Idiopathy

distant nausea; a far-off rumbling that spoke of storms to come.
    ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘so you haven’t been together long at all, then?’
    ‘Over a year,’ said Angelica. Before she even got to the word
year
her face seemed to falter under the pressure of what she’d said. Her mouth flapped for a moment, her eyes suddenly panicked. ‘Oh God,’ she said.
    Katherine put her mug of tea back down on the table and dropped what was left of her fag into the dregs, where it hissed quickly and was gone. She felt cold; imagined herself in tattered clothes.
    ‘We were still together that Christmas,’ she said.
    ‘I know,’ said Angelica.
    Katherine lit another cigarette.
    ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘That is very predictable.’
    ‘Katherine,’ said Angelica.
    Katherine felt as if the person hearing this news was not the person who’d once imagined hearing this news. She wanted very desperately to be angry, because that would obscure the hurt, but it seemed beyond her, edged out by pain. Already, her mind was at work with history, struggling to reshape it. She told herself she’d always suspected. She told herself there had been signs. But she hadn’t; there hadn’t. Lying, it turned out, had come surprisingly easy to Daniel. Or at least, lying to Katherine had. Perhaps with everyone else he’d been honest. Perhaps he’d saved all his duplicity for her.
    ‘Look at you,’ said Katherine, looking at Angelica.
    Angelica’s eyes were filling up, but nothing was overflowing. ‘He would have left you anyway,’ she said.
    ‘That’s right,’ said Katherine. ‘He would. He’d have met some other sucker and run off with them. How lucky you must feel that timing was on your side and you got to be that sucker.’ She sneered. ‘You probably think he loves you. He probably tells you he loves you. He probably tells
himself
he loves you. Because Daniel would never do anything so immoral, right? There’ll be a reason. There’ll be a way he can still come out of this looking like the patron fucking saint of self-regard.’ She hauled deep enough on her cigarette to feel sick. ‘I bet you sit up at night,’ she said, ‘telling yourselves it was
fate
, that the
planets conspired
to bring you together. I bet you’ve got this whole narrative about how you overcame the odds and the
universe
, through its magnificent fucking beneficence,
smiled on you
and made it all cosmically OK, so now you can spend the rest of your lives just …’
    She hadn’t meant to cry, but now she was crying she felt she might be able to overcome it through the sheer toxic force of what she felt.
    ‘Burn all the fucking joss sticks you like,’ she said. ‘You’ll still stink.’
    Angelica leaned back in her seat and looked at Katherine. She sniffed; knuckled the tears out of her eyes.
    ‘Poor you,’ she said coldly.
    ‘There you go,’ said Katherine, collecting her shoes from the corner and wrestling with the straps. ‘That’s the real you shining through.’

    ‘I liberated it,’ said Sebastian proudly.
    Daniel ignored him, and took a moment instead to contemplate the ‘it’ to which Sebastian referred: a cramped horsebox, containing a rather nonplussed cow. Strung from its neck, draping over its back and flank, was a large banner which read, in day-glo pink paint,
What passing bells for these who die as cattle?
    The cow looked dimly at Daniel. Daniel looked back at the cow, then at Sebastian, who was nodding slowly.
    ‘Yeah,’ Sebastian said. ‘Like,
oh
yeah.’
    ‘Sebastian.’
    ‘I always say, Daniel, as you know, that there’s talk, and then there’s action, and this is action. This is the ANC. This is Subcommandante Marcos. This is PETA on steroids. This is …’ He mimed a firework taking off, its rise, apex, slow descent and ultimate explosion. ‘
Brrrccchhhhhhowwwww
. You know?’
    ‘Sebastian.’
    ‘It’s like R. D. Laing throwing open the asylum. It’s the doors of perception. It’s Timothy Leary turning on in triplicate. It’s like, maybe you weren’t taking me seriously, you know? But now you are.
Now
you are. Because I’ve got a
cow
, motherfucker.’
    ‘Sebastian.’
    ‘Evolve and adapt. Change it up. Take it to the next level. Go
bovine
on the bastards.’
    ‘Sebastian.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Stand still.’
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘How did you get that cow, and what are you going to do with it, and why have you brought it here? And why for God’s sake has it got that ridiculous banner