Idiopathy

water he started ripping out pages before he threw them. He saw paragraphs of his past as they caught the wind and were gone.
    He became aware of his phone ringing. He looked at the screen and answered, because of course she would call now, just as he was doing this.
    ‘Nathan,’ said his mother.
    ‘Mother,’ he said, hurling half a book almost all the way to the other side of the river.
    ‘Nathan. Where are you?’
    ‘I’ve gone away. I told Dad.’
    ‘Well how long will you be gone?’
    ‘I have no idea.’
    ‘Is this about the television show? Are you upset, Nathan? Because it upsets me to think you’re upset. It really does.’
    ‘I’m not upset.’
    ‘I don’t want you to be upset.’
    ‘I’m not.’
    ‘I mean it, Nathan. It’s really important to me. I hate to think of you being upset.’
    ‘There’s no need to think of me being upset.’
    ‘Really, Nathan? Because we worry, your father and I. And I think it’s very unfair of you to make us worry in this way.’
    ‘You really shouldn’t worry.’
    ‘We’re supposed to be looking after you.’
    ‘I know that.’
    ‘How can we look after you if you just keep wandering off and we don’t know where you are?’
    He tucked the phone under his ear so as to more easily rip the dust jacket off the last book.
    ‘You can’t,’ he said. ‘I don’t expect you to.’
    ‘Well with all due respect, Nathan, your expectations are not really the issue.’
    He hung up; turned off his phone. He had Daniel’s address on a scrap of paper and made his way there.

    B y the time the appointed hour arrived, Daniel was sitting limply on the sofa having experienced what he could only conceptualise as a crisis of maturity. He had, he realised, no idea how to do this, this having people round thing, and he had found himself, midway through a scorched-earth cleaning policy, wishing quite acutely that Angelica was there. It wasn’t as if she’d have known what to do, it was more that she would have done whatever it was that needed to be done without even thinking about it.
    Arrangements had not gone according to plan. Cleaning the house, which had entered a state of decay during the few days he had occupied it alone, had taken far longer than intended, and at the end of the process, as he packed away the mop and hoover and considered opening a beer, he’d realised he hadn’t made up the spare bed, and having made the spare bed he’d realised he hadn’t given any thought whatsoever to drink or, for that matter, food. Were they expecting him to cook? He hadn’t specifically mentioned food, but of course, inviting people to your house for the evening, or in Nathan’s case the night (God, he thought suddenly, Katherine didn’t think she was staying the night, did she? No, he’d be firm. If necessary, he’d call her a taxi), basically implied they would be fed. There was, he thought, no conceivable way he could cook, not merely because his cooking wasn’t good, but because the thought of cooking for Katherine and Nathan seemed to carry an intensity and pressure – not to mention an air of surrealism – so overwhelming as to potentially capsize the whole precarious evening.
    He’d made it to the supermarket and bought wine and beer and an assortment of finger foods that covered every possible permutation of potato: fried; reconstituted; slathered in mayonnaise. Then he’d returned; changed; unpacked the shopping, and established a position of comparative calm on the sofa just in time to put logistical concerns out of his head and get down to the serious business of worrying about all the other aspects of the evening he’d managed quite successfully not to worry about through strategically worrying about things like making the bathroom smell better and whether, in the modern age, people could truly feel comfortable with a screw-top wine.
    Around him, he thought, up and down the street and out in the world, other people, other adults, were doing all of this with a practised, almost cultish ease: lighting votive candles and setting out individual bowls of Japanese rice crackers and finding an appropriate volume for some unobtrusive yet not wholly middle-of-the-road electronica, the very knowledge of which made Daniel feel basically like he had at the virginal age of seventeen, when he routinely walked through town and looked at adults of every shape and size and level of attractiveness and thought,
All of these people, even that enormous old lady