Idiopathy

remembered now, had brought him a sense of possibility.
    He felt he had to pay careful attention to where he was going. He had not been in a crowd since the last of the parties. Faces swelled into view; threatened to collide; then were gone. He remembered walking out into the press of dancers after he’d spoken to Katherine, dimly aware of backslaps and shout-outs, feeling suddenly and profoundly unable to move and so just standing there motionless, feeling everything and everyone move around him and away.
    He tried to remember when he had last been here. No single memory stood out. Those visits, and the evenings around which they centred, had always been much of a muchness. Katherine cooked and Daniel skivvied. Often, they were already a glass or two to the good when Nathan arrived. They could be funny, he remembered. They could set each other up and knock each other down. On a good day, they drew on pooled energy. On a bad day, they battled for dwindling air. Sometimes Nathan felt surplus. Frequently, he felt like a much-needed audience. Daniel liked it if Nathan brought drugs. They’d be pissed or stoned before the food even made it out of the oven. Later, Daniel would black out and leave Nathan and Katherine alone, sitting up late into the night, each dealing out profundities in an effort to trump the other. It became a sort of centre of gravity, Nathan remembered. His feelings were shaped over successive visits. She’d sprawl on the sofa and tell it like it was, her head lolling occasionally in his direction, her bare feet tapping gently to whatever was on the stereo. Nathan started taking more control over the evening’s outcome. He topped off Daniel’s glass without being asked; front-loaded joints so Daniel got the bulk of the hit. He watched for the droop of his eyes, the flop of his head, the loss of blood from his face. It was not something of which he was proud.
    The bookshop was just off the central square. Nathan paused outside the window and examined a display of his mother’s book. They’d made a poster out of the cover image. Here she was, his mother, inflated to an unnatural scale, gazing out at God knew what with an expression akin to those women in adverts for thrush cream: wounded, slightly pinched, yet relieved of an irritation that had blighted her life.
    He went inside, picked up a copy, and took it to the counter.
    ‘How many of these do you have?’ he asked the checkout girl.
    ‘How many?’
    ‘How many copies?’
    ‘Er,’ she seemed on the verge of asking further questions but Nathan created a facial expression that dissuaded her. She scanned the barcode and scrolled through stock on her till. ‘Thirteen copies in store,’ she said. ‘But they’re selling fast. Have you read it?’
    ‘I’ll take all thirteen copies please,’ said Nathan.
    ‘Excuse me?’
    ‘Please find all thirteen copies that you have in this store and bring them here so I can buy them.’
    She did it, then asked him how he wanted to pay.
    ‘Credit card,’ he said with extreme satisfaction.
    Given their abstemious attitude to credit, he thought, it would be weeks before his parents checked the bureau and noted the card’s absence.
    He loaded the books into four plastic bags and carried them through the town centre. He had a sense of purpose that was practically holy. He envisioned the feeling of no longer carrying the books and swelled a little inside.
    He stopped in Tesco to buy wine. Every single item in the store appeared to be part of some sort of offer. He had, he realised, no idea how to choose a bottle of wine. Whole facets of the world felt locked off and unknowable. People ate as they roamed the shop. When their children started to cry they encouraged them to eat. On every aisle there was at least one child sobbing gutturally through the wilting remains of a Snickers.
    He bought one white and one red, then shepherded the bottles through the self-service system, which asked him to wait while someone verified his age. A teenager appeared out of the crowd, looked him up and down and tapped a code into the screen. It struck Nathan with some force that he was no longer young.
    He carried the books and the wine and his holdall back into the street and made his way across town to the river, where one by one he took the books from the bags and hurled them into the grey depths. They bobbed briefly amongst drifting fishing tackle and anonymous plastic flagons. After three or four books had hit the