Idiopathy

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.

    D aniel 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