by Byers, Sam
‘So look at you,’ Katherine was saying to Daniel. ‘You’re like a grown-up.’
Daniel was back at the fridge.
‘Nathan,’ he called. ‘Have another.’
‘Now, now, boys,’ said Katherine, drawing out a chair and folding herself onto it, flashing a clear expanse of thigh before tugging at the hem of her dress. ‘I hope you don’t have any plans to get me drunk and take advantage of me.’
Daniel stepped back into the dining room in order to narrow his eyes at her.
‘Let’s keep it clean, shall we? Nathan. A drink.’
‘OK,’ said Nathan, sitting down opposite Katherine and mustering a smile.
Katherine rolled her eyes at Nathan, smirked, and lit a cigarette.
‘Daniel,’ she called. ‘Ashtray.’
Nathan took out his tobacco and rolled a cigarette while Katherine gawped fairly openly at his fingers. Daniel returned to the table with three beers.
‘A toast,’ said Daniel, handing out the bottles. ‘To Nathan.’
‘Oh,’ said Nathan, feeling acutely self-conscious. ‘Don’t, I mean …’
‘Good to see you, dude,’ said Daniel, raising his bottle.
‘And here’s to Daniel not saying dude again,’ said Katherine. She tilted her bottle towards Nathan. ‘Here’s to you,’ she said.
‘To all of us,’ said Nathan, fumbling the words a little.
‘Anyway,’ said Nathan, stepping gingerly into the odd space that follows a toast. ‘How are you, Katherine?’
‘Oh fantastic,’ said Katherine. ‘Still stuck in the same job in the same town. Still single.’ She dragged on her cigarette and washed it back with a chug of beer. ‘How about you? Daniel said you’re at your parents’.’
‘Yeah.’ He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to say, not just to this but to anything.
‘That must pretty much suck.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Don’t you miss London? Don’t you hate being in the provinces? In the middle of fucking nowhere?’ She leaned back in her chair and grimaced. ‘I do.’
‘You’ve been saying that for years,’ said Daniel. ‘Why don’t you just go back?’
‘Just go back, he says.’ She rolled her eyes at Nathan again. Every moment of conspiracy felt simultaneously astounding and mean. ‘Nathan, back me up here. Did I or did I not ask Daniel a million times if we could move back?’
‘Oh don’t drag him into ancient arguments, for God’s sake,’ said Daniel. ‘And anyway, what’s your point? You don’t have to ask me now, do you?’
‘I didn’t have to ask you then,’ she said.
‘So why did you?’
She turned her attention back to Nathan, who was beginning to wish she’d both stop singling him out but also somehow single him out in a more definitive way. ‘Whatever,’ she said. ‘What about you? How long can you stick it with the folks?’
He shrugged. ‘I’m, ah …’ He slid what scant thumbnail he had under the label on his beer bottle. The corner lifted with surprising ease. ‘I don’t know. They’re pretty determined and I sort of owe them, so …’
‘What do you owe them?’ said Katherine, wearing an expression more suited to a bad smell than anything else.
Nathan could also, he found, draw stripes in the condensation on his beer bottle.
‘Well it’s …’ He frowned. ‘I mean, I’ve caused them quite a lot of problems, and they paid for me to go to this place …’
‘So what?’ said Katherine. ‘You have to stay with them?’
‘Maybe let’s not give him the third degree, eh?’ said Daniel. He sat down next to Nathan and patted his shoulder in a way that made Nathan want to sob. ‘Don’t worry about her,’ he said.
‘Oh fuck off,’ snapped Katherine. ‘Stop trying to show off. Patronising me doesn’t make you Mr Sensitive, you know. All I’m saying is that Nathan is an adult, and he shouldn’t feel guilty, or do anything out of some twisted sense of loyalty.’
‘I’m sure he feels just great now that you’ve freed him from the burden of guilt.’
‘Well what’s your contribution?’
‘I do feel guilty, actually,’ said Nathan. ‘Like, a lot.’
Daniel looked both surprised and slightly put out. Katherine looked smug.
‘Of course he feels guilty,’ said Katherine.
