by Byers, Sam
‘I know what you mean,’ she said.
Daniel nodded. ‘I think we had this conversation at the time.’
‘Yeah. There’s nothing really new to be said, is there?’
‘I keep thinking,’ said Daniel.
‘Look,’ said Katherine. ‘Maybe he just couldn’t be helped, you know? He was in a bad place. He always had the propensity or whatever. Shit. I can’t count the number of times he was weird. Right? I mean, don’t get me wrong, but I’m not going to go and string myself up with guilt just because Nathan tried to top himself.’ She reached for some pitta. ‘I’m aware that last statement was in slightly poor taste,’ she said, munching.
‘He says he didn’t try and kill himself,’ said Daniel.
‘Whatever. Kill yourself. Cut yourself. It’s all the same.’
A man at the next table unfolded a newspaper. The headline said: Daily Exercise Cuts Death Risk.
‘This is bland, isn’t it?’ said Daniel, meaning the food.
Katherine shrugged.
‘So,’ Katherine said. ‘All this stuff with the cows. Does that affect you?’
‘Well, people think it does, so to all intents and purposes it does. That’s the joy of PR. It doesn’t matter if you’ve done anything wrong or not. It’s what people think that counts.’
‘The madness of crowds and all that.’
Daniel nodded. ‘Hell of a job to try and keep the crowds sane.’
Katherine rolled her eyes. ‘You hero,’ she said.
‘Just saying. What about you, anyway? Isn’t facilities management basically the same? Don’t you have to rebalance people’s misguided perceptions of risk?’
‘Essentially. And listen to them moan.’
The mechanism of their conversation ran down. They nibbled and stared and looked about them until one of them could wind it back up. It was oddly comfortable. Silence had never really been an issue between them. It was all the things they said that were the problem. All those stupid clichés about things going unsaid, Daniel thought. The stiff, buttoned-up English and their repressed ways. Was any of that really true any more? It seemed to him that there was very little he and Katherine hadn’t said to each other at some point, which was why their silences tended to be comfortable. There came a point where it was a relief not to be saying anything.
But then the relief passed, and there was only, once again, the pressure to speak.
‘We can just be normal, though, right?’ said Daniel.
‘Why wouldn’t we be?’
‘I’m telling myself, really,’ said Daniel. ‘I don’t know why I said it out loud. I’m … It’s weird. Everything’s weird.’
‘Is this weird?’
‘Slightly.’
‘But you did always assume that at some point we’d catch up with each other? Right?’
Daniel shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I mean … Maybe not. You know? Bridges, water, all of that.’
‘You weren’t curious? You never thought, hey, I wonder how Katherine’s doing?’
‘I would have emailed.’
‘You would have emailed?’
‘What’s wrong with that? Jesus.’
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Nothing at all.’
‘Don’t say nothing when it’s really something. You know I hate that. If it’s something just say what it is.’
‘It’s nothing.’
‘Right, OK, it’s nothing.’
Daniel was freezing, and doing a poor job of concealing how freezing he was. He sensed Katherine was enjoying watching him shiver. The whole thing was futile, he thought, utterly futile. It had always been futile and it was going to go on being futile until eventually they both gave up pretending it was anything but. This wasn’t a revelation he enjoyed. For some reason he was at a loss to fathom, he wanted this, all of this, to have some sort of point.
‘Whatever,’ said Katherine. ‘We’ll just be.’
‘Fine,’ said Daniel.
Katherine surveyed the platter.
‘I think I’m done here,’ she said.
‘Yeah,’ said Daniel, looking at his watch. ‘I should probably …’
‘I need the loo before I go,’ said Katherine, standing up. ‘I’ll say cheerio.’ She took out her purse.
‘No, no,’ said Daniel. ‘I’ll get it. Honestly.’
‘Let me at least pay half.’
‘No, seriously. I’ve got it.’
‘Well thank you.’
‘Pleasure.’
‘Anyway,’ she said. ‘This has been nice.’
Daniel nodded. ‘It has. Good to see you, Katherine.’
