Idiopathy

a shag.’
    Hazel yawned. ‘You know what you are?’ she said. ‘Predictable, that’s what.’
    ‘You know what you are?’ said Katherine.
    ‘We don’t want to know what she is,’ said Katherine’s mother. ‘Katherine. We’re worried about you.’
    ‘Well, don’t be. I’m fine.’
    ‘There’s a job opening up in my company,’ said Hazel. ‘I could put in a word. Seriously. I mean, all joking aside. You know.’
    Katherine lit a second cigarette off the butt of the first. She could, she thought, say yes. She could pack up and leave; start again. She would be good at the job her sister was offering, whatever it was, because she was always good at her job. After work, she and her sister would go to a wine bar or perhaps a restaurant. They would order crisp white wines and light pasta dishes and a salad to share, and when men – half-decent men in crumpled Friday suits with their ties progressively askew – offered to buy them drinks, they would smile and accept, and then afterwards they would laugh and agree that none of the men were good enough, saying
did you SEE what he was wearing?
Perhaps they would share a house. Perhaps for a time they would be happy, at least until one of them met someone and it all fell apart. Wouldn’t that, any of that, be better than this?
    Except, of course, it wouldn’t be like that, because Katherine would be accepting a kindness, and the second she accepted it she would resent it, and her sister would resent her for resenting it, and how long would it take, really, before an argument over food or a night out or something trivial spun on its axis the moment her sister reminded her that
she got her this job
and wasn’t she even
grateful
for that?
    ‘No,’ she said eventually. ‘I’m alright, thank you.’
    ‘I don’t even know why we called in,’ said Hazel. ‘It’s an hour out of our way.’
    ‘Why did you?’ snapped Katherine. ‘I didn’t ask you to.’
    ‘We wanted to see you, Katherine,’ said her mother, who now sounded hurt in a way that Katherine found enraging.
    ‘Well consider me seen,’ said Katherine.
    After they left she started to cry, but checked herself.
Won’t help
, she told herself repeatedly.
Won’t help so don’t bother
.

    S ometimes, in quieter moments, when her looming fears and preoccupations had, if not exactly receded, then at least temporarily weakened, Katherine would think of Nathan, wondering what he was doing and, more pertinently, what had happened in the past year and a half. Nothing good, she assumed. He was always, she thought, heading towards nothing particularly good, and if their friendship could have been characterised by any sort of arc it would have been that at one stage the knowledge of where Nathan was headed had seemed exciting, even romantic, but later less so. He had always been edgy, of course, and no one would ever have suggested his lifestyle was healthy or that his choices were always the most positive, but in the last months the change had been noticeable. She and Daniel had begun to discuss it – his twitching eyes and sudden non sequiturs; his occasional comments about unhappiness or, as he’d put it to her once, what he saw as an actual inability to be happy – but this had been at a time when she and Daniel weren’t discussing anything very much outside themselves, and when they too were not heading for anything particularly good, and when, as is always the case in a relationship that is either decaying or blossoming, events external to them as a couple seemed to require more effort to observe than to ignore. Had they let him down? Had they failed someone at one of those rare critical moments when failure is permanent? Until very recently she would have said, had she been asked by the right person at the right time and in the strictest possible confidence, that they had, but now he had phoned, and he had, quite clearly, asked for help, suggesting that the previous time they’d failed hadn’t actually been the irrevocable moment at all, but a precursor, a warning. Of course, that also raised the distinct possibility that this was therefore the big moment, the one they had to get right, which did not make her feel particularly assured, given that it was once again a bad time, and that she was distracted, and that there were things in her life that seemed to preclude the addition of more things to her life.
    But of course, there had been that conversation, the last time she’d seen him,