Idiopathy

day, all the time. Like the minute he was happy about anything she’d go and suck the joy right out of it until it was just a dry husk, and it was making him miserable, all the time, every day; and she wanted to talk about him being megalomaniacal about
his
feelings? Please. This coming from the person who whenever she was pissed off had to make sure everyone else was pissed off too, preferably more than she was? And if she wanted to go back to the book and the ending of the bloody book if she really wanted to be pedantic about it, her near-vitriolic dismissal of everything he’d enjoyed about the book and the fact that it had been his very enjoyment of something as simple as a good ending to a book which had started such a sprawling argument in the first place, actually made him think he didn’t like the book so much after all, or that he was stupid for liking it. At the very least, his enjoyment of it was now counterbalanced by a lot of very negative feelings and reminders. And honestly, he said, even if you accepted that they were both somehow tyrannical about their emotions and both wanted other people, particularly each other, to feel what they themselves were feeling, wasn’t the fact that he wanted her to be happy far more defensible and in many ways more admirable than the fact that she just seemed to want him and everyone else to be as miserable and fucked up as she was?
    Then Katherine went quiet, and stared at him coldly, and gave her thin smile and cock of the head and told him in her most cutting and bile-filled yet still oddly calm and polite voice that not everyone was as able, or willing, as he seemed to be, of going through the whole of their lives consistently selecting the appropriate emotion from a fucking drop-down menu.

    U nbeknownst to Nathan, it was after exactly one of these episodes (the initial subject shifted, so it could have been about a book or a film or the way Daniel always put sauce on his chips despite knowing full well that Katherine hated sauce on her chips and so wouldn’t be able to eat any of his chips, but the routine that followed was usually fairly standard) that Katherine and Daniel decided they needed to get out more and possibly talk to a few people since they were, quite clearly, going stir-crazy within the admittedly rather close confines of their relationship. They had friends, of course, but these had dwindled somewhat over time. Apparently some of their friends found Daniel and Katherine a bit oppressive, and the ones who didn’t find them oppressive, or who even seemed actually to be comfortable around them, Katherine and Daniel found a bit weird. It occurred to Daniel and Katherine that they might have been putting too much pressure on themselves; that, possibly, they were each looking to the other to provide a totality of human interaction, despite the fact that, quite obviously, no single person could ever be capable of this.
    ‘Especially,’ said Katherine, ‘and I don’t mean this in an aggressive way, you.’
    ‘Me? What do you mean especially me?’
    ‘Well, it’s not like you’re some kind of social dynamo, is it? I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m not having a go, but, you know.’
    Daniel did know. Daniel knew very well, thank you very much. He found it difficult to socialise in an unpressured manner. This was complicated, and had to do with the fact that whenever he socialised with women he felt as if Katherine’s eyes were boring into his vital organs, and whenever he socialised with men all his usual issues with men (their coded language, their constant joshing, the ever-present possibility of violence) got in the way.
    ‘Can’t we just go out and talk to some people?’ said Katherine, lighting another one of Daniel’s cigarettes because she was not, at that time, smoking.
    ‘What people?’
    ‘People people. As in people.’
    ‘Where?’
    ‘I don’t know. Where people are. In a pub or something.’
    ‘You want to go to the pub and meet people?’
    ‘Not necessarily Meet, as in capital M, but small-M meet maybe, yeah.’
    ‘People will think we’re swingers.’
    ‘So what? We’ll meet some swingers then.’
    ‘Why the fuck would I want to meet swingers?’
    ‘This is what you do. You take things and then totally dampen them.’
    ‘Are we going to argue about this?’
    ‘I’m not arguing, I’m just saying.’
    ‘But obviously if you say something like that then I have to say something back and then that’s an