‘Good to see you, Daniel.’
She leaned forward and kissed his cheek. He held her shoulder briefly, awkwardly. He never knew if he should go for the other cheek as well. It turned out to be a one-cheek kiss.
‘See you Saturday,’ said Katherine.
Daniel nodded. ‘Take care,’ he said.
She went into the café and he sat back down, picking distractedly at the almost entirely untouched platter, the world all at once unknowable, unfamiliar; the sense of the nostalgia to which he’d earlier refused to succumb suddenly all too attractive. They could have talked about the old times, he thought. They could have made each other laugh. Even shouting at each other would have been more reassuring.
He took out his mobile and called his father.
‘Dad,’ he said. ‘How are you?’
‘Uh …’ said his father. ‘I don’t know.’
Daniel chose to ignore this and move on. ‘I just called to say, guess who I just saw?’
Daniel’s father thought for some time. ‘Don’t know,’ he said.
‘Katherine,’ said Daniel. ‘Remember Katherine? She sends her love.’
‘Who’s Katherine?’ said Daniel’s father.
‘Katherine,’ said Daniel. ‘You remember Katherine, don’t you? She was my girlfriend but we broke up. You always thought she was fun. She had …’
He stopped, wondering now if this was needlessly cruel. Whose benefit was he really calling for, anyway?
‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘She says Hi. I just thought I’d pass that on.’
‘Hi,’ said Daniel’s father.
‘Hi,’ said Daniel, and hung up.
Here we all are, he thought, forgetting each other.
He saw Katherine leaving the café. He needed a piss before he left but hadn’t wanted to run into her again inside.
He left some cash on the table and walked through the café to the toilet. There was only one. He stepped inside and stood for a moment, unnerved at how redolent it was of Katherine’s shit. This, he thought, was the smell of a life together; the smell of bodies and time. He locked the door. The more he breathed the less he was able to smell it. He pulled down his trousers and sat on the seat, finding it still warm. There, in a public toilet, drinking in the smell of his ex-partner’s shit, he thought quite distinctly of his father; of the things that were failing and fading away; of the things we hope to hold on to even as we can feel ourselves letting them go, and he sobbed, and breathed deeply, and blew his nose and pissed.
Katherine left the café at a trotting pace, lighter for having vomited and shat, but still somehow puffed and weighty. People weren’t getting out of her way. She shoulder-bumped two and had a near-miss with another.
She wanted to know how it had felt to see Daniel again. Although she hadn’t been able to tell, beforehand, how it would feel, she had naturally assumed that however it felt would become clear afterwards, and that it would, in turn, clarify the things she’d felt since they’d split. In reality, though, all was murk and gloom.
At the office she snagged her coat in the revolving door. By the time she got to her desk she felt like she’d been worked over by goons. She went to the bathroom and adjusted. Her eyes felt fleshy. She leaned on the sink and heaved, got nothing. She and Daniel had, she kept thinking, been happy. She was sure they had. Hadn’t they? Hadn’t they been happy? If they h
ad, she couldn’t remember how, or exactly when.
Back at her desk she decided on a fire drill. She went out into the hallway and slid her key into the alarm system. The siren was pleasing. People berated her as they passed.
‘Again with this?’
‘It’s regulations.’
‘We had one last week.’
‘Now we’re having one this week.’
‘It’s usually on a Tuesday.’
‘It’s not a drill if you know when it’s happening, is it?’
Outside, workers chatted and smoked in chilly clusters, shifting from foot to foot and checking in with other floors. Katherine left them out there as long as possible while she swept the building. Response time had been poor. Half of them would be dead. There was, she thought, something happily Darwinian about fire drills.
She went outside and told them with great satisfaction that half of them were dead.
Afterwards, she found Keith in the stationery cupboard, selecting a new rubber band.
‘Who have you told?’ she said.
‘Hey,’ said Keith. ‘Cool it on the hostility, yeah?’
‘Who have you told?’
‘No one. My therapist. Claire.’
