by Byers, Sam
So he’d decided to leave. Not while the argument was happening, of course, but immediately after, before Katherine could leave or anyone could apologise or the argument could march even further into territory from which there was ever less hope of return. He shouldn’t have come, he thought. He should have suggested coffee with Katherine, or not called her in the first place, or, even better, not had that stupid conversation with her a year and a half ago which had, and he could admit this now because he felt done with it all, led him into all this in the first place.
But then Angelica had arrived, and although she couldn’t possibly have known (despite the fact that Daniel had, very obviously, said something to her), she had in fact said the only thing Nathan had wanted to hear since the day he’d left his treatment and come home: We’re so glad you’re here, and that had made it rather more difficult to leave, and there was something about the fact that he had, in that simplest of everyday moments, decided to stay a little longer, that meant he was no longer trapped, and which meant in turn that, as he now found himself at the centre of exactly the attention he’d spent all evening trying to get but which, now that he had it, he was no longer sure he really wanted, the sense of being pinned to his seat left him, and he felt opened up and oddly calm.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘I was …’ He paused, thinking. ‘I was just going to talk about the last time we saw each other, really, and ask you how you felt about that now.’
‘Felt about what?’ said Katherine.
‘About what I said, then. That night.’
‘Which bit of what you said, specifically?’
Nathan took a breath, allowing himself a moment to reflect. There was not, now, any need to do this, as he’d said, but there was perhaps some sense in doing it, in seeing it all through and being done.
‘Well I can’t remember exactly how I put it,’ he said, ‘but I think the basic message was that I was in love with you.’
Katherine arched an eyebrow. ‘Was it now,’ she said.
It was, Nathan thought, fairly foolish of him to have thought Katherine would help him in any way, or reveal any of her feelings before he did, or indeed do anything to make this experience anything other than the ordeal she seemed to want it to be.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I think that was the gist of it.’
‘Funny,’ she said. ‘That bit was lost on me. All I heard was a load of stuff about you. About how you were lonely. About how you thought I was lonely, and how together we might be less lonely, or something.’
Nathan remembered trying to tell her how he felt, and the grim, dawning realisation that what he felt was indescribable, and the disappointment he’d felt at realising the one person he’d hoped would understand was not going to understand – not because she couldn’t, he realised, but because she didn’t want to, just as she didn’t want to understand now, either.
‘I probably didn’t express myself very well,’ he said.
‘You can say that again,’ she said.
‘I had a lot on my mind,’ he said.
She stubbed her cigarette out in the ashtray, holding his gaze.
‘Why don’t you try again?’ she said.
‘How do you mean?’
‘You know what I mean. Stop asking what I mean. Christ.’
Nathan nodded. He looked down at his hands, turning them over, holding them up in front of his face. After the dressings came off, he’d worked hard to help them heal. There were ointments and oils; stretching exercises to make sure his skin still fit his knuckles. After months of pain, there were now patches where he had no sensation at all. He stood up and took off his jacket, then rolled up his shirtsleeves, revealing the vines and creepers of scar tissue and tattoos that crept over his forearms. Katherine did her best not to appear shocked. He sat back down and crossed his legs. He felt a great sense of clarity and calm. He’d come here, he now saw, for all the wrong reasons. He’d wished, for over a year, that Katherine had understood him, and that had been for the wrong reasons too. And now here she was asking to understand, again, for all the wrong reasons.
‘After we’d talked,’ he said, his hands now folded neatly in his lap, ‘I walked out into the woods.’
‘This isn’t what I asked,’ said Katherine.
‘Tough,’ said Nathan.
‘Dear God,’ said Daniel. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, squeezing his cranium between his palms while Angelica wriggled her way into a pair of jeans. ‘Dear holy fucking Jesus fucking God make this evening be over.’ He made a grab for the waistband of her jeans and pulled her sharply towards him, then wrapped his arms around her waist and pressed his cheek to her stomach. ‘I’m so glad you’re back.’
