Idiopathy

by Byers, Sam

  ‘Can you stop smirking, please?’ he said.

  ‘Yeah, sure,’ she snapped. ‘I’ll just control my face for you.’

  Tangent, he thought. Shouldn’t have got distracted by the smirk. Schoolboy error.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Now I don’t want to have an argument about this, OK? I just want to say …’

  ‘Who’s having an argument?’

  ‘No one’s having an argument, that’s the point. I just wanted to say, and like I said, I don’t want this to turn into an argument, but I just wanted to say …’

  ‘Every time you say that you make me want to have an argument. It’s like, Hey, don’t think this thought that I just put in your head.’

  ‘Can you stop interrupting me, please?’

  ‘It’s a conversation. It goes back and forth.’

  ‘Well, but it’s not going back and forth, is it? Because you keep …’

  ‘Maybe you should say over and out when you’re done.’

  ‘That’s very funny. Again. But if we could try and be serious for one second …’

  ‘Don’t tell me when to be serious and when not to be serious. I’ll decide when I’m serious, thank you very much, I don’t need you to …’

  ‘Right, what you’ve done there is you’ve interrupted me again.’

  ‘And you’ve interrupted me.’

  ‘OK, so let’s call it quits on the interrupting.’

  She hooted with laughter. ‘Yes, Daniel. We’re quits on the interrupting.’

  ‘This is a tangent.’

  ‘From what?’

  Could something still be called a tangent when the central theme of a conversation had not yet been set? Was it possible for an entire conversation to be nothing but tangent from beginning to end, or was that like saying a sandwich was all filling, which of course was impossible, because without the element of bread then all you really had was jam on your hands. Or whatever the filling was. Didn’t have to be jam. Could be corned beef, for example. Was it possible Daniel was still stoned? It was, he thought. It was very possible. He would have to proceed with caution.

  ‘From the point,’ he said decisively.

  ‘And what’s the point?’

  ‘The point is …’

  ‘Hold on,’ said Katherine. ‘Drum roll, please. We’re about to be told the point.’ She drummed her fingers on the table, and continued to drum them while Daniel talked.

  ‘I might just pop to the loo,’ said Nathan. Neither Katherine nor Daniel looked at him. He didn’t stand up.

  ‘The point is, you shouldn’t have done that with my phone,’ said Daniel triumphantly. ‘You shouldn’t just answer my phone like that.’

  ‘OK,’ said Katherine, shrugging. ‘Sorry.’

  Daniel froze. This was, he had to admit, an inspired rhetorical gambit. Of all the things he’d imagined might be said during the course of what he’d hoped would be more of a dignified and lucid lecture than a rambling and semi-coherent spat, a simple apology had not even registered as a possibility. It was brilliant. In the time they’d been apart, he thought, she’d obviously not only honed some of her more notorious techniques of incessant enragement and gradual, sustained torture, but also developed new and nightmarish abilities in the subtler and more arcane arts of deflation and controlled anticlimax.

  ‘OK,’ he said slowly. ‘That’s good.’

  ‘No problem,’ said Katherine.

  ‘Great,’ said Daniel. ‘I’m glad we could …’

  ‘Pleasure,’ said Katherine.

  But then, in this brief caesura, Daniel realised that all Katherine had really done was make him look irrational. By seeming to apologise so easily, she’d implied that what he was angry about was of no consequence. She could apologise for it, she seemed to be saying, without so much as a backward glance, because it was nothing to her, which meant, by extension, that it should also have been nothing to him, which, given it clearly wasn’t nothing to him, implied he was getting all worked up about something no one else cared about, which was another way of saying he was mad, which was another way of saying Katherine wasn’t mad, which was, ultimately, just another way of her winning.

  ‘But you do see,’ he said, ‘why I was angry?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Of course.’

  ‘I mean, you agree it was serious.’

  ‘I recognise that it was serious to you, yes.’

  ‘But do you think it was serious?’

  ‘What, my answering your phone?’

  ‘Yes. Answering my phone. Do you think that was serious?’

  ‘Not really, no.’

  ‘Right,’ said Daniel. ‘This is what I’m talking about.’

