Idiopathy

of hostility and aggression. He was kind to Angelica because it was easier than being honest. He had been unkind to Katherine because it was easier than being honest and safer than being kind.
    Angelica squeezed his thigh; rolled slightly towards him; kissed him gently on the apex of his cheekbone. Everyone wants to be loved. He wanted to be loved. He wanted, he thought, to make people love him, to need him, and now he had. He’d wanted, from the earliest age he was able to recall, to grow up, to be an adult, and now he had, and now he was, and now he wanted to regress, and climb aboard a bus with blacked-out windows bound for some nameless green-belt field where someone would water-pistol chemicals onto his tongue and steer him into a fog of music so loud that it felt like a shoal of nibbling fish setting to work on the dead skin around his life.
    ‘I love you,’ said Angelica.
    He thought about Nathan. He’d felt superior to him once. He’d predicted Nathan’s slip, had felt vindicated when it happened because it reminded Daniel that there was a reason he wasn’t Nathan. Daniel could dabble. He always dabbled. He was hands-clean. He could envy Nathan and watch him fail and then go back to being the man he really was. And he had. And he’d cheated on Katherine because he could, and now Angelica could cheat on him and he could cheat on her, and in a way, he had.
    ‘I love you too,’ he said, and he did and he didn’t.
    He felt Angelica soften into sleep beside him and wondered if she was dreaming of Sebastian. It struck him that, even as he lay awake and dreamed open-eyed about violence and anger and the things he wanted to do but couldn’t, he was circling closer towards loving her again, simply because she seemed to be circling away. He reached out and touched her shoulder. He wanted to tell her. By reflex, she rolled and wrapped her arms around him, and he could feel her breath against his cheek and ear, and could smell the hot scent of sleep across her neck and chest as he nestled his face closer, throwing his arm across her hip and squeezing until she exhaled, just slightly. He wouldn’t be able to sleep, he thought. Then he did.

N athan’s parents, as became clear to him during the time he spent in their company, never mixed. They co-existed, interacted at times, but consistently fell short of cohesion. His mother was increasingly hot and blustery, moving at speed through the house, revelling in her ability to manage each small crisis. His father, meanwhile, trailed her like a lingering odour. Clearly so accustomed to not being listened to that the entire act of communication had now been reduced to a mere formality that allowed them, after the event, to say in all confidence that yes they certainly
had
told each other about this or that because they remembered it quite vividly, they now conversed almost entirely in the round.
    ‘We need to, ah, we need to have a quick discussion about …’ Nathan’s father would say.
    ‘Roger,’ his mother would say, as if her husband had been completely ignoring her and she now needed to get his attention. ‘Have we had any news from …’
    ‘… next Saturday. Because I’ve got here …’
    ‘… Jacinta and Gregory re: …’
    ‘… that we’re supposed to be going to …’
    ‘… next Saturday. Because I’ve got here that we’re supposed to …’
    ‘… Jacinta and Gregory’s for dinner, and I was just wondering …’
    ‘… go round there for dinner, and I’m not sure we’ve …’
    ‘… if that’s confirmed or …’
    ‘… confirmed it. Have we?’
    ‘… if we still need to. Do we?’
    Each of them felt, and frequently said, that the only way to really get anything done was simply to do it yourself, yet each of them also seemed to find doing anything without alerting the other to what they were doing rather difficult, resulting in a continual barrage of occluding updates. One of them was going shopping and would talk about this when they got back. The other was going to the post and would also talk about this when they got back. The precise nature of ‘this’ would never quite be defined, yet both would return with the ticklish idea that something would need to be discussed. Later, when it became clear that there had been something they should have discussed, and that problems had arisen as a result of not discussing it, they would debate whether they’d discussed it.
    ‘Oh, Roger,’ Nathan’s mother would say. ‘Do we