Idiopathy

shrugged, exhaling smoke into the night and staring drily at the crush of dancing bodies, their hands stretched skywards in a gesture of celebration, supplication or surrender. ‘So you’re miserable. So what.’
    ‘I’m saying I think I can be happier. I think we can be happier.’
    She laughed grimly. ‘Who said I want to be happier?’
    ‘Doesn’t everyone want to be happier?’
    ‘Not me,’ she said. ‘Wanting to be happy just makes you miserable.’
    She stubbed her cigarette into the dirt and stood up, shooting another glance in the direction of her boyfriend. ‘We’re all miserable,’ she said. ‘Trick is to find a way of doing it without being such a bloody cliché.’
    She looked him up and down, quickly, half sneering, half saddened. ‘Put your fucking mask back on,’ she said.
    After that, and after the remaining events of the evening which had led, directly, to his hospital admission and thereby to a lengthy and unhappy Christmas convalescence at his parents’ house while he waited for his transfer in the spring to The Sanctuary, he had vowed not only to return to his old routine of silence, exile and cunning, but indeed to strengthen its rigour to the point of such inflexibility that no one would ever in fact be able to know him again. Knowing people, as in really knowing them and, worse, having them know you, was painful, and it was best, he’d decided, watching the woman to whom he’d revealed himself stroll cruelly away to rejoin the throng, simply not to do it, ever, and as if to mark the moment he made the decision, he said her name:
Katherine
.
    He tapped the keys of his phone. Her voice, bright yet sharp-edged, bridged the distance.

    Hi, it’s Katherine. I’m either out or very reluctant to speak to you. Leave a message and find out which.
    ‘I t’s me,’ he said dumbly. ‘I mean, it’s Nathan. I, um, I’m sorry to hear about, you know, about you and Daniel. I … You two really had something, you know? Anyway, I’ve, ah, I’ve been away, and now I’m back, and I’d love to see you. Both of you. Do you have Daniel’s number? Anyway, give me a call sometime. It’d be great to, ah …’ He stopped, gears grating in his brain. ‘I thought I could do this, but I’m not sure I can.’
    He hung up, stabbed with worry. He lay back. He told himself we don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are. We name things, sometimes wrongly. The eye plays tricks. We sit in rooms and don’t feel well. Our mourning is at times premature; at times too late. The rooms feel external but are not.
    His phone buzzed. He reached for it eagerly.
    Hi all
, he read.
Mother Courage here. I’ll be on TV with Dr Dave 1pm Weds talking about my new book. Please watch and tweet! Love to you all. MC x.
    He breathed, and followed his breath inwards, to places where the scale of his thoughts was wrong. He noted; corrected. Long before he found his way back out, he slept.

A typical argument between Daniel and Katherine, during the phase of their relationship in which they’d become adept at disagreement, began with Daniel passing Katherine a book he’d read and urging her to read it, telling her the ending in particular was fantastic. Katherine became angry, saying the book was now ruined. Daniel pointed out that he hadn’t told her anything about the ending, he’d just said he liked it. Katherine said she didn’t care what actually happened, the simple fact of him saying he liked the ending gave it a certain promise which it would now, almost certainly, fail to live up to. She said she resented the idea that she needed to be told the ending of a book was good in order to encourage her to get all the way through it as this implied she had a tendency not to get all the way through books. Now, she said, the whole book was going to feel like a chore because she’d have to finish it whether she liked it or not just to show him she was capable of finishing it, and when she got to the end it would have Daniel’s smug face all over it and reading it would be like eating a chocolate biscuit someone had been holding too long in their hand: it would still probably taste good, but it would be discernibly tainted. To Daniel, this metaphor was suspiciously appropriate, meaning that either Katherine was far more skilled in rhetoric than he was (very likely) or that she sometimes planned out her arguments in advance and then waited for the right moment to set them running (also likely), both of