‘Why?’ Daniel turned to Nathan, the hand once again on the shoulder and once again causing Nathan distress. ‘Why feel guilty, man?’
It seemed the outer edges of the beer label came away more easily than the main body, meaning Nathan now had a tattered mess of a label that wouldn’t shift any further. He wondered if he could get away with leaving the room and coming back when they’d moved on to another subject.
‘He feels guilty,’ said Katherine, ‘because of what he tried to do.’
‘But that’s not something to feel guilty about,’ said Daniel, who seemed to be speaking in the abstract rather than addressing anyone directly.
‘I’m not saying he should feel guilty,’ said Katherine. ‘I’m just saying that it’s inevitable he does, that’s all. Stop saying really obvious things and trying to pass them off as profound insights.’
‘I do feel guilty,’ said Nathan. ‘I basically did quite a shitty thing and made them worry. They worry a lot and I’ve made them worry more.’
‘But you weren’t well, right?’ said Daniel. ‘I mean, it was a symptom, wasn’t it? You weren’t yourself. You can’t feel guilty if you weren’t yourself.’
‘I sort of was myself,’ said Nathan. ‘I’m not really meant to absolve myself by just saying I wasn’t myself.’
‘What do you mean you’re not meant to?’ said Katherine.
‘It’s not part of my treatment,’ said Nathan. ‘I’m supposed to confront rather than deny.’
Katherine was studying him intently, leaning forward in her chair, blinking in the sting of her own cigarette smoke. Nathan rolled another cigarette so as to have something to look at.
‘Did you have ECT?’ said Katherine. ‘I’ve heard they still do that.’
‘Katherine,’ said Daniel. ‘For fuck’s sake.’
‘What?’ said Katherine.
‘It’s fine,’ said Nathan. ‘It’s OK. No, they didn’t give me ECT. It was all just pretty much talking.’
Was it, or was it not, sexy and more than a bit thrilling to be fancied by someone who had tried to kill themselves? The question, which Katherine would have been quick to admit was not the most morally on-target she could have come up with, had become one of those stubborn mind-events that resist dismissal until satisfactorily answered. There were other questions too, of course, many of which circled around Daniel, but these were not exactly fun to consider, whereas the whole area of Nathan’s attractiveness with reference to his recently very much increased air of unpredictability and the general complexity of risk versus charm and tragedy versus thrill versus pity was exactly, it seemed, where her head wanted to be after a couple of beers and what she saw as an absolutely stellar effort on her part to get this gathering off the ground, because when she’d walked in it had felt like a fucking wake, and she’d had to deploy maximum social weaponry just to correct whatever it was that Daniel had done to the atmosphere.
Nathan looked both well and not-well, a combination that Katherine found quite effective. Just as she liked Keith’s weird irises and his gloomy inferences about his smacked-out past, so she found Nathan’s scarred physical bulk coupled with his awkward, quiet bashfulness rather appealing. It had all been there before, of course, but a year ago the juxtaposition had felt awkward, whereas now it was fascinating. He seemed, she thought, both broken and fixed, as if he were on the other side of something, as people said, yet unsullied by the usual piousness that Katherine found so often accompanied the aftermath of such experiences. She couldn’t even begin to tot up all the women in the office capable of the most clichéd of homilies which, thanks to their cheap therapy and off-the-peg religious catharse
s, they genuinely believed were spiritual and emotional gold. It made her rather queasy, and more than a little offended, all these people, better now, cured or enlightened in whatever way happened to suit, tottering round looking down on everyone else just because they hadn’t been fortunate enough to have their husband cheat on them or become seriously ill or see God through a miasma of toilet products. It was sickening, but there was none of that with Nathan.
She wanted, of course, to know everything. What had happened; what he’d done; why; what treatment he’d had; what he was going to do now; how he felt. But of course Daniel, working as always on the principle that anything difficult was best left unsaid, was in conversation shut-down mode. He really was the boring father of the group at times, Katherine thought, which admittedly might have been quite sexy on a good day with the wind behind him, unless of course you’d actually slept with Daniel, in which case a lot of the oomph went out of the fantasy. Had he always been this tense? Basically, yes. Had Katherine often enjoyed cranking the tension a little higher? Absolutely.