‘I’m glad I’m back,’ she said, rubbing his hair. ‘And I’m glad I came back when I did.’ She laughed.
‘Sorry about that,’ said Daniel. ‘I must have looked ridiculous.’
‘Nooooo,’ she said, ruffling his fringe and settling into the kind of voice a loving owner might use for their ageing English Shepherd. ‘You looked very brave. I was proud of you.’
‘Hmmm,’ he said, enjoying the feeling of her fingers against his scalp.
‘That was something you’ve wanted to say for years,’ said Angelica. ‘And now you’ve said it. It’s out. It’s gone.’
‘Silly,’ said Daniel.
‘Nooooo,’ said Angelica.
He hugged her a little tighter. He would, he saw now, always be able to settle back into this: this sense of comfort and ease; of reassurance and reliability. Much as it might have been what he feared – the unbending known-ness of the day-to-day – it was also what he wanted, what he needed. Much as he might have wanted to be someone else, he thought, there was no one else he knew how to be.
‘Tell me about you,’ he said, releasing her and patting the bed beside him. ‘What happened?’
She shook her head. ‘To be honest, I just thought, What’s the point? We made our banners, did a bit of shouting. Sebastian went on the news. He got more and more puffed up. More and more cocky. He started saying we needed to make some kind of statement; do something shocking. I just thought, About what?’ She laughed. ‘Don’t get me wrong, Sebastian’s an old friend, but he doesn’t give a fuck about cows.’
‘Probably not,’ Daniel said.
‘Anyway, I was glad I left when I did.’
‘Why?’
She looked at him. ‘Oh of course,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t have seen the news. They’re not letting them leave. The protestors. I’ve had about ten texts. Some sort of quarantine or something. So now they’re stuck there till God knows when.’
‘Quarantine for what?’
‘It’s just a way of containing the demonstration. They’ll wait till it’s all died down and then send them home.’
‘So Sebastian’s with them?’
‘I don’t know. He threw a wobbly and went off on his own.’
‘Hm.’ He gave her another hug. ‘Well I’m glad you’re home,’ he said.
‘Me too,’ she said.
He stood up. ‘Right. Better face the music.’
She gave his hand a squeeze. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’ll be right down. It’ll be fine.’
Her phone rang. She picked it up off the bed and answered it.
‘Hello?’ She covered the mouthpiece with one hand and mouthed to Daniel: Sebastian. Daniel sat back down on the bed. ‘Hello?’ Angelica said again. ‘Hello, Sebastian? I can’t … It’s hard to …’
Daniel gestured at her to hang up, but she held up a finger, making a sorry face as she did so.
‘What? No, I don’t … Well … No I don’t think …’ She covered the mouthpiece again. ‘He says he’s on his way here,’ she said. ‘He needs help apparently.’
‘No,’ said Daniel, then, when he saw Angelica’s face drop a little with disappointment, ‘Alright, alright. Whatever.’
Thank you, Angelica mouthed.
Everything, Daniel thought, was going back to the way i
t had been. Sebastian would come round. He’d be annoying. Perhaps they’d argue. Angelica would keep the peace. He’d feel frustrated and annoyed but not, he thought, anything beyond that. He would be able to handle it. In many ways, he thought, it would be reassuring.
Of course, Nathan said, he was disappointed after they’d talked that night. Not that it was Katherine’s fault, but he’d built up a certain vision of the future that was hard to let go. He’d felt, for a short time, like something inside him had opened up, blossomed, if you wanted to be clichéd about it, and then suddenly it was like he had to close it all back up again and he didn’t know how. People always said that things were better when you talked about them, when you shared them, and although now after his experiences in treatment and everything he could see that that was certainly true sometimes, in the right circumstances, at that particular time it wasn’t true at all, and everything was very much worse for having been brought out into the open. He remembered, he said, cutting his finger when he was a kid, and staring at it, watching the blood bead up along the edge of his knuckle, and feeling nothing, and being unbelievably excited by the thought that he didn’t feel pain any more, that perhaps he’d grown out of it, and running to his dad and holding up his finger and telling him it didn’t even hurt, and his dad saying it was because the air hadn’t got to it yet, and then right as his father said that he could feel the air get to it and his finger started hurting and he started to cry. Well it was just like that, he said. The air got to everything, and he could feel all the areas where he was exposed, as if someone had folded his skin back and he was just bare muscle and nerves.
