Idiopathy

by Byers, Sam

  For Katherine, a sense of connection with others was no different to the cashmere cardigan; the much-desired boyfriend. She pined for it; drew it towards her; felt herself open ever so slightly outwards, and then recoiled, convinced that the happiness she’d sought was now a responsibility to be managed in much the same way as she managed the height of chairs and the temperature of the air-con: a series of small adjustments which would result, as she made them, in the gradual erosion of her core.

  Katherine got caught in the lift with Keith, having wrongly assumed he was now committed to the stairs, and realised with sinking horror that she still wanted him to want to sleep with her.

  He said, ‘I’m in such a calm place right now. I feel like I’m getting back to the person I’ve always wanted to be.’

  ‘You look fat,’ she said. ‘Maybe the person you’ve always wanted to be is fat.’

  ‘You’re angry,’ he said. ‘Anything I can do?’

  ‘Maybe we could meet up sometime,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Keith with a smile that was painfully kind. ‘I don’t think that would help.’

  ‘Don’t pity me,’ she said. ‘Don’t you fucking dare.’

  ‘You’re right. Better to just stalk around pitying yourself, right, princess?’

  ‘You prick.’

  ‘Right back at you,’ he called, as she got off on the wrong floor.

  Later, she saw him talking to Claire Demoines, who stood on tiptoe in her fuck-off-red fuck-me heels and gave him a love-me hug. Katherine went round and kicked the safety catches off four of the fire extinguishers so as to have a job to distract her in the afternoon.

  The cows were endless. They went on and on. She went home every evening and caught up with their lack of movement.

  ‘You join us live and exclusive,’ barked Bill Palmer to camera, eyes wide above his protective face mask; rubber-gloved hands gesticulating excitedly towards the motionless cow behind him. ‘Behind me is Simone, the first infected cow to be filmed. Beside me here is local vet Bob Chevington. Bob, tell me what we’re seeing here.’

  Bill Palmer was an ex-war reporter stuck doing domestic reports after valiantly getting himself shot on camera. He was, Katherine thought, clearly relishing this unusual opportunity for drama, and had become something of a ubiquitous presence through what it now seemed de rigueur to refer to as the crisis. His approach was basically sartorial. Outside embassies he wore the foreign correspondent’s uniform of blue cotton shirt and pleated chinos. In Afghanistan it was sandy camouflage and a range of helmets. Now, clearly alert to the possibility of both drama and further journalistic recognition, he was in a white boiler suit with the hood pooled insouciantly at his neck, his mane of white hair thrust sideways by a stiff breeze; his generous eyebrows knitted into a frown that spoke of news valiantly borne in the face of heavy peril.

  ‘Well, Bill, what we’re seeing here is classic Bovine Idiopathic Entrancement,’ said the vet. ‘This animal has been staring straight ahead for over twenty-four hours. It remains completely motionless. It is totally unresponsive to stimulus.’

  ‘And what’s the prognosis, Bob?’

  ‘Death. Probably by dehydration.’

  ‘Dark times,’ said Bill. ‘Here’s Chastity with the weather.’

  The camera lingered on the stricken cow, its glazed, dead eyes seemingly looking straight at Katherine.

  All the old patterns were resurfacing. She could see them; name them; but felt powerless to intervene. The feeling was similar to jamming her fingers down her throat and dry-heaving all the food she’d neglected to eat. She was gagging on an emotional nothingness, and in an attempt to circumvent it she returned to the tried-and-tested method of ascribing to Daniel the things she couldn’t feel for herself, or perhaps felt but couldn’t name. It was all so familiar – her disaffection with kindness at the office so neatly mirroring her disaffection with Daniel. She used to test his commitment by hurting him. She threatened to leave him, or cheat on him, then watched his face and measured the depth of his feelings for her by the extent to which it crumbled. He was insecure; prone to worry. If he ever became confident, she thought, it would mean that he no longer loved her, since to love someone is to worry; to need someone is to fear the inevitability of their absence. Without fear, she thought, without drama, there was only the grey blankness of late-middle-age relationships, where, as far as she could make out, concepts like love and passion were replaced by what she saw as the wretched terminology of codependent ennui: companionship, contentment, compromise; where one person’s love for another was no longer stated simply because it was no longer questioned; where the key indicator not only of love but also of solidity would simply be the mere fact of the solidity and love that had gone before. No, no, she thought. Better the sense of odds, of struggle; the ongoing and repeated relief of trauma endured and survived. Without it, there was only the security of the unimaginative: an unspokenly dwindling sex life; roiling resentment; his-and-hers facial hair.

