Idiopathy

going to have to be clear on. You’re going to have to stop being so nice to Daniel.’

    D aniel tipped some cylindrical shapes of reconstituted potato into a salad bowl, stuffed a handful into his mouth, and then ambled around the kitchen enjoying a brief mental image of twisting a corkscrew into Katherine’s head and uncorking her brain, at which point he realised he’d somehow managed to locate a corkscrew and uncork a bottle of red without any conscious engagement whatsoever. This was how murder happened, he thought, looking at the open bottle. There you were, ambling around your kitchen looking for something, and the next thing you knew an hour had vanished from your life and you’d fashioned a necklace from the ears of the dead.
    He took a swig of the red. It felt good to mix his drinks. He felt in his pocket for the comforting bulge of foil-wrapped skunk. At what point in the evening was it appropriate to mention it? Now?
    ‘Dude,’ he said, ambling back into the dining room and putting the drinks on the table. ‘I got you a present.’
    ‘Oh?’ said Nathan.
    Daniel fished in his pocket and, not without considerable pride, brought out the little foil-wrapped parcel, presenting it to Nathan flat on his palm, the way you might offer a horse an apple. He did a mini mock-operatic song, too, which he felt added both gravitas and amusing self-awareness to the whole slightly complicated moment. He tried not to beam; then, when Nathan made a diagonal with his mouth, tried not to falter.
    ‘Oh,’ said Nathan. ‘Is that …’
    ‘It’s really good,’ said Daniel. ‘I figured it might have been a while.’
    ‘It has,’ said Nathan. ‘And I’m afraid it’s going to be a while longer, too.’
    ‘Oh,’ said Daniel. He was still holding his hand out. Already his brain was entering its emergency embarrassment-limitation mode, whereby it instructed him to talk loudly, laugh inappropriately and go slightly floppy as if to demonstrate how literally relaxed he was. ‘Well, I mean, that’s cool, man, you know? We can crack it out later, or …’
    ‘No,’ said Nathan, surprisingly firmly. ‘I mean it’s going to be forever. Like, I can’t do that any more.’
    ‘Right,’ said Daniel, nodding. ‘Yeah, I mean, of course, like …’
    ‘Moron,’ said Katherine happily.
    ‘It’s just …’ Nathan looked genuinely uncomfortable, which was making Daniel uncomfortable, which was in turn making the crisis control systems in his head go to ever further lengths to make him look comfortable. By now he’d almost completely lost muscle tone. He draped himself casually over the back of a chair; ran his hand through his hair; slipped off the back of the chair; caught himself; stretched and yawned.
    ‘Totally cool,’ he said. ‘Totally, totally cool.’
    ‘But you go ahead,’ said Nathan. ‘It’s fine.’
    ‘Yeah, I might do that,’ said Daniel, who was beginning to feel distinctly panicked. ‘I mean, it’s not something I do often, but …’
    Nathan nodded. Inside Daniel’s mind, a vast drug-related difference engine was struggling to compute. His entire coping mechanism for the evening had, quite obviously, been to get wasted. Indeed, his entire coping mechanism for the past week had in many ways centred on this. He looked at his watch. It was early: horribly, terrifyingly early. What in God’s name were they supposed to do now? Talk to each other? About what? He was standing, he thought, on the cusp of an existential slurry pit. He sank into his chair and wondered what the best way out of it was. His solution was both predictable and, perhaps as a direct result of its predictability, reassuring: he should carry on as normal.
    ‘Yeah,’ he said, unwrapping the little parcel, ‘I might just have a quick one, you know. How about you, Katherine?’
    ‘Probably not,’ she said. ‘But don’t let us stop you.’

    H aving never ‘opened up’, as the saying went, to anyone before the evening he’d perhaps ill-advisedly opened up to Katherine, Nathan had not only never known how it felt to tell someone something honest and secret about yourself, he had also, perhaps more crucially, never known how it felt to re-encounter the person with whom you’d had that particular conversation in the first place. It was, he thought, rather like the sensation of removing an old plaster from your fingertip. Every time Katherine looked at him it was like touching something afresh with that recently