Idiopathy. Sam Byers

      Daniel was in bed when he got Katherine’s message. He had been there for three days, suffering from a crippling bout of what Angelica had diagnosed, rather unsympathetically, as Dan-Flu.

      Daniel had always been stoically healthy. Recently, however, he had developed an odd relationship with illness. He spent quite protracted periods of time believing he was becoming unwell.

      ‘I think I’m coming down with something,’ he’d say, making vague gestures at his throat or nose, his presentation largely asymptomatic. ‘I’ve got a funny … you know … like a sort of …’

      ‘Like a sort of hypochondria?’ Angelica would inevitably say. ‘Like a sort of deluded-type feeling?’

      ‘No. Like a sensation, a sort of sensation in my throat. I think there’s something going round.’

      On the verge of succumbing as he so often claimed to be, it was surprising how infrequently Daniel tipped the scales into observable disease. His relationship with illness was flirtatious; only a particularly attractive ailment could tempt him into bed. When it did, he reacted with all the high-flown sense of occasion one might expect from a man who was constantly yearning-and-putting-off.

      ‘No, no,’ he’d say, huffing another fistful of snot into a tissue and tossing the resultant goopy wad onto the heap of others he kept as a quantitative record of his malaise, ‘it’s definitely not a cold. Because my stomach feels weird and that suggests to me that it’s more …’

      He wondered what had become of him. In all the time he’d been with Katherine he’d been ill once, twice at most, and even then with great reluctance. He’d prided himself on his resilience. At his previous place of work he’d kept a copy of Field Marshal Montgomery’s famous sign on his desk: I’m 99% Fit, Are You? Odd, really, given how generally diseased his entire relationship with Katherine had been. Perhaps, he thought, you never really shut disease out; merely shunted it into new areas of your life.

      On this occasion, Daniel had succumbed to something that wasn’t quite flu, since it was accompanied by a level of fatigue and lower back pain that were not, in Daniel’s conception of flu, a normal part of the experience. Responding with his usual immediacy as soon as it became clear this was going to be a genuine bout of ill health, he’d taken to his bed and remained there for close to seventy-two hours, getting up only sporadically for such necessities as toast, orange juice and trips to the toilet. By day three he was in a satisfying funk. The bed reeked; he was greasy and unshaven; his dressing gown had become a grim second skin.

      Disappointingly, despite these heavily vaunted external indicators, Daniel also seemed to be showing every sign of recovery, and the thought was beginning to occur to him that the thing might have run its course, and that he should probably start thinking about getting up and making himself halfway human again before Angelica got genuinely impatient and frustrated rather than just teasingly so. Given that he and Angelica had invited friends round for dinner (or, more accurately, Angelica had invited her friends round for dinner), he was under a certain degree of pressure to recover, and much as he resented this, it seemed preferable to an evening spent listening to their echoing laughter downstairs.

      Daniel liked being ill. He regarded it as luxurious, almost decadent. He spent so much of his life being organised and well presented that he had come to regard illness as one of the few times he had permission to let himself go. He drank only occasionally, and although he had experimented with drugs in the past, largely supervised by Nathan, whose capacity for illegal intake was boundless and troubling and, to Daniel, faintly seductive, he had never really been the type to develop any regular habits of chemical relaxation. Indeed, the only time he was ever particularly tempted was when Angelica, as she often did, announced that she didn’t need drugs to have a good time, prompting Daniel to wonder if he might need drugs to have a good time around people who didn’t need drugs to have a good time.

      His convalescence had not, however, gone according to plan, and it was this precise sense of missed opportunity that now led him to resent his forced return to the land of the well. One of the great things about being ill, or so he’d always thought, was that it was one of the few times he could justifiably escape interaction. He liked to take to his bed, turn off the phone, and lie prone for as long as it took to feel human. This time, however, Angelica had been home for the first two days, and much as he respected her offers of hugs and food and ‘company’, none of them were really what he wanted. This morning she had gone out, and he had looked forward to spending at least a small portion of his alone-time masturbating to the collection of low-grade pornography he kept in a locked file marked ‘work’ on his laptop. His aim was predominantly medicinal. Daniel took scant pleasure in masturbation these days, but had become concerned about the quality of his sperm, as if his increasingly staid existence might be directly affecting the efficiency and productivity of his testes. He imagined the little beasts in their gloopy pool, wet-brained and lame, swim-limping around in impotent circles. Was it possible to have depressed sperm? If so, how could you tell? When he finished he made sure to study the mess on the tissue, the bedspread, the old T-shirt, for signs of dubious consistency or colouration. It always looked much the same, but recently he could have sworn that it had lost some of its sheen.

      As if aware of his intentions, however, Angelica had placed the cat on the bed before she left (her cat: Giggles, a vast, slovenly sand-bag of a beast, with matted fur and a gammy eye). Mistaking his dancing fist under the bedcover for some form of prey, Giggles had taken to leaping on Daniel’s genitals every three or four strokes, rendering him, after about ten futile minutes, incapable of anything even approaching pleasure, so terrified was he that, if he did achieve orgasm, it would be forever linked in his mind to the feeling of an obese cat pogoing around on his penis, thus possibly triggering some sort of latent and horribly embarrassing fetish.

      A frustrating day, then, made all the more disturbing by the sight, about twenty minutes after Angelica returned home, of his mobile phone vibrating and Katherine’s name scrolling gently across the screen.

      If it is possible to miss someone while simultaneously hoping you never have to see them again, then this is how Daniel felt about Katherine. He’d softened over time, of course, and in the end nostalgia had just about won out over revulsion, but it was touch and go. A kind of tender nausea, was how he thought of it; a wistful horror.

      He listened to her message twice, sitting on the edge of the bed, half out of his dressing gown. He felt ragged and poorly put together. He lacked, suddenly, the energy and willingness to get up and change.

      Angelica called from downstairs, her voice like full beams through fog, ‘Daniel? Are you coming? It’s ready, baby. But you’ve got to be honest, OK?’

      He played the message again, trying to read Katherine’s voice, flat-toned, business-like – her voice for getting things done. Was that a flutter he could detect? A tension? Did it fall a little at the end? Did her message seem hurried, as if she just wanted to get through it? As always with Katherine, he hoped for more than he received, and the fact that he still, after all this time of learning to know better, hoped at all, was itself a source of both irritation and sadness.