Idiopathy

them time and again is just how guilty they feel. Is that something you experienced?’
    ‘Unquestionably,’ said Nathan’s mother. ‘Without question. The guilt is enormous, and very difficult to overcome without being a very strong person indeed. But I think what I really want to stress is the shame. You know, at one point, when he was at his worst, I actually told people I didn’t have a son, because it was so much easier than trying to explain.’
    Nathan had opted to continue tugging the thread, which was now approximately a foot long.
    ‘We call that emotional disownership,’ said Dr Dave. ‘A very common response to filial trauma. But then there was a breakthrough, was there not?’
    Here Nathan’s mother’s face clouded expertly with the cumulonimbi of grief. She took a long breath.
    ‘There was,’ she said valiantly.
    ‘And is that,’ said Dr Dave, leaning forward, placing a hand on her knee. ‘Is that something you feel able to share?’
    Nathan’s mother nodded.
    ‘What a surthrivor,’ said Dr Dave, awed.
    ‘Thank you,’ said Nathan’s mother. ‘It’s … it’s not something I’ve really talked about much, although … although it is in the book, but … Well, after
years
, I mean literally years of all this stuff going on, my son, my boy …’
    ‘We hear you,’ said Dr Dave.
    ‘I can’t even describe what he did to himself,’ said Nathan’s mother. ‘But it was harm. Very serious harm. And when we saw him next he was in the hospital. Covered in bandages. His hands. His arms. His chest. And at first he was on a lot of medication, obviously. But slowly he came round. And me and my husband were there, and …’
    Nathan remembered his father ambling around the private room they’d somehow secured at the hospital, asking him if he wanted his dinner and then helping him finish it off lest it go to waste.
    He gave the thread a sharp yank but only succeeded in exposing more of its length.
    ‘Stop pulling the furniture to bits,’ said his father, who had begun jiggling his knees and rubbing his hands.
    ‘Sorry,’ said Nathan.
    ‘And I looked at his face,’ Nathan’s mother was saying.
    ‘That’s it, girl,’ said Nathan’s father. He looked at Nathan shiftily. ‘Sorry.’
    ‘And I knew he finally understood. That it had taken this awful moment to … to …’
    ‘I don’t want to watch this any more,’ said Nathan.
    His father looked at him.
    ‘OK,’ he said. ‘But, um … There’ll be questions afterwards, if you know what I mean, so …’
    Nathan nodded. ‘You go ahead,’ he said, standing up.
    Upstairs he texted Daniel to say he would be coming. After only a couple of minutes he heard his father emit a long-drawn-out moan. He went back downstairs and found him staring at footage of a transfixed lamb.
    ‘This just in,’ said the voice-over. ‘The disease previously known as Bovine Idiopathic Entrancement has jumped the species barrier. What you see here is the first recorded case of Ovine Entrancement. Scientists have announced that …’
    ‘Jesus,’ said Nathan. ‘This is …’
    ‘You’re telling me,’ said Nathan’s father. ‘They cut your mother’s money shot for this.’

I n Angelica’s absence, and in the dead time before the weekend, Daniel fell into the sort of patterns he dimly recalled from his long-ago days of being single. He’d been a student then, of course, and he had to admit that in the intervening years many of the habits he’d once looked back on through a certain rose-coloured haze had, if he was honest, paled. There were, for example, only so many frozen pizzas a man could eat before a definite sense of bodily decay set in; and much as stocking the fridge with beer, chocolate bars and assorted snacks had seemed deliciously sinful when daydreamed about over a fruit smoothie and a bowl of Fairtrade granola, there came a point when the sight of all that badness was no longer exciting and was just, well, bad. Freedom, it seemed, was overrated, particularly if you had no idea what to do with it.
    He tried to recall the last time he’d been alone. There’d been the odd evening here and there, perhaps a weekend, but decent stretches of solitude had been rare. Katherine used to threaten to go away a lot but then rarely did, and Angelica rarely even threatened it, leading to those slightly odd conversations when Daniel tried to persuade her to go away while strenuously attempting not to appear to be persuading her to go