  She went back to the charity shop where she’d donated Keith’s vibrator. She told them she’d left something in the bag by accident and wanted it back. The woman looked blank yet suspiciously relaxed.

  ‘I haven’t seen anything,’ she said. ‘What was it you left?’

  ‘A vibrator,’ said Katherine.

  ‘Oh. Um …’

  ‘You can’t miss it,’ said Katherine. ‘It’s shaped like an enormous penis and on the side it says The Widowmaker in day-glo letters.’

  ‘I don’t think I …’

  ‘I know you’ve got it,’ said Katherine.

  ‘I assure you I haven’t.’

  ‘Give it back.’

  ‘I would if I could.’

  ‘Whatever,’ said Katherine.

  Claire Demoines did a lap of Katherine’s floor and dropped the news, to which she had, she explained, been privy for some time but which she had promised not to disclose as it was both private and sensitive.

  ‘He really wasn’t sure he wanted anyone to know,’ Katherine overheard her saying in a low voice to Jules and Debbie and Carol. ‘But I mean we’ve talked about it a lot and I said I thought he’d probably feel better if it was out there and he didn’t have to cover it up any more.’

  ‘Mmmm,’ said Jules, being So Compassionate. ‘He’s being So Brave.’

  ‘There’s such a taboo, isn’t there?’ said Carol.

  ‘It’s like you can’t even discuss it,’ said Debbie. ‘But he’s really Putting It Out There, which is So Admirable.’

  ‘I just feel really privileged he felt able to open up to me,’ said Claire.

  ‘Mmm,’ said Debbie, Jules and Carol, all of whom, Katherine knew, now hated Claire for being the person Keith had opened up to more than any of them despite all of their overweening efforts to get Keith to open up. Not that they cared about Keith, of course, or that they really desperately wanted to be involved, but, as Debbie would later put it to Katherine, who exactly did Claire Demoines think she was, just flouncing in after, what, a week? and getting Keith, who they’d all known much longer, to totally open up to her.

  ‘What am I missing?’ said Katherine brightly, sidling up to Claire Demoines and cocking a glance at the intricacy of her tights. Keith would ladder those in a heartbeat, she thought, with his ghastly fingers.

  ‘Keith’s been seeing someone,’ said Claire.

  ‘Great,’ said Katherine. ‘How lovely. Is it serious?’

  ‘No, not like that. He’s been undergoing treatment.’ She invested the term with all the gravity she could muster.

  Katherine did a mental checklist of all the things for which Keith might possibly wish to seek treatment. His toxic personality aside, he was quite prone to recurrent urinary tract infections, around which she supposed it was possible to say there was something of a taboo.

  ‘Right,’ said Katherine. ‘Is it serious?’

  ‘He’s a sex addict,’ said Debbie, unable to contain herself. ‘But now he’s ge
tting some treatment.’

  ‘What does the treatment entail?’ said Katherine. ‘Is it like being a heroin addict? Can you get some sort of sex substitute on prescription?’

  ‘Well, it’s a talking cure,’ said Claire flatly.

  ‘Like a prostitute, you mean,’ said Katherine.

  ‘No, like an analyst.’

  ‘So he’s seeing a shrink because he can’t stop shagging people.’

  ‘His toxic and addictive attitude to sex has been greatly damaging his relationships,’ said Claire.

  ‘Shagging people does that,’ said Katherine.

  By lunchtime the details were all round the office. Keith was undergoing some sort of aversion therapy. He wore a rubber band round his wrist so he could twang it whenever he felt tempted. This would, apparently, transport him back to certain states of aversion and restraint he’d explored under hypnosis. He told Debbie, in the strictest confidence, that he’d looked back on some of the things his addiction had made him do and, although he didn’t want to go into detail for fear of offending Debbie or causing her never to wish to interact with him again, he was not proud of himself. So he had, he explained to Carol in the strictest confidence, taken some of those experiences and had a good hard look at them and then related them to a therapist, who had explained that he had an addiction, and that his addiction was poisoning his life, and that what he needed to do was build meaningful relationships with women without having sex with them. Apparently, he’d explained to Claire in the strictest confidence, his therapist had pointed out that a perfectly natural consequence of building meaningful relationships with women without sleeping with them would be that he would want to sleep with them. This would be partly because he was building a meaningful relationship, which is always arousing, and partly because sex would now feel like something of a taboo, which was, as everyone knew, kind of sexy.

