Idiopathy

he took to be ‘I love you.’ He mouthed the same back at her and smiled. She smiled back.
    ‘God, this cull,’ he said.
    ‘Isn’t it awful? Those poor cows.’
    Daniel hadn’t actually considered the cows. His mind had been on more work-based concerns, such as the potential for a PR apocalypse. But then Angelica was one of those people, the sort who, walking through the city and passing a bedraggled vagabond flanked by neckerchiefed Labradors, would say simply,
Oh, those poor dogs
.
    ‘I know,’ he said.
    ‘Do you?’ said Angelica, looking up suddenly from her book, her eyes full.
    Daniel froze for a moment. Did he?
Did
he know?
    ‘Um … Yes,’ he said.
    ‘Oh Daniel,’ she said, breathing out and beaming. ‘I love you so much.’
    ‘Me too,’ he said.
    He kept experiencing these little freezes: rude sensations of being locked out of his own existence, just for a second. He seemed to come to, though from what he was never sure, to find reality had advanced a beat without him. He was more aware of them now because it was precisely one of these fleeting moments of existential paralysis that had got him into the current thorny predicament with reference to his apparent inability to stop telling Angelica he loved her.
    He’d awoken early, the morning after Katherine phoned, and briefly congratulated himself on his handling of the night before. Her call had thrown him, but he felt he’d recovered reasonably well. Angelica hadn’t suspected anything; he’d been only moderately offensive in the face of Sebastian’s highly offensive presence; his early trudge to bed had surely been successfully masked by his man flu; and he’d acquitted himself more than tolerably in the sack before nodding off. It was while considering these achievements that he became aware that his head had rolled in Angelica’s direction and, worse, that she had woken up and was staring back at him with that particular sentimental intensity that always made him feel as if someone had just daubed his skin with tiger balm. When he brought her into focus, he found she was smiling.
    ‘What are you thinking?’ she asked.
    It was a good question. What
was
he thinking? He realised he needed to think of any random subject in the world – football; the news; work; his dreams – and that would end the conversation, but his brain was suddenly bereft of resources, and when he tried to think he heard only the sort of cavernous echo that might accompany a bucket dropped into an empty well. What
was
he thinking? What was he
thinking
?
    ‘Err … I love you,’ he said, politely ignoring the air-raid siren in his brain.
    She beamed. ‘Love you too,’ she said, throwing her arms around him and hugging him until he perspired.
    The damage was done. Now every time he looked at her he felt she was looking at him in anticipation of him telling her he loved her, meaning every time he
didn’t
tell her he loved her he felt like exactly the sort of shit he should have felt like every time he
did
tell her he loved her. Somehow, not telling her he loved her had become synonymous with telling her he didn’t love her, meaning he had to tell her he loved her just to maintain the status quo.
    He glanced again at his newspaper. Some cretin in the op-ed section was going all weak-kneed about animal rights. Daniel imagined him, the columnist, bravely mopping the tears from his keyboard as he typed on. Sebastian would be all over this, he thought grimly. When had normality become so bloody weird?
    He gathered his newspaper and stood up.
    ‘Just going to brush my teeth,’ he said, tucking the newspaper under his arm. ‘Won’t be long.’
    It was a daily euphemism. Neither of them ever announced they were going for a shit. They were forever cleaning their teeth or washing their faces. For some reason they both always said they wouldn’t be long.

    H e thought about Katherine as he drove to work, or rather, he thought around her, tending as he did to back his way into any reverie in which she might be involved. He’d been turning the telephone message over in his mind for a couple of days, and in between telling Angelica he loved her he’d made a concerted effort to at least begin to diagnose his feelings. Sadly, he’d made little headway, and his sense of how he thought he might be feeling differed depending on his sense of how he thought he might be living, which recently had been fluctuating on a near-daily basis, tied up as it was in Daniel’s