Idiopathy

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.
    ‘I’m coming,’ he said, his voice hoarse, his sinuses ballooning under the pressure of speech. It sounded like he’d said, ‘I’b cubbig.’
    He wondered if he should call her right away. Perhaps, he thought, he should leave it a few days, or call at the weekend, when he was more likely to find her at home, and when he was more likely to be able to hold a sensible conversation.
    He fingered the tassels on the edge of the bedspread – one of those airbrushed cosmic designs that cram the infinite expanse of the planetary realm into the domestic confines of a mass-produced double bed. It was laughable, really. So much was laughable. In the corner of the bedroom was a large canvas where Angelica had expressed herself through the medium of Infant Art – capital I, capital A. One of her therapists had told her to paint with the innocence of a child. Angelica had finger-painted a sun and blue sky, except that her thumb had smudged the acrylic so that the sun’s rays turned green at the tips. It was endearing and awful. He listened to the message a final time and found he could read even less into it than before.
    ‘Honey? I said it’s ready. Are you coming down? They’re going to be here any minute and I’d really love it if you could …’
    ‘I said I’m coming.’
    He remembered Nathan the last time he’d seen him, standing under the summer stars in a forest clearing, naked from the waist up, standing perfectly still while a throbbing press of dancers ululated around him. He’d seemed somehow beyond it all, beyond time. Where
had
he been the past year and a half?
    Daniel found some jeans on the end of the bed and half-heartedly pushed his feet through the legs. He wanted to get back into bed and sleep. He wondered if he should tell Angelica about the message and then realised, with a little drop somewhere in his small intestine, that he wasn’t really wondering at all, merely pretending to himself that he was wondering. This was something he was capable of. He could go through the motions of decency in order to soften the inevitable indecency at the end. Whatever your moral fibre, as Katherine had always been fond of explaining, convenience trumped ethical resolve every time. Why else would God have invented remorse?
    ‘What are you doing up there?’
    ‘Nothing, honey, I’m just …’ He swept his thumb across the screen of his phone, clearing a moist print. ‘Just changing, that’s all.’
    Downstairs, he found Angelica swaddled in oven gloves, bearing aloft a glass baking dish filled with what looked like lentil cement.
    ‘Who was that on the phone?’ she said, standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room, lit from behind by the halogen bulbs that spotlit the worktops, her face in shadow, her hair oddly aflame at the edges. She was holding up the food like it was some sort of offering, as if they’d have to kneel to eat it. She looked happy and precarious. He told himself she might drop the dish if he was honest.
    ‘No one,’ he said. ‘Wrong number.’
    Angelica had been holding something delicate, he thought – it would have been incautious to tell her. But then, Daniel considered all disclosure incautious, and as long as he’d known her, there had never been a time when Angelica, metaphorically speaking, wasn’t bearing something delicate, something she was holding out to him like a fragile sacrifice, and even when she wasn’t, there had never been a time when