Idiopathy

by Byers, Sam

  ‘No, no,’ said Daniel. ‘It’s fine. Honestly. Are you OK? I love you.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘I love you too and I’ve missed you.’

  ‘I’ve missed you too,’ said Daniel, realising as he said it that he had.

  ‘See you in a bit,’ said Angelica.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Daniel.

  He put his phone on the duvet beside him and rubbed his temples. The adrenalin had barged aside most of the effects of the joint, and now he felt only a kind of dull fatigue. He was, he thought, loading himself down. Everything he said, everything he thought, was just another brick in the ever-expanding hod of lies and shortcomings and fears that he carried around daily, minute by minute, and continually tried to pass on to someone else, anyone else, who looked like they might be stupid enough to take it. Or, no, he thought, that wasn’t right. Not stupid. Kind. Kind enough to take it. Angelica wasn’t stupid, she was kind, and the kinder she was, the less he felt he deserved her, and the less he felt he deserved her the more he imposed on her kindness, hoping all the while that it would buckle and fail and prove him right about God alone knew what.

  He stood slowly from the bed, suddenly very unwilling to go downstairs and face Nathan, whose suffering he had now mortgaged to offset his own triangulations and mistakes; the thought of sitting next to whom now filled him with exactly the same self-loathing he’d once felt when wriggling out of Katherine’s hi-there grip in order to step into the shower and wash away the hour-old guilt of fucking Angelica.

  He did not, he thought, deserve kindness.

  ‘That’s it,’ snapped Katherine. ‘Go ahead and stare.’

  Nathan felt a sharp lurch somewhere between his heart and his throat. He hadn’t been aware of staring, but now that Katherine was staring back he realised his eyes had settled into an idle state pointed directly at her face.

  ‘I … Sorry,’ he said. ‘I was miles away.’

  ‘Were you now?’ said Katherine.

  ‘Yeah, just, you know.’ He twirled a finger against the side of his head. ‘Thoughts.’

  Katherine sucked on the joint and studied Nathan through the blue-tinged smoke, narrowing her eyes either because she was affecting some form of expression or because the smoke was irritating them, Nathan couldn’t tell.

  ‘I hate them,’ she said. ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Thoughts. Better just not to have them, really, isn’t it?’

  ‘They’re unavoidable,’ said Nathan. ‘But you don’t have to let them linger.’

  She curled her lip. ‘Teach you that in therapy, did they?’

  He nodded, then looked at the tabletop.

  ‘Did that hurt?’ said Katherine, using the exact tone of voice Nathan remembered being used by the doctor who’d first examined him that night, tapping bits of his legs and arms, checking for sensation. Does that hurt? Can you feel that? In that situation pain was good, the doctor had explained. It meant there was no nerve damage. His therapist would have said the pain in this situation was a good sign too, but Nathan was unconvinced.

  ‘I’ll live,’ said Nathan.

  ‘He hates me, doesn’t he?’ said Katherine, no longer sneering.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Daniel.’

  ‘No,’ said Nathan. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ said Katherine.

  ‘What am I thinking?’ said Nathan.

  ‘You’re thinking, What does it matter? What does it matter if he hates me or not?’

  Nathan shrugged.

  ‘But it does,’ said Katherine. ‘It matters.’

  ‘OK,’ said Nathan.

  There was a catch in her voice, and Nathan felt it reflected in his own face. A little hiccup on the ‘a’ of matters; a little leap in the top of his cheek in response, and then the tiniest of smiles tugging at one corner of Katherine’s mouth in response to that. He realised again that she had not called him. She’d listened to his message, and she’d called Daniel. How stupid, he thought, to have come here, making a fool of himself, just so they could interpose him between them like they always had.

  ‘Do you think that was wrong of me?’ said Katherine.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Picking up his phone. Do you think that was bad?’

  ‘I honestly don’t know,’ said Nathan. ‘I’m sure it’ll be fine.’

  ‘You’re sure, are you? You’re absolutely sure it will be fine?’

  ‘No.’

