Idiopathy

oddly humourless, as if free expression and boundless emotional exploration were such a serious business that they left no room for actual fun.
    ‘Who wants more?’ said Angelica, pouring the cat onto the floor as she stood up to attend to the food. ‘Honestly, there’s loads.’
    ‘I couldn’t,’ said Plum. ‘Really.’
    ‘Not for me,’ said Daniel. ‘Lovely as it was. I’m stuffed.’
    ‘Looks like it’s just you and me, Seb. Go on, have another spoonful.’
    ‘Absolutely don’t mind if I do,’ said Sebastian, passing his plate over. ‘You must give me the recipe.’
    ‘I’m so blessed to have a man who cooks,’ said Plum.
    ‘Oh, you are,’ said Angelica. ‘Daniel’s a bloody disaster area in the kitchen.’
    ‘How can you eat something if you don’t have a relationship with it?’ said Sebastian, dry-swallowing another wad of brownish paste.
    ‘Mmmm,’ said Angelica.
    Daniel said nothing. The difficulty of these little soirées with Sebastian and Plum was that they had a tendency to cast Daniel as the negative one, the one who blew the vibe all too easily. This meant that he not only had to tolerate them but also had to out-positive them, which of course was difficult when he felt he was about to gag.
    He decided to quarantine himself quickly, before all the sewage inside him escaped.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m not well. I might need to lie down.’
    ‘Really, honey?’ said Angelica. ‘Are you really feeling rotten and miserable?’
    ‘Yes,’ said Daniel. ‘Sorry.’
    ‘Maybe we should go,’ said Plum.
    ‘No, no,’ protested Daniel, noting that Sebastian had remained silent through this exchange. ‘Don’t mind me. You stay and have a good time. I might even come back down. I just need a bit of a rest, that’s all.’
    ‘Feel better soon,’ advised Plum.
    As he climbed the stairs, already regretting what must have seemed a sudden and rather pathetic exit, he could hear Sebastian taking up the theme.
    ‘You know,’ he said, ‘the Bhutanese believe that how someone handles illness says a lot about how they handle life …’
    He lay down on the bed, fully clothed, and closed his eyes. The lentils were repeating. He felt weighed down, awkwardly anchored to the world around him. His brain was somehow racing and limping at the same time.
    He was, he thought, slightly self-indulgently but with a certain amount of satisfaction,
troubled
. He recognised this because it wasn’t a new phenomenon. Just as spots of blood will point to guilt or illness (the scarlet smear on the handkerchief; the pink streamers of sinister matter in the urine), so Daniel’s thoughts were increasingly spattered with ugly spots of troubling disturbance. Childhood transgressions bubbled to the surface. Old crimes and embarrassing social stumbles pricked at him from the darker recesses of his memory. At perfectly ordinary moments he found his ears burning, his cheeks flushed, his stomach twisting down towards his bowels at the memory of mistakes gone by. Did he think he was perfect? Did he
wish
he was perfect?
    Recently, as if he had unconsciously exhausted his archive of slight yet resilient pains, the memories had begun to be accompanied by sudden, pressing fears. What if Angelica became ill? What if he became ill? What if he lost his job? Perhaps Angelica didn’t love him. Perhaps she had met someone else. How would he be able to tell? How could he tell if he loved her? Like the memories, these fears loomed seemingly from nowhere, from the depths or the peripheral distance, like fish nipping at breadcrumbs on the surface of their calm pool. He wondered if it was because, as he had thought before, he was evaporating as he aged. Perhaps as all the fluids of his self drifted skywards, the things he’d long since drowned returned to the surface. He pictured those selfsame fish – beached, gills gaping, scales already losing their luminescence in the suffocating air. Was this what he was? Was this what everyone was, in the end, a collection of buried, ignored, suppressed detritus that remained stubbornly on the tideline after everything else had receded?
    Thinking about it now, in bed, with his hand over his eyes and a childish tremble in his upper lip, he realised that this was why Katherine’s call had unnerved him so thoroughly. Here, at the sight of a single name scrolling across a screen, was the feeling of everything he’d buried being exhumed without dignity. Yes, he had let