place. She wondered how people had ever achieved comprehensive worrying before Google, which listed fears you never knew you had in the order other people had them. Global Delay, Down’s Syndrome, Cerebral Palsy, Deafness, flippers for hands. Pregnancy post-thirty was something of a fraught business. Worst of all were the unnamed afflictions; the grey non-diagnoses of freakdom. Every parent wanted a label for their kids. At least if you had yourself one of those disabled children you earned a lifetime’s free supply of sympathy and respect, like Debbie Boyd on floor three, who was, in the Dances-With-Wolves-style naming system to which the office seemed to adhere, So Patient, and who no one ever told off or teased for sleeping at her desk because she was widely regarded as being a saint and a martyr thanks to the fact that her son scoffed foil wrappers while binning the chocolate they contained and had a predilection for whapping his willy against the thighs of his Rainbow Daycentre classmates, whereas having one of those children that was just, as some children can be, not right, be it in the head or in the body, meant everyone simply assumed you were a terrible mother who’d ignored some nutritional or pedagogical footnote in the bible of parental perfection. Indeed, now that she thought about it, people were pretty likely to assume she was a terrible mother anyway since there was no father to speak of, and she was, she had to admit, a touch wayward at times, and had probably gone about this whole business with less than the required degree of planning. She’d be blamed for everything. In twenty years time, when little Whatever-It-Was-Going-To-Be-Called-Presuming-Of-Course-She-Kept-It grew into a fully matured clock-tower sniper and started picking off sales shoppers with some form of coldly efficient semi-automatic weapon, it would be her fault.

  She wondered if she was becoming manic. Every occurring thought felt like some chubby-thumbed tyke was pawing a pinball machine in her head, with one thing caroming off another and lights and bells going off and then, at the end of all that noise, the thought, whatever it might have been, disappearing down a hole and being replaced by an entirely new thought. Was it her hormones? She wondered how one went about checking one’s hormones; wondered if wondering if you were becoming manic was itself a sign of mania.

  Eating would have helped, but it seemed to have slipped rather far down her agenda; so far, in fact, that her stomach now prepared itself to vomit on approximately the same schedule as it would ordinarily prepare itself to eat. Now that she was not-eating for two, starvation brought a spangled, almost psychedelic sensation of fizz. It was like pressing her face cheek-deep into a champagne curtain. It pulled at the corners of her eyes and tightened her lips. It was a state of alert, a heightened experience. Even as she felt her insides being eaten, she found herself savouring the buzz. She liked to think of it as a protest. Already, she could feel that little smear of life inside her grasping at scarcely available resources. It wasn’t eligible for support, she felt, until certain decisions had been made. The more she fed it, the more it would grow, and anyway, feeding it when she hadn’t yet firmly decided for or against exterminating it seemed something of a mixed message.

  She wondered how big it would be now. She thought of it as a sort of stain; a thickening puddle or a jellified sac with one unblinking eye.

  She made an appointment with the doctor. Her usual GP had left. She picked a woman’s name, only to find that Dr Leslie Rubrick was in fact a man. She asked him why he was called Leslie. He asked her why she thought she was pregnant. She told him she’d weed on a stick.

  ‘That’s not always an accurate guide,’ he said, skim-reading stats on his Mac.

  ‘Nor are names,’ she said. ‘I also haven’t had a period.’

  ‘Have you been taking precautions?’

  ‘Clearly not enough.’

  He clicked on a file and nodded.

  ‘It’s really important you don’t feel judged,’ he said.

  Initially, there was a mildly pleasing sense of furtiveness and secrecy that, not altogether coincidentally, mirrored the feelings she’d had when she was secretly fucking Keith (yes, past tense for that now). There was something about having a secret, she thought, that brought with it a sense of elevated moral standing or general day-to-day importance. Not telling people removed the burden of explanation, of the need to emote; it allowed her to look at the problems of others as nothing more than the problems of others. How pleasing it was to watch the other women in her office – Jules and Carol and all the rest – go about their daily distractions in blissful ignorance of Katherine’s secret martyrdom. Secrecy was an ethos, a point of pride. She wanted it, then of course felt constrained by it and wanted its opposite: attention. People surprised her in their ability not to notice. Not telling them her problems meant she had to listen to theirs. The pains of the supermarket; their Very Repetitive Strain Injuries; the fact that their husbands were too ‘closed’ emotionally (‘I try to ask him why he’s angry all the time, but he’s so closed, you know?’); and the way their neighbours were encroaching on their back garden by shifting their fence six inches over. She started to feel they should know. Not that she should tell them, just that they should know, that they should look up from their trifling, never-to-be-resolved-because-they-didn’t-actually-want-to-resolve-them problems and just notice, just see, that all was not well with another human being and that the things that were not well with her greatly outweighed the things that were not well with them. Problems were competitive in the confines of the office. Sympathy was a contact sport. Even as she felt aloof, the injustice keened away inside her, swelling and fading and dopplering off into her soul. She st
arted to self-sabotage her secrecy, not wanting to tell but desperate to impart. She favoured implication over explanation. When Jules, who was, following a hallucinatory spiritual experience caused by an accidental commingling of generic toilet cleaner with branded bleach, So Compassionate, caught her coming out of the stalls dabbing bile from her lips and tears from her eyes and asked her what was wrong, Katherine said Nothing while making all the possible facial shapes of someone who should really have said Something. Sadly, Jules would probably have found it difficult to read body language even while being groped, and therefore failed to notice Katherine’s shuttling eyes and roving stare and quivering lip as she declared herself to be Fine, really Fine, just as Carol failed to notice when Katherine stared at the floor and sucked in her top lip after coming over faint in the staffroom and saying Nothing was wrong, that she was Fine.