  Now Katherine did her innocently baffled face, which she always deployed at the exact moment she knew Daniel would be unable to explain himself in order to force him to fail to explain himself.

  ‘What is?’ she said.

  ‘You’re not taking this seriously.’

  ‘I’ve apologised.’

  ‘But it’s not a proper apology.’

  ‘What would constitute a proper apology?’

  ‘Really meaning it. If you really meant it.’

  ‘I do really mean it.’

  ‘But do you see what I mean? Do you see why I was so angry?’

  ‘I didn’t think you were that angry,’ said Katherine, playing her trump card. ‘You seemed quite calm. You weren’t shouting or anything.’ She looked at him, fluttering her eyelids. ‘Were you really angry?’

  ‘Yes, I was really angry.’

  ‘Really really angry.’

  ‘Yes. Really really angry.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because …’

  ‘I mean, I just can’t understand why you’d be so angry about …’

  Daniel felt his brain, which up to this point had just about borne up under what was, he had to admit, a fairly ridiculous level of strain, suddenly and irreversibly implode. A red giant of gaseous rage, he leaned down in front of Katherine, his nose a mere quarter of an inch from hers, and went supernova.

  ‘I’M TELLING YOU HOW I FEEL,’ he screamed, his muscles clenched and shaking. ‘I’M TELLING YOU HOW I FUCKING FEEL. I’M FUCKING TELLING YOU HOW I FUCKING FEEL AND YOU HAVE TO LISTEN.’

  He leaned back against the wall, not looking at Katherine, running his hand over his face, which he now realised was drenched in sweat. Weakness replaced the anger. There was a moment when he thought he might not be able to breathe. When he removed his hand from his face, Angelica was in the doorway, beaming.

  ‘Oh baby,’ she said, lips a-tremble. ‘That was amazing. I’m so proud of you.’

  Katherine was staring at him with exaggerated, slow-blinking calm, smiling slightly, affecting, as she always affected in the face of other people’s rage, a kind of distanced anthropological interest: gently baffled and calmly superior; taking notes on another person’s weakness while simultaneously congratulating herself on her ability to have located it. The aim, of course, was to make Daniel more angry, but he was beyond that now, spent and embarrassed and quivering with the exertion. He looked over at Nathan, who was looking at the table, and then back at Angelica, who was still standing on the other side of the room, as if waiting for a safe moment to approach. Everyone, he thought, everyone he knew and had known, seemed suddenly very far away, and known to him only in the shallowest, most cursory sense. He knew people, and they did not know him back. He looked again at Angelica, and she held his gaze and smiled at him. She looked, he thought, awful. Her hair was matted; her jeans and coat were streaked with mud and cow shit. When he crossed the room and hugged her, he caught the deep scent of damp farmyard and days-old sweat.

  ‘I’ve missed you,’ he said.

  ‘Missed you too,’ said Angelica. ‘What happened? Are you OK?’

  ‘I am,’ he said. ‘It’s nothing. It’s stupid. Forget it. What about you? How are you?’

  ‘I’m OK. I’m glad to be home. I’m sorry.’

  She
squeezed tighter.

  ‘OK,’ said Daniel, breaking her grip and returning, as if after hypnosis, to the room. ‘I’ll start the shower running and get the kettle on. Go and get out of those clothes and I’ll get them straight in the machine.’

  Angelica nodded, releasing him with a degree of reluctance, then turned to Katherine and Nathan.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, giving a little wave. ‘I’m Angelica.’

  ‘Hello,’ said Nathan, who Daniel was, if he was honest, a little worried about, both in terms of his possible ongoing fragility and also in terms of the fact that he was almost certainly at this point considering leaving, although why that should have mattered now, Daniel couldn’t be sure. In many ways, totally humiliating himself had only made Daniel more determined to be a good host. He wanted the evening to be over; wanted everyone to leave, but baulked at being the cause.

  Katherine stood up from her chair and, smiling, crossed the room, wrapped her arm around Angelica’s shoulders, and kissed her on the cheek.

  ‘Nice to meet you,’ she said.

  ‘So nice to meet you too,’ said Angelica, before turning slightly, cocking her head to one side, and fixing Nathan with a motherly smile that struck Daniel as at once horribly obvious and therefore possibly incriminating but also genuine and therefore rather endearing.