By this time, he said, he was just standing there, right in the middle of the crowd, and everyone was dancing around him, and he felt overwhelmed, and all this, this stuff was roiling away in there, and he didn’t know how to put his skin back on, as it were, or his mask, like Katherine had said, and he got it into his head that somehow, somewhere along the line, he’d become the wrong person, a person he’d never intended to be, and it was like he saw himself for the first time, and he looked ridiculous, and he was in pain, and it was all so stupid, and he’d left the crowd and walked off into the woods and sat there a while, spinning out, everything warping and floating, his hands leaving smeared contrails when he moved, the air very thick when he tried to breathe, and all of him straining outwards and trying to expand but held in check by what he’d become.
Anyway, he said, shaking his head. The point was he’d stripped off most of his clothes and taken hold of his camping knife and started hacking away at his tattoos, beginning with his calf, then moving on to his arms and chest, and then even having a go at his neck, and he’d felt very clear and calm, even when he was holding a tatter of his own skin in his hand, and he remembered thinking that it didn’t hurt because the air hadn’t got to it.
Here, Katherine, who had managed to get through everything up to this point without saying anything, and indeed without even making any especially communicative facial gestures, which just half an hour ago would have unnerved Nathan, but about which he now no longer cared, interjected in a voice she had very obviously run through several pre-speech checks to ensure it was bleached of all inflection.
‘Who found you?’ she said.
‘No one found me,’ said Nathan, who didn’t see why this was particularly relevant. ‘I was out in the woods and no one knew where I’d gone.’
Ultimately, he said, the knife had got pretty bloody, and therefore pretty slippery, and so luckily he’d had to give up on his project, and as soon as he stopped he started to panic, like really freak out, and started to cry and call for help, but then the shame found its way in, and he realised that he didn’t want anyone to see him, so he called an ambulance on his phone and walked through the woods to the main road, and when it came he held up his hand like he was hailing a taxi and blacked out, and woke up in the hospital covered in bandages with his mother sitting over him looking like he’d ripped her heart in half.
When Nathan finished, he spread his hands as if to show they were empty. He had imagined this conversation, rehearsed it, more times than he would ever be able to enumerate, but in the end, in reality, it was a sort of negative image of everything he’d pictured. The outline was the same, but all the colours were reversed, and now that he saw the change, he felt all the events between then and now neatly reverse themselves along similar lines. He wasn’t in love, he realised. He was angry. He’d phoned Katherine because he was angry with her. He was here because he was angry with her. He’d hurt himself not because he was upset, but because he was angry. He’d told her everything not because he wanted to explain, but because he wanted her to have to know. If she hadn’t needled him, he thought, it might have been different. It could have gone on being different for a very long time.
She was looking at him coldly; breathing slowly but determinedly.
‘And what the fuck,’ she said, ‘am I supposed to do with that?’
Nathan shrugged.
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘You don’t need to do anything with it.’
Her upper lip was quivering almost imperceptibly. She seemed at pains to slow her every physiological function – her breathing, her blinking – to near inertia, creating an oddly sympathetic sensation in Nathan: time not so much stopping as becoming impossible to parse.
‘Do you want me to help you?’ she said. ‘Is that it?’
‘No,’ said Nathan.
‘Because I can’t,’ she said. ‘And I’m not going to apologise for that. I’m not going to feel guilty.’
‘I don’t want to be helped,’ said Nathan. ‘I’m tired of people helping me.’