  She rolled her eyes. Put your fucking mask back on, Nathan heard her saying in his head. He felt as if someone had just edged his chair off a cliff.

  ‘I don’t know why I’m asking you, anyway,’ said Katherine, looking away, apparently addressing herself.

  Nathan rolled a cigarette, keeping his eyes on his fingers. Katherine’s attention, which as recently as five minutes ago he’d been going out of his way to attract and maintain, now felt like a thick woollen sweater in dense summer heat. He decided not to answer for fear of, if not exactly revealing his discomfort, which must have been obvious, then at least exacerbating its effects. He concentrated on making a perfect cigarette: free from creases and excess spit. He wanted another beer but didn’t entirely want the effects of another beer. He bounced his heel gently on the floor, easing the urge to stand up and walk away. When what seemed like several minutes had passed and Katherine hadn’t said anything further he decided to risk a glance in her direction. When he raised his head he found his gaze returned, not merely in the sense that Katherine was looking at him at the same moment as he chose to look at her, but also in the sense that the tone of the gaze seemed similar, familiar somehow, sad in the same way, as if expressing a desire to escape to and from all the same places.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Katherine.

  ‘That’s OK,’ said Nathan.

  ‘Do you hate me too, now?’ she said. There was no vulnerability in her voice, he noted, just a kind of deadened resolve.

  ‘No,’ said Nathan.

  Her smile, Nathan thought as he watched her lips shape it, was ghostly: something dead returning to the place it had once lived.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t, would you?’

  Bludgeoned by her conversation with Keith, and, although she would never admit it, already regretting her interference in Daniel’s affairs, Katherine was beginning to wonder if she had, for the entirety of this evening and for many of the days that led up to it, been thinking all the wrong things. Not half an hour ago she’d been sitting in this exact same chair musing on Nathan’s attractiveness in the face of the extent to which he was damaged and wondering if she could find a way to be attracted to him since he was so obviously attracted to her. Now it struck her that the real question was in fact one she had asked herself not so very long ago, in Malta, when she’d sat on the promenade and stared out at that odd, crouching city, and considered what a burden it was to be loved, to be offered this small and vulnerable emotion in need of nurture. What she should have been asking herself, she thought, was not whether she was attracted to anyone, or whether they hated her, but whether, at this stage in her life, she wanted anyone to be attracted to her at all. Because nice as it ought to have been to feel that she was wanted, perhaps even loved, it didn’t seem to bring her any happiness, and seemed to bring out in her little more than the perverse desire to do damage, which was followed in turn by exactly the kind of regret she delighted in telling people she never felt.

  She leaned forward and flicked her fingernail against the rim of her wine glass, sending a single, chiming note out into the room.

  ‘Time, gentlemen,’ she said.

  Nathan frowned.

  ‘What time is it?’ he said.

  She looked at her watch and sighed. ‘Not nearly as late as it feels.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Nathan.

  ‘No offence,’ said Katherine. ‘But I think I’m sort of realising that I don’t want to be here.’

  She noted his obvious disa
ppointment, but didn’t allow her thoughts about it to linger.

  ‘Were we always like this?’ she said.

  ‘Who? You and me?’

  ‘Me and Daniel.’

  ‘Oh.’ He leaned back in his chair, pursed his lips and tapped them with his thumb. ‘In what way?’

  ‘Christ,’ she said. ‘You certainly weren’t always like this, I’ll say that much.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like captain fucking non-committal, that’s what. In all the time I’ve known you I can’t remember you ever asking me what I meant, do you know that? We used to talk for hours. We used to get completely off our faces and talk until we passed out and neither of us would make any fucking sense at all but I don’t recall you asking me what I meant. You know what I mean. Stop asking what I mean.’

  He nodded. ‘Yeah,’ he said, his tone ripe with you-asked-for-it. ‘You were always like this.’

  ‘I wanted you to say no,’ she said.

  ‘I toyed with the idea of saying I didn’t really remember,’ said Nathan. ‘But you wouldn’t have let me get away with it.’

