Idiopathy

feeling as he did that his life was becoming dull, he pined for both. Yet where he was able to resist the pull of smoking with comparative ease, anger appeared increasingly seductive. At least with fags you could re-steel your resolve with the images of diseased lungs and blackened, crazy-pavement teeth that now adorned the packets. What was offered to people trying daily to tamp down their tempers? Pictures of broken plates? Mugshots of the domestically abused? There seemed to be no real motivating factors in staying calm, particularly, he thought, when so many people around him seemed to become angry so frequently and productively.
    It wasn’t that he actually
was
angry, of course. That would have been simple. It was more that he missed its release, pined for it at times, and so found himself in the odd position of wishing he could be angry without actually, as he wished it, feeling particularly angry. This had now reached the point where he found himself fantasising about anger. In the lift, his mind sought out possible scenarios in which it would be not only acceptable to be angry but downright admirable. He dreamed of a heroic, righteous rage.
I’ve never seen him like that
, people would say with awe.
I’ve never seen him so angry
. Men would be intimidated by him; women would find him attractive. He’d develop the sense of having a whole other side.
    Safely ensconced in his office, he sank into his leather armchair, dropped his canvas bag on the floor beside the desk, and turned on his computer. He had fifty-three high-priority emails. Recently, he’d enforced a new three-step priority matrix to help determine which emails needed to be read first. Sadly, everyone now marked their emails as high priority for fear they wouldn’t get read.
    He looked out of the window at the rag-tag gaggle of proudly dishevelled demonstrators. He had to maintain a certain depth of focus to avoid his own semi-transparent image being overlaid on theirs. He was reluctant to see himself, a sad little man in a nicely furnished box, with nothing really to defend or attack, dreaming, like every sad little middle-class white man in the world, of a good old-fashioned fight that wouldn’t make him look bad.
    He buzzed Clara, his secretary.
    ‘Morning Clara.’
    ‘Morning.’
    ‘How are you?’
    ‘Can’t complain.’
    Clara was actually very gifted at complaining, so this statement, with which she started each new day, was something of a falsehood.
    ‘Great,’ said Daniel. ‘Could you bring me some coffee?’
    ‘Suppose.’
    He leaned back in his chair, digging his mobile out of his pocket when it jabbed uncomfortably into his thigh. He scrolled the numbers idly, A through E; F through K. Katherine was the only person in his contacts listed solely by her first name.
    ‘Clara,’ he said into the buzzer.
    ‘I’m making it now. Give me a chance.’
    ‘Could you make a call for me?’
    ‘Before I make the coffee?’
    ‘Yes please.’
    Clara called Katherine and put Daniel through.
    ‘Katherine?’
    As he said it he realised he’d rehearsed this in his head more times than he could comfortably acknowledge. It would all, he knew, stem from his opening sounds. Katherine believed in beginnings, and her interpretation of his greeting would set the tone. He thought he’d done well: not too bright, not too flat; somehow both at ease and respectful of the wider context …
    ‘It’s um … It’s a bad line. I’ll call you back.’
    It wasn’t a bad line, of course, meaning that somehow he had blown his opening. In the unnervingly long minutes while he waited for her to call back he examined the way he’d said her name from every possible angle and perspective. Katherine?
Katherine?
Katherine.
Katherine
. How should he have said it, for fuck’s sake? Maybe he shouldn’t have phrased it as a question. Maybe it came off as tentative. Was it redundant? After all, who else would have answered her phone?
Katherine
, he should have said. Full stop.
It’s Daniel. Hi.
No. Too cold. Should have just gone with Hey.
Hey! Long time no speak
. Christ.
    His phone rang.
    ‘Hey,’ he said.
    ‘Hey yourself,’ said Katherine.
    There was a difficult pause. Katherine tended not to break pauses, Daniel now remembered, often preferring to revel in the awkwardness of the moment. Comfort was cause for concern, even at a trivial, conversational level.
    ‘How, ah …’ He decided simply to start sentences in the hope that she would, as was