‘Why didn’t you just say what I wanted you to say?’ she said. ‘You knew what I wanted you to say. You said it before. Why couldn’t you just say it again? Why did you have to go and give me all this stuff?? I don’t want your fucking stuff. I … I have stuff of my own. Can’t you see that? I was giving you a chance. I was giving you what you wanted.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Nathan. ‘But I don’t think that’s true.’
She seemed to draw herself inward and upwards, straightening and steeling herself. She looked at him coldly. ‘So you hate me too, is that it?’
‘No,’ said Nathan. ‘That’s not it.’
‘Liar,’ she said.
He sat forward in his seat. He had very definitely had enough. He rolled his sleeves back down and slipped on his jacket.
‘That’s it,’ said Katherine. ‘Fuck off. Just like last time.’ She shook her head. ‘Nothing changes, does it?’
She started to cry. ‘Oh fuck,’ she said. ‘Nathan, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I … I keep saying these things to people and …’ She took a long, shuddering breath. ‘Please don’t go,’ she said. ‘I don’t want you to go. I didn’t mean it. I never mean it. You of all people know that.’
Nathan picked up his bag, which he’d left under the table.
‘Take care,’ he said gently. ‘Give Daniel my apologies.’
In later months, and even more so in later years, it would be clear to Katherine that she had made a mistake. She thought about it now, slumped in her chair, alone, holding the flame of her cigarette lighter to the burnished edge of Daniel’s dining table and watching the wood as it blackened. The regret, she felt, was looming at her as if from some far-off place: distant, but edging in. What she felt now was merely the recognition of what she would feel, one day, when she let herself, at which point it would, of course, be too late. She tried, as she always tried, to recalibrate. She tried to picture Nathan, increasingly paralysed by remorse, calling her up at an ungodly hour and trying to pour his guts out. He’d be back, she told herself. They always came back. She’d tested him; he’d failed. It was disappointing, but at least now she knew.
If only she was more stupid, she thought. If only she was more blind. Then she’d be able to believe all that and be happy. But she wasn’t; she couldn’t; and she wouldn’t be. Clarity was cruel that wa
y. It eased nothing; spared her nothing. If people knew her as well as she knew herself, she thought, as well as she knew others, they would forgive her. But to do so they would have to know her, and that was something she simply couldn’t allow, because what they saw, though forgivable, would not be something or someone they could love.
Her lighter became too hot to hold. She let the flame go out and watched a seedling of smoke push its way up from the wood before dwindling. She thought about Daniel’s face as he screamed at her. At least she had that, she thought. We all, at some stage of our lives, need someone we can control.
She wasn’t quite sure why she was still here, and then she realised it was because she had, over the course of the evening, felt the dark tickle of a growing certainty at the base of her brain, as if it were being licked by the little wisp of smoke that had risen from the edge of the table, that she was not going to see Daniel again after tonight, and once that certainty solidified, she felt unexpectedly unable to leave. She had not, despite all the things she’d said and thought up to this point, wanted to leave in quite this way. Arguably, she had not wanted to leave at all, just as she had not wanted Nathan to leave her.
She was very tired, she now realised. Not just from the strains of the evening but from the strains of her life to date. She took out her phone, wrote SOS, K, and sent it, along with Daniel’s address, to Keith’s number. It was hit and hope.
This time, Daniel took a very different approach to descending the stairs. Where previously he had wanted to convey simmering rage and carefully marshalled argumentative force, he now wanted to communicate a sense of carefree lightness, almost frivolity, as if to make it very clear that he had either completely moved on from the evening’s distressing events or, even better, that those events had failed even to register sufficiently to necessitate him now putting them behind him. If he’d put less thought into it he would have near-skipped down the stairs, but he didn’t want to overdo it, and so trotted lightly from step to step and emerged into the dining room with what he hoped was a perky energy, only to be confronted by an energy that was very much the antithesis of perky.