  So, Keith quietly explained to Debbie, Carol, Claire and Dawn, who by now had overcome their disappointment at realising they all actually had Keith’s confidence and tended to talk to him in a little cluster, the point was that he should not, under any circumstances, reduce his contact with women. Indeed, he should increase his contact with women, since that was how he was going to go about building better relationships with them. So really, what he was saying was that he needed the help of the women of the office. Would they, he wondered, could they possibly, find the time to help him practise some meaningful relationships by, say, going to coffee with him, or perhaps just having a spot of lunch or even, as time went on and Keith’s powers of resistance grew stronger, maybe even going to dinner? They could feel perfectly safe, he told them, not only because his days of basically being an absolute animal when it came to sex were behind him, but also because his aversion therapy meant he could very easily, if the inclination to sleep with any of them arose (which, he assured them, it very definitely would, because they were all very attractive, which was precisely why he was enlisting their support), snap his elastic band, which his therapist had placed there to form an anchor with the images of aversion they’d worked on together which, Keith gravely informed the assembled women, were so repellent that a woman would basically have to be the most attractive woman alive to still seem attractive after he’d associated her in his head with what were, he near-whispered, very unpleasant things indeed.

  ‘This is horrendous,’ said Katherine to Debbie in the staffroom.

  ‘Isn’t it?’ said Debbie, gazing wistfully after Keith. ‘All those awful things he wanted to do …’

  ‘God,’ said Katherine’s mother, dropping by with Katherine’s sister Hazel in tow, both of them trailing a flatulent cloud of smugness that Katherine felt would have to be professionally removed after they left. ‘This couldn’t have come at a better time. Honestly, Hazel, you’re a lifesaver. Wasn’t I just saying to you the other week that I needed to recuperate, Katherine?’

  ‘No,’ said Katherine.

  ‘Oh don’t be like that, Katherine,’ said Katherine’s mother. ‘You can come too, next time.’

  ‘No thank you,’ said Katherine.

  ‘And no thank you,’ said Hazel. ‘The whole point is to rid yourself of toxins, not take them along with you.’

  ‘That’s enough, Hazel,’ said Katherine’s mother, then, in a tone of voice that somehow suggested it should make Katherine feel better, ‘You look absolutely awful, Katherine.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Katherine.

  ‘No need for sarcasm. It’s motherly concern. What are you doing to yourself?’

  ‘I think I’m just run-down.’

  ‘Run-down from what?’

  ‘Life.’

  ‘Spare me. Is there any more coffee?’

  ‘I can make some.’

  Katherine’s mother looked her up and down.

  ‘Sit still,’ she said softly. ‘I’ll make it.’

  It struck Katherine that she might cry: an increasingly common response to unexpected kindness. It was something she had to ready herself for, these days. When it snuck up on her unsolicited, she was thrown.

  ‘What have you been eating?’ said her mother, nosing in the fridge. ‘God, there’s a tumbleweed blowing through here.’

  ‘There’s a tumbleweed blowing through a lot of things,’ chimed Hazel.

  ‘I eat out a lot,’ said Katherine.

  ‘Who with?’ said Katherine’s mother.

  ‘No one.’

  ‘You eat out alone? God, darling. That sounds depressing.’

  ‘I like it.’

  ‘No you don’t. You do it and then kid yourself that you like it. It’s how you’ve always been.’

  ‘How have I always been?’

  Katherine felt defensive and edgy, largely because she felt vulnerable and tearful and hated the thought that her mother and, worse, her sister, might see her at a low ebb.

  ‘You’ve always kidded yourself,’ said Hazel.

  ‘Like with what?’

  Her family, she thought, had an unwavering desire and ability to gang up on her.

  ‘Like with everything,’ said Hazel. ‘You don’t have the career you want so you always go off on these ridiculous monologues about how glad you are to have avoided the rat race. You don’t have a relationship so you go on and on about how glad you are not to be in a relationship because men are such a drag. You miss Daniel, so you take absolutely every opportunity to …’

  ‘I do not miss Daniel.’

  ‘Please,’ said Hazel. ‘Anyone would miss Daniel.’