‘So what are we eating?’ she asked Daniel. She had no desire to eat, of course. The thought of eating in front of them just now seemed oddly approximate to them all getting naked together, but she strongly suspected that Daniel would either not have prepared anything or, if he had, that it would be awful or, even better, that it would have every hope of being good but would then be scuppered by her getting him all flustered.
‘Eating?’ said Daniel.
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘As in, you know, food.’
‘Right,’ said Daniel.
The trick, she thought, was to make Daniel feel horribly guilty and inadequate without pushing him so far that he actually presented them with a meal, because then she’d have to either not eat it (which might, now that she thought about it, be quite funny) or eat it and then schedule a trip to the toilet.
‘You have got some food, Daniel?’
‘Well, you know. Nibbles.’
‘Nibbles?’
‘Yes, Katherine. Fucking nibbles.’
‘I’m fine with nibbles, actually,’ said Nathan.
Katherine held up her index and middle finger, the stub of her cigarette smoking furiously between them. ‘Now Nathan,’ she said. ‘One thing we’re going to have to be clear on. You’re going to have to stop being so nice to Daniel.’
Daniel tipped some cylindrical shapes of reconstituted potato into a salad bowl, stuffed a handful into his mouth, and then ambled around the kitchen enjoying a brief mental image of twisting a corkscrew into Katherine’s head and uncorking her brain, at which point he realised he’d somehow managed to locate a corkscrew and uncork a bottle of red without any conscious engagement whatsoever. This was how murder happened, he thought, looking at the open bottle. There you were, ambling around your kitchen looking for something, and the next thing you knew an hour had vanished from your life and you’d fashioned a necklace from the ears of the dead.
He took a swig of the red. It felt good to mix his drinks. He felt in his pocket for the comforting bulge of foil-wrapped skunk. At what point in the evening was it appropriate to mention it? Now?
‘Dude,’ he said, ambling back into the dining room and putting the drinks on the table. ‘I got you a present.’
‘Oh?’ said Nathan.
Daniel fished in his pocket and, not without considerable pride, brought out the little foil-wrapped parcel, presenting it to Nathan flat on his palm, the way you might offer a horse an apple. He did a mini mock-operatic song, too, which he felt added both gravitas and amusing self-awareness to the whole slightly complicated moment. He tried not to beam; then, when Nathan made a diagonal with his mouth, tried not to falter.
‘Oh,’ said Nathan. ‘Is that …’
‘It’s really good,’ said Daniel. ‘I figured it might have been a while.’
‘It has,’ said Nathan. ‘And I’m afraid it’s going to be a while longer, too.’
‘Oh,’ said Daniel. He was still holding his hand out. Already his brain was entering its emergency embarrassment-limitation mode, whereby it instructed him to talk loudly, laugh inappropriately and go slightly floppy as if to demonstrate how literally relaxed he was. ‘Well, I mean, that’s cool, man, you know? We can crack it out later, or …’
‘No,’ said Nathan, surprisingly firmly. ‘I mean it’s going to be forever. Like, I can’t do that any more.’
‘Right,’ said Daniel, nodding. ‘Yeah, I mean, of course, like …’
‘Moron,’ said Katherine happily.
‘It’s just …’ Nathan looked genuinely uncomfortable, which was making Daniel uncomfortable, which was in turn making the crisis control systems in his head go to ever further lengths to make him look comfortable. By now he’d almost completely lost muscle tone. He draped himself casually over the back of a chair; ran his hand through his hair; slipped off the back of the chair; caught himself; stretched and yawned.
‘Totally cool,’ he said. ‘Totally, totally cool.’
‘But you go ahead,’ said Nathan. ‘It’s fine.’
