Idiopathy

rising ceiling-ward with the smoke from her mother’s cigarette, which she had waited for the duration of the conversation to light.

    D uring the evenings she wasn’t with Keith, which were numerous given that Keith had three other fucks to squeeze into his week, Katherine read and watched the news. She rarely watched anything else on television. Like much of Katherine’s life, what she read and what she watched were governed by her sense of types of people: types she wanted to be versus types she couldn’t stand. She didn’t want to be the sort of woman who watched soaps and weepie movies. She wanted to be the sort of woman who watched the news and read the Booker list. She imagined herself at parties, despite the fact she never went to parties, being asked her opinion on world affairs and modern literature.
    Confronted with such topical discussions, however, she found herself adrift and exposed. It wasn’t that she didn’t know what was happening, or that she didn’t, in some distant and largely hypothetical way, care: it was simply that she felt unable to muster appropriate levels of distress. Once this fact became clear, it seemed to spread its tentacles into the rest of her life in such a way as to make her question, not for the first time, exactly how human she could lay claim to being. Watching the news was, essentially, watching life, and the manner of her watching unnerved her. She thought of it as a certain lack of connection, a phrase, coincidentally, that she often used about men with whom she hadn’t gotten along. Others saw it as coldness, a phrase men Katherine hadn’t gotten along with often used to describe her.
Unmoved
was a word that came up a lot, both in Katherine’s head and in other people’s descriptions of her.
Emotionally hard-to-impress
, was the way she preferred to think about it. Just as declarations of love were not enough to stir the same in her, so footage of, say, starving Haitians was not enough, in and of itself, to cause the kind of damp-eyed distress that seemed so automatic in others. Swollen, malnourished bellies; kids with flies in their eyes; mothers cooking biscuits made of earth. It was faintly revolting. Sometimes, when in a particularly quarrelsome mood, Katherine asked people exactly what the relevance was. For some reason, people tended to find this question offensive. They cited vague humanitarian criteria. The word
children
came up a lot, as if simply saying it explained everything.

    K
ath
, Keith wrote in an email from an undisclosed location where he was holidaying with an un-named and un-gendered companion to whom he was almost certainly not related.
I miss you bad. I don’t think I can live without you. Love me?
    Keith
, Katherine wrote back.
I will never live with anyone who can’t live without me. Grow up. PS: who the fuck are you on holiday with?

    S omething had to be done. She was stagnating. For all she knew, she might already be dead. She needed a decisive act, she told herself, something that would galvanise her. She decided to quit her job. The fear of not having a job would force her to find a job.
    She ambushed her manager while he was unpacking a sandwich.
    ‘However did my wife manage to stop the mayonnaise soaking into the bread?’ he said. ‘Do you know? Is it a womanly secret? She doesn’t return my calls any more.’
    ‘I quit,’ said Katherine.
    ‘Again?’ said her manager.
    ‘This time I mean it.’
    ‘OK,’ he said, tossing his limp excuse for a sandwich back in the box. ‘What do you want?’
    ‘Nothing. I want to quit.’
    ‘I can’t give you another pay rise. People will start to think you’re sleeping with me.’
    ‘I don’t want a pay rise,’ said Katherine, who found it difficult to believe anyone would think he was sleeping with anyone. ‘I’m handing in my notice.’
    ‘Two days’ extra holiday.’
    ‘No. One month’s notice.’
    ‘OK.’ He held up his hands in defeat. ‘One month. Hey, you know, that would mean there was no longer a conflict of interest in terms of us …’
    She closed the door behind her as she left.

    ‘F uck me like you’re a child,’ said Keith, back from holiday and fucking her in a way that reminded her of an animal in a veterinary collar – as if she were something to be shaken off, a constraint out of which he needed to reverse. ‘Fuck me like you’re scared of me.’
    It proved to be too much of an imaginative leap. She fucked him like she pitied him and then