  ‘What is this?’ said Katherine. ‘An intervention?’

  ‘Call it sisterly concern,’ said Hazel.

  ‘That’s enough, you two,’ said Katherine’s mother, carrying through a cafetière. ‘Who wants milk?’

  Katherine lit a cigarette. ‘Not for me. Two sugars.’

  She looked Hazel up and down. Generic was the word that sprang to mind. Conservative denim and chunky knits; a makeup routine almost certainly cribbed from a magazine article that used words like understated and confident.

  Her mother sat back down and dealt with the coffee while Hazel, who was sitting opposite Katherine, gave her the appraising eye.

  ‘Mum’s right,’ she said. ‘You do look awful. Do you want the name of my dermatologist?’

  ‘What you need,’ said Katherine, ‘is a shag.’

  Hazel yawned. ‘You know what you are?’ she said. ‘Predictable, that’s what.’

  ‘You know what you are?’ said Katherine.

  ‘We don’t want to know what she is,’ said Katherine’s mother. ‘Katherine. We’re worried about you.’

  ‘Well, don’t be. I’m fine.’

  ‘There’s a job opening up in my company,’ said Hazel. ‘I could put in a word. Seriously. I mean, all joking aside. You know.’

  Katherine lit a second cigarette off the butt of the first. She could, she thought, say yes. She could pack up and leave; start again. She would be good at the job her sister was offering, whatever it was, because she was al
ways good at her job. After work, she and her sister would go to a wine bar or perhaps a restaurant. They would order crisp white wines and light pasta dishes and a salad to share, and when men – half-decent men in crumpled Friday suits with their ties progressively askew – offered to buy them drinks, they would smile and accept, and then afterwards they would laugh and agree that none of the men were good enough, saying did you SEE what he was wearing? Perhaps they would share a house. Perhaps for a time they would be happy, at least until one of them met someone and it all fell apart. Wouldn’t that, any of that, be better than this?

  Except, of course, it wouldn’t be like that, because Katherine would be accepting a kindness, and the second she accepted it she would resent it, and her sister would resent her for resenting it, and how long would it take, really, before an argument over food or a night out or something trivial spun on its axis the moment her sister reminded her that she got her this job and wasn’t she even grateful for that?

  ‘No,’ she said eventually. ‘I’m alright, thank you.’

  ‘I don’t even know why we called in,’ said Hazel. ‘It’s an hour out of our way.’

  ‘Why did you?’ snapped Katherine. ‘I didn’t ask you to.’

  ‘We wanted to see you, Katherine,’ said her mother, who now sounded hurt in a way that Katherine found enraging.

  ‘Well consider me seen,’ said Katherine.

  After they left she started to cry, but checked herself. Won’t help, she told herself repeatedly. Won’t help so don’t bother.

  Sometimes, in quieter moments, when her looming fears and preoccupations had, if not exactly receded, then at least temporarily weakened, Katherine would think of Nathan, wondering what he was doing and, more pertinently, what had happened in the past year and a half. Nothing good, she assumed. He was always, she thought, heading towards nothing particularly good, and if their friendship could have been characterised by any sort of arc it would have been that at one stage the knowledge of where Nathan was headed had seemed exciting, even romantic, but later less so. He had always been edgy, of course, and no one would ever have suggested his lifestyle was healthy or that his choices were always the most positive, but in the last months the change had been noticeable. She and Daniel had begun to discuss it – his twitching eyes and sudden non sequiturs; his occasional comments about unhappiness or, as he’d put it to her once, what he saw as an actual inability to be happy – but this had been at a time when she and Daniel weren’t discussing anything very much outside themselves, and when they too were not heading for anything particularly good, and when, as is always the case in a relationship that is either decaying or blossoming, events external to them as a couple seemed to require more effort to observe than to ignore. Had they let him down? Had they failed someone at one of those rare critical moments when failure is permanent? Until very recently she would have said, had she been asked by the right person at the right time and in the strictest possible confidence, that they had, but now he had phoned, and he had, quite clearly, asked for help, suggesting that the previous time they’d failed hadn’t actually been the irrevocable moment at all, but a precursor, a warning. Of course, that also raised the distinct possibility that this was therefore the big moment, the one they had to get right, which did not make her feel particularly assured, given that it was once again a bad time, and that she was distracted, and that there were things in her life that seemed to preclude the addition of more things to her life.