Idiopathy

to look at.
    ‘Did you have ECT?’ said Katherine. ‘I’ve heard they still do that.’
    ‘Katherine,’ said Daniel. ‘For fuck’s sake.’
    ‘What?’ said Katherine.
    ‘It’s fine,’ said Nathan. ‘It’s OK. No, they didn’t give me ECT. It was all just pretty much talking.’

    W as it, or was it not, sexy and more than a bit thrilling to be fancied by someone who had tried to kill themselves? The question, which Katherine would have been quick to admit was not the most morally on-target she could have come up with, had become one of those stubborn mind-events that resist dismissal until satisfactorily answered. There were other questions too, of course, many of which circled around Daniel, but these were not exactly fun to consider, whereas the whole area of Nathan’s attractiveness with reference to his recently very much increased air of unpredictability and the general complexity of risk versus charm and tragedy versus thrill versus pity was exactly, it seemed, where her head wanted to be after a couple of beers and what she saw as an absolutely stellar effort on her part to get this gathering off the ground, because when she’d walked in it had felt like a fucking wake, and she’d had to deploy maximum social weaponry just to correct whatever it was that Daniel had done to the atmosphere.
    Nathan looked both well and not-well, a combination that Katherine found quite effective. Just as she liked Keith’s weird irises and his gloomy inferences about his smacked-out past, so she found Nathan’s scarred physical bulk coupled with his awkward, quiet bashfulness rather appealing. It had all been there before, of course, but a year ago the juxtaposition had felt awkward, whereas now it was fascinating. He seemed, she thought, both broken and fixed, as if he were
on the other side
of something, as people said, yet unsullied by the usual piousness that Katherine found so often accompanied the aftermath of such experiences. She couldn’t even begin to tot up all the women in the office capable of the most clichéd of homilies which, thanks to their cheap therapy and off-the-peg religious catharses, they genuinely believed were spiritual and emotional gold. It made her rather queasy, and more than a little offended, all these people,
better now
, cured or enlightened in whatever way happened to suit, tottering round looking down on everyone else just because they hadn’t been
fortunate
enough to have their husband cheat on them or become seriously ill or see God through a miasma of toilet products. It was sickening, but there was none of that with Nathan.
    She wanted, of course, to know everything. What had happened; what he’d done; why; what treatment he’d had; what he was going to do now; how he felt. But of course Daniel, working as always on the principle that anything difficult was best left unsaid, was in conversation shut-down mode. He really was the boring father of the group at times, Katherine thought, which admittedly might have been quite sexy on a good day with the wind behind him, unless of course you’d actually slept with Daniel, in which case a lot of the oomph went out of the fantasy. Had he always been this tense? Basically, yes. Had Katherine often enjoyed cranking the tension a little higher? Absolutely.
    ‘So what are we eating?’ she asked Daniel. She had no desire to eat, of course. The thought of eating in front of them just now seemed oddly approximate to them all getting naked together, but she strongly suspected that Daniel would either not have prepared anything or, if he had, that it would be awful or, even better, that it would have every hope of being good but would then be scuppered by her getting him all flustered.
    ‘Eating?’ said Daniel.
    ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘As in, you know, food.’
    ‘Right,’ said Daniel.
    The trick, she thought, was to make Daniel feel horribly guilty and inadequate without pushing him so far that he actually presented them with a meal, because then she’d have to either not eat it (which might, now that she thought about it, be quite funny) or eat it and then schedule a trip to the toilet.
    ‘You have got some food, Daniel?’
    ‘Well, you know. Nibbles.’
    ‘Nibbles?’
    ‘Yes, Katherine. Fucking nibbles.’
    ‘I’m fine with nibbles, actually,’ said Nathan.
    Katherine held up her index and middle finger, the stub of her cigarette smoking furiously between them. ‘Now Nathan,’ she said. ‘One thing we’re