Idiopathy

away.
    ‘I really think you’ll enjoy it,’ he’d say of some rally or convention or godforsaken gathering of the dreadlocked clans. ‘You should go. I mean really. Go.’
    ‘Oh,’ she’d say vaguely. ‘I might, but you know, we have so little time together as it is.’
    ‘I know, darling, but I’m happy to share you with the world.’
    ‘Oh Daniel.’
    ‘Oh Angelica.’
    She wouldn’t go, of course, or worse, he’d end up going with her. Either way, he’d spend at least part of the time pining for exactly the sort of alone-time he knew he always squandered when he had it.
    The evenings dragged. He called Angelica. She texted a lot but on the phone was distracted and vague. She always said, Hang on, let me go somewhere quiet, then went somewhere categorically unquiet. She said it was going well. She said Sebastian was amazing. She felt they were Making a Difference. Daniel started picturing her and Sebastian together. It gave him a little twist in his gut. He imagined Sebastian letting his hair down, giving it a quick toss; slipping out of his knits and mumbling something wanky about worship. For some reason Daniel had a problem admitting he didn’t like people. He liked to think he was above it, or that, like anger, it was a response that was unjustly denied to him in his role as a martyr to the rational. But he didn’t like Sebastian and Sebastian didn’t like him, so perhaps it was time to start accepting things.
    He called his father, asked him how’s tricks.
    ‘I’m inundated,’ said his father. ‘Totally inundated.’
    Sometimes Daniel tried to be rational, sometimes he didn’t. Less and less, if he was honest.
    ‘It’s such a busy time, isn’t it?’
    ‘Oh God, don’t even,’ said his father.
    ‘Are you managing to get a break at all?’
    ‘You’re kidding, aren’t you? They’re working me into the ground. Geoff’s away; Paul’s no good to anyone any more. I’m carrying the whole team.’
    ‘They’d be lost without you.’
    ‘Don’t I know it.’
    He thought about going to see the old man, but quickly realised he couldn’t face it. It struck him that his procrastination around going to see his father suggested he hadn’t actually developed nearly as much as he’d like to think, or at least not in the ways that now seemed important. He was too young for all this ageing, all this
stuff
.
    The larger the weekend loomed, the greater Daniel’s fears became. He woke twice in the night, tatters of a nameless shame still clinging to his skin. He remembered saying something stupid about how if Nathan needed help he would ask for it; remembered how easy it had been to let Nathan and whatever was going on with him simply vanish. He paced his house and felt embarrassed. He had never, he realised, entertained anyone. Angelica entertained people; Katherine either entertained them or horrified them; and Nathan had a way, if not of entertaining people directly, then at least of leading them towards people and places that would do the job, and procuring the necessary chemicals along the way. Indeed, Daniel and Katherine had always used Nathan for exactly that purpose: for escape; for
fun
; and now, in a development made no less disturbing by its predictability, the tables were horribly turned and Daniel, who had not, if he was honest, really made or maintained any friends at all since moving here, found himself thrust into the role of host and entertainer.
    By the time Thursday came around, Daniel knew what he needed to do. He needed, quite urgently, to buy some drugs.
    He mulled it over at work, wondering initially about Ecstasy, but then coming to the conclusion that sitting in a room getting off his face on E might not be Nathan’s idea of a good time. Indeed, E hadn’t been Nathan’s idea of a good time for a long time, now that Daniel thought about it. Towards the end (a phrase Daniel realised he needed to stop using, given that it clearly wasn’t the end), Nathan had graduated from the largely unalloyed pleasures of Ecstasy and acid, through the more utilitarian amphetamines, to the total vortex of entertainment offered by ketamine and a cocktail of downers, suggesting that a good time, whatever that might have been, was not only no longer Nathan’s goal but may actually have been something against which he sought to quarantine himself. Daniel had never understood the impulse. He was down enough day to day; why part with money for the experience? In a way, this both