Idiopathy

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?’

    B ludgeoned 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 disappointment, 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,’