  If it hadn’t been for the certain knowledge that Nathan would have comforted her, and that his comfort would have greatly confused everything, Katherine felt fairly sure she would have cried. Instead she went to the fridge and pulled out two beers, which she uncapped on the lip of Daniel’s worktop with a decisive crack, leaving two neat crescents in her wake.

  ‘No,’ she said, sitting back down. ‘I wouldn’t have let you get away with that.’ She slid Nathan’s beer across the table with enough force to make him scramble to catch it before it dropped into his lap. ‘Holy fucking Christ,’ she said, pulling out the neighbouring chair and resting her feet on it, pausing for a second to admire her legs with some degree of satisfaction before the thought of swollen ankles and varicose veins forced her to move on. ‘Why did you ever come and visit us?’

  Nathan laughed. ‘It wasn’t that bad,’ he said.

  ‘Bollocks,’ said Katherine.

  ‘If you want to know the truth,’ said Nathan, apparently addressing his beer bottle, ‘I was grateful to be invited. No one else ever asked me to their house that I can remember, and they certainly never cooked me dinner. They came round to buy or sell drugs; talked shit to me at parties or whatever, but they didn’t actually have me round to dinner.’

  ‘Well,’ said Katherine. ‘If we’d known that, we wouldn’t have asked you either.’

  Nathan laughed. ‘Precisely why I didn’t tell you.’

  Katherine plugged her smirk with her beer bottle, relieved at being able to express herself through her preferred medium of barbed cynicism and apparent flippancy. God save us, she thought, from the deep and meaningful.

  ‘It’s like old times, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘You and me talking shit, you-know-who stoned out of his brain in the bedroom.’

  ‘Is that how you saw it? You and me talking shit?’

  Katherine gave him the look she tended to use as the facial equivalent of a shot across the bows.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s how I saw it, and that’s how I liked it.’

  Nathan raised a hand in acceptance, then was quiet a moment, then seemed to take a breath and summon a degree of resolve that, in suggesting as it did all manner of possible things he might have been about to say, immediately lowered the temperature in Katherine’s spine to approximately that of her beer bottle.

  ‘Look …’ he said. ‘I just wanted to say …’

  She levelled two fingers at him, drawing a bead on the space between his eyes.

  ‘Uh uh,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘No you don’t.’

  He stopped. ‘Maybe it’s a bit early in the evening.’

  ‘It’s a lot early in the evening,’ she said, allowing herself to breathe again. ‘Zip it.’

  He nodded. Katherine sat back and let the silence hang. She heard Daniel’s footsteps on the stairs and hoped he was angry. Let him come down and insult her, she thought. She was ready. Let him come down and start a fucking fight.

  Daniel came down the stairs at a considerably slower pace than he’d gone up them. This was partly because he was tired, partly because he didn’t really want to get to the bottom (would it be possible, he wondered, to take the stairs at such a lethargic pace that everyone would have left by the time he got to the ground floor?) and partly because, in the small collection of seconds that had elapsed while he was standing up from the bed and walking to the top of the stairs, he had become confused about his own emotional state and the way he was going to handle whatever conversation or confrontation might be waiting for him in the dining room. He considered, briefly, turning around and going back up to bed, but his feet had already sounded out on the bare wooden steps and he felt certain that Katherine would have heard him coming and so would immediately know if he’d run into his old friend cowardice on the stairs and turned back, so that when he did finally go downstairs she’d sense blood in the water and go in for the kill. What he needed to do, he thought, was to come down the stairs slowly enough to allow him to rehearse his opening line, which he should really have rehearsed while he was still in the bedroom, but no sense, he thought, crying over spilt milk, yet also loudly enough to give the message that, although he was coming down the stairs slowly, this was in fact nothing to do with feeling tentative and more to do with the fact that he was trying to hold himself back, so wild and untamed was his rage.