‘I’m pregnant,’ she said. ‘It’s yours. I’m going to kill it with my bare hands.’
He stood staring at her dumbly, swaying slightly. Then he laughed. Then he looked at her face and stopped laughing.
‘Shit,’ he said.
She left him standing there, three sizes of rubber band hanging limp and ignored from his fingers.
The feeling of being out was, to Nathan, at once bizarre, uncomfortable and oddly enticing. He’d been ‘out’ before of course – wandering the lanes near his parents’ house; dropping into The Rover for a Guinness – but arriving in a town centre was a new kind of exposure. He’d forgotten the wildly unpleasant temperament of the average weekend shopper: the steely resolve mixed with constant, bitter compromise. Parents paused outside department stores to scream at their children and partners. Elderly men and women moved with caution through a minefield of charity hustlers, amateur preachers, shabby men selling miniature kites, puppeteers, buskers, motionless women painted silver, beggars, market-stall traders and bored-looking youths handing out flyers for closing-down sales.
Nathan had never seen the value in either goods or the process by which they were acquired. The last time he’d shopped had been under duress, just before he went away for his treatment. His mother had taken him to John Lewis to kit him out. She’d led the charge into the menswear department, hauling cardigans and cords off the racks; preaching the gospel of layering as she pinned sweaters to his chest and squinted. Everything seemed to make him look pale. When they were done they collected Nathan’s father from the canteen and began the ceremonial unsheathing of the Mastercard, gathering at the card machine with the grave but dignified reluctance one might expect of two national leaders as they tapped in the nuclear codes. Thinking the chance might not come again, and perhaps already envisioning a time when such information would be useful, Nathan had watched his father as he slowly and with excessive deliberation entered each of the four digits of the card’s pin number. Just knowing the code, Nathan remembered now, had brought him a sense of possibility.
He felt he had to pay careful attention to where he was going. He had not been in a crowd since the last of the parties. Faces swelled into view; threatened to collide; then were gone. He remembered walking out into the press of dancers after he’d spoken to Katherine, dimly aware of backslaps and shout-outs, feeling suddenly and profoundly unable to move and so just standing there motionless, feeling everything and everyone move around him and away.
He tried to remember when he had last been here. No single memory stood out. Those visits, and the evenings around which they centred, had always been much of a muchness. Katherine cooked and Daniel skivvied. Often, they were already a glass or two to the good when Nathan arrived. They could be funny, he remembered. They could set each other up and knock each other down. On a good day, they drew on pooled energy. On a bad day, they battled for dwindling air. Sometimes Nathan felt surplus. Frequently, he felt like a much-needed audience. Daniel liked it if Nathan brought drugs. They’d be pissed or stoned before the food even made it out of the oven. Later, Daniel would black out and leave Nathan and Katherine alone, sitting up late into the night, each dealing out profundities in an effort to trump the other. It became a sort of centre of gravity, Nathan remembered. His feelings were shaped over successive visits. She’d sprawl on the sofa and tell it like it was, her head lolling occasionally in his direction, her bare feet tapping gently to whatever was on the stereo. Nathan started taking more control over the evening’s outcome. He topped off Daniel’s glass without being asked; front-loaded joints so Daniel got the bulk of the hit. He watched for the droop of his eyes, the flop of his head, the loss of blood from his face. It was not something of which he was proud.
The bookshop was just off the central square. Nathan paused outside the window and examined a display of his mother’s book. They’d made a poster out of the cover image. Here she was, his mother, inflated to an unnatural scale, gazing out at God knew what with an expression akin to those women in adverts for thrush cream: wounded, slightly pinched, yet relieved of an irritation that had blighted her life.
He went inside, picked up a copy, and took it to the counter.
‘How many of these do you have?’ he asked the checkout girl.
‘How many?’
‘How many copies?’
‘Er,’ she seemed on the verge of asking further questions but Nathan created a facial expression that dissuaded her. She scanned the barcode and scrolled through stock on her till. ‘Thirteen copies in store,’ she said. ‘But they’re selling fast. Have you read it?’
