‘Mmhmm,’ nodded Sebastian. ‘But there’s the issue of the common good.’
‘Who decides that?’
‘Daniel’s a bit grumpy today,’ said Angelica, rubbing his back and pouting. ‘He’s had an ickle bit of fwoo.’
‘Oh fuck off.’
‘You’d be right out of the Native American leadership circle with that sort of behaviour,’ said Plum, winking at Daniel. She had a way of somehow joining in with the general conversational trend while at the same time suggesting a degree of sympathy with the underdog, meaning no one could ever justifiably get angry with her, meaning in turn that Daniel quickly became angry with her but had no idea how to express it without looking like an arsehole.
‘Illness is such a blessing,’ said Sebastian, helping himself to some more of the lentil thing. ‘It’s so cleansing.’
‘I’m full of snot. I don’t feel cleansed.’
‘Gwumpy wumpy,’ said Angelica, reaching down to pick up the cat, groaning a little as she heaved its formless mass onto her lap. ‘He’s gwumpy, isn’t he? Yes he is. Yes he is.’
‘I remember when I had dysentery in Sri Lanka,’ said Plum. ‘God, it was like being a new person at the end of it.’
Sebastian put his arm round her and kissed her temple. ‘You were so beautiful going through that,’ he said.
‘Gwumpy man. Gwumpy wumpy daddy man. Yes he is. Yes he is.’
‘Do you have to talk to the cat about me in that way? I mean really? Is it really necessary?’
‘Animals know our true selves,’ said Sebastian. ‘If you’re comfortable with your true self you have nothing to fear from the cat, regardless of what Angelica says to it.’
‘I’m not that concerned about the cat’s opinion, actually, it’s more the …’
‘I sometimes feel like he looks right through me,’ said Angelica, looking at Daniel but ostensibly referring to the cat. ‘Like he can just walk into the room and know, you know? Like the other day when I was feeling really negative, you remember, honey, over that whole thing with the phone and the … anyway, that’s irrelevant, I don’t want to go back to that space again, but he just walked into the room, and looked at me, and I just felt he understood, and he came and sat with me, and it was so calming, and I thought, all of this is happening without language, without words.’
‘It’s true,’ said Daniel. ‘He knows the pain of being mischarged on your quarterly BT bill.’
‘It’s not that literal,’ said Sebastian.
‘I know. I was sort of joking.’
Sebastian nodded as if this confirmed something very important to him. It was one of the things that Daniel had never quite understood about Sebastian and Plum and their ilk. For people who believed in freedom and expression and peace and love, who railed daily against the tyranny of the squares, they were 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 Nathan down towards the end, of course he had, they all had. Yes, he had cut Katherine off in a manner unbefitting their five years together, giving her the sense, as she had said in her last letter to him just under a year ago, that none of it had mattered, that it had all been a mistake. And yes, most of all, he had lied to Katherine,