Idiopathy

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.’