Idiopathy

hadn’t made; the phone calls they hadn’t received; the micro-disappointments of an average day. A young couple passed a camera to an old couple and asked for a picture. The girl had a blue Mohawk; the old woman had a blue rinse. Momentarily, it looked as if the young couple were handing the camera to their future selves. Daniel looked at Katherine, this woman he knew so well. Too well, really, to talk to now. He wanted to tell her she was lucky, in a way, to be in a position where she could still yearn for more, rather than simply fear the loss of what she already had.
    She took a glug of her coffee and watched him over the rim of her cup. For a second he watched her watching him. He felt a nameless tug and wanted to leave.
    ‘So,’ he said. ‘Nathan.’
    ‘Ah yes. Nathan.’
    Saying his name felt like an achievement.
    ‘What’s the plan?’ said Katherine.
    ‘How should I know?’
    ‘Well you’re the planner.’
    ‘What does that mean?’
    ‘You plan. You do plans. You’re never knowingly without a plan.’
    ‘Do we even need a plan?’
    She held up her hands. ‘Hey, you know me. If the plan is that we don’t need a plan then I’m absolutely fine with that. The question is: are you?’
    ‘Yes,’ said Daniel. It came out sounding like a question.
    They went quiet again.
    ‘Fuck,’ said Daniel after a while. ‘Fuckitty tits.’
    ‘Well,’ said Katherine. ‘Ain’t that the truth.’
    ‘I keep thinking,’ said Daniel.
    ‘Naturally.’
    ‘You know.’
    ‘I’m sure there was nothing we could have done.’
    Daniel felt stalked again; shadowed. Something nameless and hot licked gently at his nape and slipped a spindly finger through his belly button into his stomach. It was the kind of horror that woke you in the night and sent you pacing downstairs into the dawn. His father was going to forget everything and die.
    ‘That’s the statement,’ he said. ‘That’s the statement I keep unpacking. If there was nothing we could have done, then was there something someone else could have done?’
    ‘Why should that worry us? There’s always something someone else could have done.’
    ‘But what if all that means is that we should have been someone else?’
    ‘Eh?’
    ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘I probably don’t want to think about it anyway.’
    He made an exploratory start on the foodstuffs. Some were crunchy; some were semi-liquid. Katherine let her fingers hover above the spread, then seemingly thought better of it.
    ‘I know what you mean,’ she said.
    Daniel nodded. ‘I think we had this conversation at the time.’
    ‘Yeah. There’s nothing really new to be said, is there?’
    ‘I keep thinking,’ said Daniel.
    ‘Look,’ said Katherine. ‘Maybe he just couldn’t be helped, you know? He was in a bad place. He always had the propensity or whatever. Shit. I can’t count the number of times he was weird. Right? I mean, don’t get me wrong, but I’m not going to go and string myself up with guilt just because Nathan tried to top himself.’ She reached for some pitta. ‘I’m aware that last statement was in slightly poor taste,’ she said, munching.
    ‘He says he didn’t try and kill himself,’ said Daniel.
    ‘Whatever. Kill yourself. Cut yourself. It’s all the same.’
    A man at the next table unfolded a newspaper. The headline said:
Daily Exercise Cuts Death Risk
.
    ‘This is bland, isn’t it?’ said Daniel, meaning the food.
    Katherine shrugged.
    ‘So,’ Katherine said. ‘All this stuff with the cows. Does that affect you?’
    ‘Well, people think it does, so to all intents and purposes it does. That’s the joy of PR. It doesn’t matter if you’ve done anything wrong or not. It’s what people think that counts.’
    ‘The madness of crowds and all that.’
    Daniel nodded. ‘Hell of a job to try and keep the crowds sane.’
    Katherine rolled her eyes. ‘You hero,’ she said.
    ‘Just saying. What about you, anyway? Isn’t facilities management basically the same? Don’t you have to rebalance people’s misguided perceptions of risk?’
    ‘Essentially. And listen to them moan.’
    The mechanism of their conversation ran down. They nibbled and stared and looked about them until one of them could wind it back up. It was oddly comfortable. Silence had never really been an issue between them. It was all the things they said that were the problem. All those stupid clichés about things going unsaid, Daniel thought. The stiff, buttoned-up English