Idiopathy

toilet, drinking in the smell of his ex-partner’s shit, he thought quite distinctly of his father; of the things that were failing and fading away; of the things we hope to hold on to even as we can feel ourselves letting them go, and he sobbed, and breathed deeply, and blew his nose and pissed.

    K atherine left the café at a trotting pace, lighter for having vomited and shat, but still somehow puffed and weighty. People weren’t getting out of her way. She shoulder-bumped two and had a near-miss with another.
    She wanted to know how it had felt to see Daniel again. Although she hadn’t been able to tell, beforehand, how it would feel, she had naturally assumed that however it felt would become clear afterwards, and that it would, in turn, clarify the things she’d felt since they’d split. In reality, though, all was murk and gloom.
    At the office she snagged her coat in the revolving door. By the time she got to her desk she felt like she’d been worked over by goons. She went to the bathroom and adjusted. Her eyes felt fleshy. She leaned on the sink and heaved, got nothing. She and Daniel had, she kept thinking, been happy. She was sure they had. Hadn’t they? Hadn’t they been happy? If they had, she couldn’t remember how, or exactly when.
    Back at her desk she decided on a fire drill. She went out into the hallway and slid her key into the alarm system. The siren was pleasing. People berated her as they passed.
    ‘Again with this?’
    ‘It’s regulations.’
    ‘We had one last week.’
    ‘Now we’re having one this week.’
    ‘It’s usually on a Tuesday.’
    ‘It’s not a drill if you know when it’s happening, is it?’
    Outside, workers chatted and smoked in chilly clusters, shifting from foot to foot and checking in with other floors. Katherine left them out there as long as possible while she swept the building. Response time had been poor. Half of them would be dead. There was, she thought, something happily Darwinian about fire drills.
    She went outside and told them with great satisfaction that half of them were dead.
    Afterwards, she found Keith in the stationery cupboard, selecting a new rubber band.
    ‘Who have you told?’ she said.
    ‘Hey,’ said Keith. ‘Cool it on the hostility, yeah?’
    ‘Who have you told?’
    ‘No one. My therapist. Claire.’
    ‘I’m pregnant,’ she said. ‘It’s yours. I’m going to kill it with my bare hands.’
    He stood staring at her dumbly, swaying slightly. Then he laughed. Then he looked at her face and stopped laughing.
    ‘Shit,’ he said.
    She left him standing there, three sizes of rubber band hanging limp and ignored from his fingers.

T he feeling of being out was, to Nathan, at once bizarre, uncomfortable and oddly enticing. He’d been ‘out’ before of course – wandering the lanes near his parents’ house; dropping into The Rover for a Guinness – but arriving in a town centre was a new kind of exposure. He’d forgotten the wildly unpleasant temperament of the average weekend shopper: the steely resolve mixed with constant, bitter compromise. Parents paused outside department stores to scream at their children and partners. Elderly men and women moved with caution through a minefield of charity hustlers, amateur preachers, shabby men selling miniature kites, puppeteers, buskers, motionless women painted silver, beggars, market-stall traders and bored-looking youths handing out flyers for closing-down sales.
    Nathan had never seen the value in either goods or the process by which they were acquired. The last time he’d shopped had been under duress, just before he went away for his treatment. His mother had taken him to John Lewis to kit him out. She’d led the charge into the menswear department, hauling cardigans and cords off the racks; preaching the gospel of layering as she pinned sweaters to his chest and squinted. Everything seemed to make him look pale. When they were done they collected Nathan’s father from the canteen and began the ceremonial unsheathing of the Mastercard, gathering at the card machine with the grave but dignified reluctance one might expect of two national leaders as they tapped in the nuclear codes. Thinking the chance might not come again, and perhaps already envisioning a time when such information would be useful, Nathan had watched his father as he slowly and with excessive deliberation entered each of the four digits of the card’s pin number. Just knowing the code, Nathan