  ‘And you must be Nathan,’ she said, walking over to peck him on the cheek.

  ‘Hello,’ said Nathan.

  ‘I want you to know,’ said Angelica, resting her hand on Nathan’s shoulder and inadvertently causing Daniel’s stomach to freefall in the direction of his rectum as she did so, ‘that we’re really happy you’re here.’

  Nathan looked at Daniel, who immediately looked away, only to find he was then looking at Katherine, who looked back at him with disconcerting archness, causing him to look at the floor and briefly wish the old feeling of being locked out of his life would return and grant him half a second’s respite from reality, but sadly he had no such luck. Everywhere he looked he felt himself looked at, and every time he was looked at he felt compromised.

  And then Nathan smiled and, rather oddly, patted Angelica’s hand, and said he was glad to be there, and thank you for having him, and it felt, momentarily, to Daniel, as if something, oddly the very same something he’d tried and failed to shake by becoming so pathetically enraged, had fallen away.

  Katherine’s first impression of Angelica was that she was pretty and therefore threatening. Her second impression was that she was exhausted and off guard and therefore vulnerable.

  After the warm and fuzzy introductions, during which Katherine made a conscious decision to appear as normal and friendly as possible in order to cause unease in Angelica, who would then have to be equally friendly and who would hopefully crack under the pressure, Daniel trotted nervously after Angelica and could be heard cooing and fussing from the bathroom as he turned on the shower and encouraged Angelica to take off her clothes. A minute later he strode back through the dining room without paying Katherine and Nathan any attention and disappeared upstairs.

  Katherine arched an eyebrow at Nathan, who had spent the last five minutes looking at the grain of the tabletop.

  ‘Psst,’ she hissed.

  He looked up. His face, which had been blank, seemed slow to take on his features, giving Katherine a fleeting and eerie sense that she was looking at a developing Polaroid.

  ‘Hey,’ he said.

  ‘What do you think?’ said Katherine.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About her.’

  Nathan shrugged. ‘Seems nice,’ he said.

  ‘Bit bland, though, isn’t she?’

  Another shrug.

  ‘You’re hopeless,’ said Katherine, flopping back in her chair with exaggerated exasperation and lighting a cigarette.

  Nathan looked at the table again, hunching slightly. Daniel came back downstairs carrying clean clothes.

  ‘Got you well trained, hasn’t she?’ said Katherine.

  Daniel, who had got a little way past her and was nearly at the bathroom door, turned and walked back to stand in front of her. He put the clothes down on the table and held up his index finger.

  ‘Don’t,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ said Katherine.

  ‘Just don’t,’ he said. ‘You know what I mean.’ He turned to Nathan. ‘Sorry about all this,’ he said. ‘Back in a minute.’

  ‘No worries,’ said Nathan.

  Katherine sucked her beer and took a few minutes to try and catalogue the extent of Daniel’s kindness to her over the years in relation to the kindness he was now showing Angelica. Had he ever run a shower for Katherine? Had he ever helped her out of her clothes and appeared with a clean outfit for her? Not as far as she could remember, but then, she’d never come home streaked with shit and looking like she’d been gang-raped by cattle so in some ways it was difficult to tell.

  She wondered if that was the point, if it had always been the point. She had too rarely (if ever, if she was honest) given Daniel the opportunity to look after her. She had not come over all hopeless in the face of a simple task. She had not phoned him in panic at unsociable hours. She had not, perhaps, let him know that she needed him. Look at this evening, she thought: she’d steered him rage-wards primarily because she knew she could; because it would confirm a connection, a deeper knowledge.