  Which would have been fine, had his rage actually been wild and untamed. As it was, the only thing that could actually have been considered wild and untamed was his deep-seated fear that, by not being sufficiently angry at the fact he had been made a fool of (a shortcoming he attributed to being stoned), he was being disgracefully weak and pathetic, although thankfully the thought of Katherine thinking he was weak and pathetic did make him rather angry, meaning he had to somehow hold on to the sense of his own inadequacy in order to become angry enough to show just how adequate he really was.

  Thunk, thunk, thunk. He imagined his tread on the stairs booming out into the dining room below, chilling Katherine’s blood as she braced herself for a flaying.

  The best thing, he thought, would be to undercut it. That would throw her. She’d hear the anger in his footsteps, brace herself, and then he’d pull the old switcheroo on her by sitting down all calmly and explaining to her in his gentlest tones that what she’d done with the phone was simply not acceptable. That way, he thought, he’d have the satisfaction of implied anger as well as the even greater satisfaction of having out-matured Katherine. Because he was, these days, much more mature. Look at what an honest and open conversation he’d just had with Angelica. Look at the fact, he thought, that he even had Angelica. What, or who, did Katherine have? Nothing. No one.

  Why was he angry with her again? The phone. Of course. Focus, Daniel, focus. Two more steps. Thunk. Here comes trouble. Thunk.

  ‘Watch out,’ said Katherine’s voice from the dining room as he rounded the corner. ‘Jake the fucking Peg’s coming down the stairs.’

  She had her back to him: her feet up on the table, a beer in her hand, and what was left of the joint between her fingers. Nathan did not appear to have moved.

  Daniel came to a halt just inside the perimeter of the dining room and took two seconds to marshal massive and contradictory forces inside himself.

  ‘Right,’ he said, holding up one finger.

  ‘Here he goes,’ said Katherine, not even turning round.

  ‘OK,’ said Daniel. ‘Now …’

  ‘Always has to do a lot of throat-clearing,’ said Katherine, presumably addressing Nathan. ‘He makes, like, sixteen preparatory statements and then forgets what he wanted to say.’

  ‘OK, look,’ said Daniel.

  ‘Right,’ said Katherine. ‘OK. Look. Now. Right. OK. Now. Katherine. Right. This is. OK. Right. Katherine.’

  ‘Right,’ said Daniel. ‘OK.’

  ‘What?’ said Katherine.

  ‘We
ll if you just …’

  ‘Just what?’

  ‘Just SHUT UP for a second,’ said Daniel, who was now in the position of having become genuinely angry about entirely the wrong thing, which meant that, through the thickening haze of his anger, he had to try to keep sight of the thing he wanted to be angry about, because the thing he was now actually angry about was, even he could see, a bit pathetic, whereas the thing he wanted to be angry about was perfectly reasonable, so he needed to back the winning horse, so to speak, rather than make an idiot out of himself by getting all worked up about something extremely childish, because this was, Daniel knew, one of Katherine’s most successful techniques: she’d get him angry about something serious, then get him more angry about something frivolous, and then, when he got really angry, say she didn’t know why he was getting so angry about something so frivolous, to which he’d reply that he wasn’t getting angry about the frivolous thing, he was getting angry about the other thing, at which point she’d invariably interrupt him, and say it sounded like he was getting angry, and he’d try and explain that he wasn’t denying that he was getting angry, he was denying that he was getting angry about whatever silly little thing she was accusing him of getting angry about because he was actually angry about … And then she’d say that the timing of his anger seemed to coincide more with the latter, frivolous thing than it did with the former, more serious thing, the actual gravity of which, to be frank, she questioned anyway, given the ease with which it had been sidelined by the frivolous thing, and he’d try and interrupt and accuse her of getting off track, to which she’d say, Oh, you get to decide the track now, do you? And so he’d …

  ‘Right,’ he said.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘You’re being really childish,’ he said.

  ‘Sorry, Dad.’

  ‘Right, that’s also a very mature response. Very mature, Katherine. I see what you’ve done there. Ha ha ha. Calling me dad. Oh, that’s very clever.’

  ‘Sorry, do you prefer to be called Jake the Peg?’

  She was absolutely dripping with smirk, Daniel thought.