‘Yeah, I might do that,’ said Daniel, who was beginning to feel distinctly panicked. ‘I mean, it’s not something I do often, but …’
Nathan nodded. Inside Daniel’s mind, a vast drug-related difference engine was struggling to compute. His entire coping mechanism for the evening had, quite obviously, been to get wasted. Indeed, his entire coping mechanism for the past week had in many ways centred on this. He looked at his watch. It was early: horribly, terrifyingly early. What in God’s name were they supposed to do now? Talk to each other? About what? He was standing, he thought, on the cusp of an existential slurry pit. He sank into his chair and wondered what the best way out of it was. His solution was both predictable and, perhaps as a direct result of its predictability, reassuring: he should carry on as normal.
‘Yeah,’ he said, unwrapping the little parcel, ‘I might just have a quick one, you know. How about you, Katherine?’
‘Probably not,’ she said. ‘But don’t let us stop you.’
Having never ‘opened up’, as the saying went, to anyone before the evening he’d perhaps ill-advisedly opened up to Katherine, Nathan had not only never known how it felt to tell someone something honest and secret about yourself, he had also, perhaps more crucially, never known how it felt to re-encounter the person with whom you’d had that particular conversation in the first place. It was, he thought, rather like the sensation of removing an old plaster from your fingertip. Every time Katherine looked at him it was like touching something afresh with that recently injured finger, always wondering how far it had really healed, for how long the wound might reasonably be expected to hold, yet also marvelling at how real and fragile every touch now was.
He was zoning in and out because sometimes he had to check in with himself to see how things were going. He kept palpating his own more sensitive areas, testing for pain. In the time he’d been absent Daniel had begun rolling a joint using Nathan’s tobacco and papers, and Katherine had obviously asked about Daniel’s job because Daniel was now explaining it in a way that suggested he was proud of it yet also used to defending it.
‘But what are they researching?’ Katherine was saying. ‘I mean, what do they do?’
‘Sustainable food sources, essentially,’ said Daniel, gumming together several Rizlas in a way that reminded Nathan of his father trying to undo his jacket: a man embarrassingly outdone by seemingly basic forces. Briefly, Nathan felt a flare-up of shame at exactly how much of an idiot he wanted Daniel to look.
‘Meaning what?’
Sometimes, and this was one of those times, Katherine looked Nathan’s way when addressing a question or a statement to Daniel, giving a sense of complicity that, like much of what Katherine did, thrilled and discomfited in equal measure.
‘Meaning exactly what it says,’ Daniel was saying, mashing the papers together with the edge of his fist, then peeling them gently away from the table, to which they had adhered,
and finding that, in all their enthusiasm for the surface of the table, they had in fact failed to adhere to each other. ‘Food that’s sustainable. What papers are these, Nathan?’
‘As in what?’ said Katherine.
‘Rizla,’ said Nathan, hurriedly and clumsily unpeeling his gaze from the side of Katherine’s face.
‘As in it won’t run out,’ said Daniel, appearing not to notice. ‘Must be a bad batch.’
‘How can food run out?’ said Katherine.
‘Well, by us over-eating and over-farming and over-fishing and blah blah blah.’
‘Right,’ said Katherine. ‘And?’
‘And? What do you mean and?’
‘I mean and what. So what? One day all our food will run out and we’ll … I don’t know, eat something else, no? I mean, won’t we all be living on some sort of powdered food by then anyway? Or, like, capsules of calories or vitamin injections or apples that fucking self-replicate in the fruit bowl?’
‘Well, not really, no,’ said Daniel, who had succeeded in joining the rolling papers through sheer force of saliva alone and was now breaking off bits of grass and dropping the crumbs into the crease, an operation somewhat hampered by the stickiness of his fingers. ‘The point is …’
‘Do you want me to …?’ said Nathan, pointing towards the mess Daniel was making on the table, his delight in Daniel’s inability to perform the task no doubt both obvious and excessive.
‘So everyone would starve? Is that what you’re saying?’ said Katherine.
‘Er, well, worst-case scenario, yes. But it’s also about developing food sources and farming techniques that don’t harm the ecosystem, and about creating crops that can withstand a period of drought and … You know, etcetera etcetera.’ Daniel pushed his efforts at construction along the table towards Nathan. ‘Lifesaver. No idea what’s up with those papers.’