  She hauled on her cigarette. Was this what men wanted, in the end? The damsel in distress? The little girl that needed to be protected? It was loathsome, she thought. Of course Daniel thought he loved Angelica: she never gave him any reason to think otherwise. He was happy because he was never threatened, and it was in keeping with Daniel’s grossly limited view of life and love that the only way he could imagine someone loving him was to be confronted at every bloody turn with how much they needed him, how much they couldn’t live without him, without ever giving the slightest credence to the possibility that perhaps the very fact Katherine hadn’t needed him, or at least hadn’t needed him in such an obvious way, was the best possible evidence that she loved him. After all, why else would she stay with him? But no, of course Daniel wouldn’t see it that way, because it failed to fit with any of the clichés he mistook for truths. He didn’t want to be wanted; he needed to be needed, and the only type of need he understood was the most obvious kind, the kind that flopped into his arms with matted hair and a tear-streaked face and said I love you. Help me. Christ.

  She looked at Nathan, who had clearly just been looking at her. She thought again about the burden of it all; the responsibility. She thought about Daniel and Angelica, and how pointless her pride in making Daniel angry appeared in the face of Angelica’s ability to make him care for her, and how nice it looked, actually, being cared for, knowing you could arrive in a state of distress and someone would help you, hold you, patch you up. And she thought of all the mornings she’d woken up sad. She was sad, she thought. It was a sad thing to have to admit, but it was true. She was a sad person; a lonely person, and, far from drawing anyone near, she’d pushed everyone further away because she couldn’t bear the thought of needing anyone to be nearby, and she was going to get sadder, and lonelier, and then she was going to have an abortion, and there’d be no one to tell, so she’d sit at home for however long she needed to sit at home, on her own, in pain, and no one would run a shower for her, or find her some clean clothes, or put the kettle on, because no one would know they had to, no one would feel they needed to, and that would, she thought, be very sad indeed. It would be the life of a sad person, because she was a sad person and that was the life she’d made. So what if Nathan had baggage? It wasn’t like she didn’t have baggage of her own, for God’s sake. And all that stuff about physical attraction, what did that really amount to in the end? Wasn’t that for your twenties? Wasn’t that something you were supposed to grow out of? He cared for her, for God’s sake. Take it, she thought. It was so easy. Take it and be glad.

  Except, of course, it was too easy. How, she thought
, looking over at Nathan and waiting for him to catch her eye, as he surely would, could anything this easy ever be trusted? How would she ever really know how dedicated he was? He would enter her life, she thought, untested, with exactly the kind of ease that, while thrilling in the short term, would calcify into mute distrust just months down the line. No, she thought. You had to make people work, make them fight. You had to know, and you wouldn’t find anything out by just collapsing into someone’s arms.

  He looked up, then away. Angelica waltzed through wrapped in a towel.

  ‘Is Daniel upstairs?’ she chirruped.

  ‘I think so,’ said Nathan.

  ‘I’ll be down in a minute,’ said Angelica. ‘Are you both alright for drinks etcetera?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Nathan, ‘absolutely fine.’

  ‘Fine, thank you,’ said Katherine.

  She watched Angelica leave, then turned her attention back to Nathan. She might not have been able to break her patterns, she thought, but at least she knew what they were.

  ‘OK,’ she said, almost, but not quite, experiencing a tangible click in her core as some old and profoundly integral part of her mechanism locked into its reliable and well-oiled groove. ‘You can speak now.’

  Nathan looked blank.

  ‘You were going to tell me something earlier,’ said Katherine. ‘I’ve decided now’s as good a time as any.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Nathan. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Yes it does,’ said Katherine. ‘What was it?’

  ‘No, really,’ said Nathan. ‘It’s nothing.’

  ‘Really,’ said Katherine.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘So tell me anyway.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m interested.’

  He leaned back in his chair and sighed.

  ‘We don’t have to do this,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ sighed Katherine, putting her feet back up on the neighbouring chair. ‘But let’s do it anyway.’

  Nathan had watched Katherine and Daniel’s display with a sense not only of discomfort, but also of fierce, crashing disappointment, which in turn had magnified the discomfort to the point where he was so uncomfortable he was unable even to stand and leave, and so had merely sat rigidly in his chair, willing it all to be over. He was a lot of things, he thought; he’d been a lot of things over the years and he was the first to admit that not all of those things had been positive, but he was not stupid, and he was not so out of touch with humankind as to be unaware that when Katherine had seemed to begin an argument with him but then very clearly thought better of it, she had done so out of pity, and pity, for all it was worth, could never equate to whatever it was that drove her and Daniel to drive each other insane.