Idiopathy

don’t want to …’ He was about to suggest that Sebastian show whatever it was to Angelica, but then he remembered the vertigo-inducing silence and general bad energies of the room behind him.
    ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Yes, of course. Which way?’

    ‘S o,’ said Angelica brightly. ‘This is funny, isn’t it?’
    Katherine, who had drifted into the kitchen, eyed Angelica as she made the tea, watching her facility with everything. Her manner, Katherine thought, was irritating. She almost certainly subscribed to the philosophy that being kind to others led to them being kind to you – the exact antithesis of Katherine’s philosophy. This is what you turned into if you bought into all that stuff, Katherine thought. All that crap about love and kindness and vegetarianism.
    ‘Hilarious,’ said Katherine.
    Angelica blinked but didn’t respond.
    ‘Daniel’s told me a lot about you,’ said Angelica.
    ‘Oh?’ said Katherine near-automatically. ‘He hasn’t mentioned you much.’
    ‘No,’ said Angelica, apparently unfazed. ‘He’s not really like that. Do you take sugar? Since your lift hasn’t arrived yet I thought I’d do you a tea.’
    ‘Like what?’ said Katherine, lighting a cigarette. ‘Two please.’
    ‘Forthcoming,’ said Angelica with a smile, spooning sugar into Katherine’s tea and taking it back through to the dining table. ‘Here you go.’
    ‘Thanks,’ said Katherine, sitting down opposite her.
    ‘I think it’s great you two can get along like this,’ said Angelica.
    Katherine laughed despite herself. ‘Get along like what?’
    Angelica smiled. ‘Oh, I think you get along,’ she said. ‘In your own way.’
    Katherine wasn’t sure what this meant but found it annoying nonetheless. The thought of someone else knowing Daniel, as in knowing him well, was surprisingly upsetting. After all, one of the things they’d clung to through their time together had been the notion that each knew the other better than it would ever be possible for anyone else to know them. She realised that she’d always assumed, after they’d broken up, that Daniel would simply stop existing, not just as far as she or even others were concerned, but as far as
he
was concerned, that he would no longer leave a tangible trace in the world. She thought of those twins, separated at birth, reunited in later life to find themselves with matching jobs and houses and partners. There was an element of that in meeting Angelica, she thought. In knowing the same person, they somehow
were
the same person, and it wasn’t a person Katherine wanted to be.
    She wondered what, specifically, Daniel saw in this pretty little void, and then wondered if any of the things he saw in Angelica were things he’d also seen in her, Katherine. Because people had types, did they not? Men, in particular, were unimaginative; fixed of border. There had to be similarities.
    ‘So how did you two meet?’ said Katherine.
    ‘In a bar,’ said Angelica, rolling her eyes. ‘Predictable or what?’
    Katherine managed a smile. She tried to picture Daniel chatting someone up. When she’d met him she’d had to do everything: approach him, seduce him, ensure he didn’t startle.
I know you want to ask me out for coffee.
She’d felt like Dian Fossey, camped out in the jungle with her hand extended while Daniel roamed the thicket and cast her the occasional cautious glance. Whatever he’d seen in Angelica, it had clearly been something he wanted, unlike whatever it was he’d seen in Katherine. Or had he just evolved? If he had, Katherine thought, then it was surely as a result of being with her. Christ, she’d been the fucking making of him. She’d made something of him and then he’d left her, and he had, quite clearly, ended up better off, too. How was that possible? She used to
pity
him, for Christ’s sake. And now look. What did she have? Who did she have?
Keith?
    ‘I guess it’s all worked out, hasn’t it?’ said Katherine.
    Angelica nodded. ‘Touch and go for a while, though, wasn’t it?’
    Katherine smirked. ‘When isn’t it?’
    ‘Are you always so cynical?’ said Angelica.
    ‘No,’ said Katherine. ‘Sometimes I’m asleep.’
    Angelica laughed.
    ‘He must have changed,’ said Katherine. ‘When I knew him he’d never have chatted anyone up in a bar.’
    ‘Oh,’ said Angelica. ‘We’d both had a few by then.’ She made a queasy face. ‘Christmas spirit and all that.’
    Katherine felt a kind of