Idiopathy

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.
    ‘Well 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.
    ‘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