Idiopathy

difficult and shifting relationship to what he thought of as Normality.
    His relationship with Katherine had, categorically, not been normal, and now he’d left it and was in a relationship where normal things were very definitely said and done, it was fairly easy for him to think of himself and his life as normal. After all, he thought, here he was: he’d told his girlfriend he loved her; she’d told him she loved him; he’d eaten breakfast; and was now driving to a successful job. That was normal, wasn’t it? If it was, then Katherine’s phone call had to be regarded as some sort of brutal intrusion of abnormality.
    Viewed another way, though, it was also possible for Daniel to reverse the situation. No, his relationship with Katherine had not been normal. It had been jagged and unpleasant. But there was, nonetheless, a creeping and rather disturbing sense of late that although the relationship might not have been as he wished it to be, Daniel had in fact been more himself. After all, he thought, was it really normal to feel so emotionally shifty around your partner? If everything was so sodding normal then why had Katherine’s phone call sent him into a state of such disrepair? Worryingly, distastefully, when Daniel looked at things this way he started to view the phone call as a sort of relief, which made him more scared than when he simply regarded it as something scary.
    He remembered lying in bed beside Katherine, not just in the later stages but, if he was honest, through much of their relationship, and trying to assess her level of anger by the way that she breathed as she slept, the way she rolled, the sounds she made as she stirred. He tended to wake before her, and found he could tell if she was angry before she even woke up. She was the only person he’d ever met who
slept
angrily. All it would take would be one sniff, one jerk of the shoulders as she rolled, and he’d know, and then he’d be tense, and she’d wake up and see he was tense and get angry. Or so she’d claim. As far as Daniel was concerned the truth was that nothing made Katherine angry. Her anger was organic. It simply
was
.
    It was also infectious. Nothing had ever made Daniel angry like Katherine’s anger. It flowed straight into his system. Other people had passing flare-ups, but Katherine could sustain the narrative of her rage for alarming periods of time. It would go through discernible shifts in tone. It had plot twists. Sometimes she apologised, even smiled, only to unleash another assault when he weakened. Sometimes she held off for days, edging him this way and that across a range of media: phone calls, emails at work, texts, even notes that she stuck to the fridge.
Don’t make any effort
, said one.
I’m really sorry you’ve taken this so badly
, said another. Once, she’d called him at work and told him in a voice so reasoned it was actually dispassionate that she accepted full responsibility for the argument.
    ‘Really?’ he’d said cautiously.
    ‘Yes. It’s my fault.’
    ‘Well …’
    ‘You’re not up to this. It’s not your fault. I just forgot it, that’s all.’
    ‘Not up to what?’
    ‘It’s really not your fault.’
    ‘What’s not my fault?’
    ‘Anything.’
    He was quiet for several seconds, cogitating. He could hear her waiting.
    ‘Well,’ he said. ‘OK.’
    There was another long pause.
    ‘You cunt,’ she said.
    ‘Excuse me?’
    ‘Excuse me? Excuse me?’ She mocked his voice. ‘You actually think I’d ring you up to apologise? You actually think that
I
think that any of this is my fault?’
    ‘Any of what?’
    ‘Any of ANYTHING, you moron. Of course I don’t think it’s my fault. You know why? Because it’s NOT my fault, it’s YOUR fault, and even worse than all of this being your fault, I now know that not only do you NOT think it’s your fault, you actually think it’s MY fault or why else would you let me take full responsibility for it?’
    ‘I don’t even know what I’m supposed to …’
    Then she’d hung up, and it had been the hang-up that had tipped him, perfectly, into utter impotent rage, shaped and fine-tuned over the rest of the day as he’d called and called, as he’d shouted at her voicemail and kicked his desk in frustration and pictured her calmly watching her phone as it rang, or reading back his abusive texts with that little smile of hers.

    S ebastian and four or five of his cronies were installed in the car park. As Daniel pulled into his