‘I’ll take all thirteen copies please,’ said Nathan.
‘Excuse me?’
‘Please find all thirteen copies that you have in this store and bring them here so I can buy them.’
She did it, then asked him how he wanted to pay.
‘Credit card,’ he said with extreme satisfaction.
Given their abstemious attitude to credit, he thought, it would be weeks before his parents checked the bureau and noted the card’s absence.
He loaded the books into four plastic bags and carried them through the town centre. He had a sense of purpose that was practically holy. He envisioned the feeling of no longer carrying the books and swelled a little inside.
He stopped in Tesco to buy wine. Every single item in the store appeared to be part of some sort of offer. He had, he realised, no idea how to choose a bottle of wine. Whole facets of the world felt locked off and unknowable. People ate as they roamed the shop. When their children started to cry they encouraged them to eat. On every aisle there was at least one child sobbing gutturally through the wilting remains of a Snickers.
He bought one white and one red, then shepherded the bottles through the self-service system, which asked him to wait while someone verified his age. A teenager appeared out of the crowd, looked him up and down and tapped a code into the screen. It struck Nathan with some force that he was no longer young.
He carried the books and the wine and his holdall back into the street and made his way across town to the river, where one by one he took the books from the bags and hurled them into the grey depths. They bobbed briefly amongst drifting fishing tackle and anonymous plastic flagons. After three or four books had hit the water he started ripping out pages before he threw them. He saw paragraphs of his past as they caught the wind and were gone.
He became aware of his phone ringing. He looked at the screen and answered, because of course she would call now, just as he was doing this.
‘Nathan,’ said his mother.
‘Mother,’ he said, hurling half a book almost all the way to the other side of the river.
‘Nathan. Where are you?’
‘I’ve gone away. I told Dad.’
‘Well how long will you be gone?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘Is this about the television show? Are you upset, Nathan? Because it upsets me to think you’re upset. It really does.’
‘I’m not upset.’
‘I don’t want you to be upset.’
‘I’m not.’
‘I mean it, Nathan. It’s really important to me. I hate to think of you being upset.’
‘There’s no need to think of me being upset.’
‘Really, Nathan? Because we worry, your father and I. And I think it’s very unfair of you to make us worry in this way.’
‘You really shouldn’t worry.’
‘We’re supposed to be looking after you.’
‘I know that.’
‘How can we look after you if you just keep wandering off and we don’t know where you are?’
He tucked the phone under his ear so as to more easily rip the dust jacket off the last book.
‘You can’t,’ he said. ‘I don’t expect you to.’
‘Well with all due respect, Nathan, your expectations are not really the issue.’
He hung up; turned off his phone. He had Daniel’s address on a scrap of paper and made his way there.
By the time the appointed hour arrived, Daniel was sitting limply on the sofa having experienced what he could only conceptualise as a crisis of maturity. He had, he realised, no idea how to do this, this having people round thing, and he had found himself, midway through a scorched-earth cleaning policy, wishing quite acutely that Angelica was there. It wasn’t as if she’d have known what to do, it was more that she would have done whatever it was that needed to be done without even thinking about it.
Arrangements had not gone according to plan. Cleaning the house, which had entered a state of decay during the few days he had occupied it alone, had taken far longer than intended, and at the end of the process, as he packed away the mop and hoover and considered opening a beer, he’d realised he hadn’t made up the spare bed, and having made the spare bed he’d realised he hadn’t given any thought whatsoever to drink or, for that matter, food. Were they expecting him to cook? He hadn’t specifically mentioned food, but of course, inviting people to your house for the evening, or in Nathan’s case the night (God, he thought suddenly, Katherine didn’t think she was staying the night, did she? No, he’d be firm. If necessary, he’d call her a taxi), basically implied they would be fed. There was, he thought, no conceivable way he could cook, not merely because his cooking wasn’t good, but because the thought of cooking for Katherine and Nathan seemed to carry an intensity and pressure – not to mention an air of surrealism – so overwhelming as to potentially capsize the whole precarious evening.