Idiopathy

fight. Instead, perhaps slightly envious of Nathan’s exit, which seemed to neatly excuse him from any discomfort or recrimination, she had hoped simply to slip away. She found the fantasy of Daniel living with his guilt far more appealing than the reality of having to dilute it by screaming at him, which would, she thought, only reinforce all those buried, passive-aggressive ideas he had about her and which had, she suspected, basically caused him to cheat on her in the first place, because heaven forfend that Daniel would ever actually try and discuss anything difficult. No, for Daniel, it was always the slinking exit; the barb buried in a platitude. The only thing aggression would achieve now would be for Daniel to be left with a memory of a final outburst – the word he used to describe any moment she became angry, regardless of the reasons or justifications for her anger. For Daniel, she thought as she left the house, head high, hoping in a considerably less head-high way that Keith might be outside,
life
was an outburst. He drifted from here to there, seeking calm, and when he failed to find it, he railed against whatever he thought might have taken it or prevented it.
    But now here he was, doing the guilt-face. If there was one thing she hated in a man it was the shrivelling, the soul-coddling, the blubbery indignation, that seemed to arise whenever they felt they had been misunderstood, and they always felt they’d been misunderstood, it seemed, right after they’d fucked someone behind your back.
    ‘Katherine,’ Daniel said.
    ‘Don’t speak to me,’ she said. ‘Don’t speak to me ever again.’
    ‘I … I’m so sorry, Katherine. I never meant …’
    She wanted to push past him and keep walking. She wanted to be very far from him indeed. She didn’t want to have to look at him or feel him looking at her. It was only as she began to muscle past, however, that she became properly aware of the fact that a lone cow was standing in the middle of the road, eyeing her oddly, while what looked like a mad hippy gestured awkwardly at its back end.
    ‘Just tap it on the flank, you say?’ said the hippy.
    ‘Fuck off, Sebastian,’ said Daniel, trying to reach for Katherine’s arm. ‘Katherine, I …’
    ‘I think she’s feeling kind of un-chill about this,’ called Sebastian. ‘I mean, she’s kind of giving me evils.’
    As Katherine hesitated, feeling suddenly vulnerable in the face of such a large and uncannily out-of-place animal, a car came round the corner, turning into the street. She winced in the undipped headlights, bringing her hand briefly to her eyes and trying to blink away the spangled swatch of reds that now stained her vision.
    ‘Shit,’ Daniel said. ‘Sebastian. Get that cow out of the road.’
    Springing into action, the man apparently named Sebastian skipped forward and thwacked the cow across the buttocks with the palm of his hand, causing it to leap surprisingly far into the air, yelp in a distinctly unbovine manner and charge directly towards Katherine.
    The whole life-flashing-before-your-eyes thing turned out to be a load of crap. A life certainly appeared in the foreground of Katherine’s mind, but it was not her own, and it was not a life that yet had any recognisable past. The only thing she thought of that even indirectly involved her was, as she had imagined so many times, her own funeral, her hysterical mother hurling herself on the coffin and then seeking solace in the arms of a swarthy mourner. Other than that, everything that glittered in Katherine’s adrenalised brain was something that hadn’t yet happened, concerning someone who didn’t yet exist.
    As the cow drew near, Katherine swallowed a great lungful of air and began charging towards it, screaming at the top of her lungs. She saw the cow’s eyes widen in alarm, saw it halt, skid slightly, then turn on a sixpence and, blinded by panic, barrel headlong into the approaching car, which swerved just enough to take the impact to the driver’s side. The door crumpled; the window shattered. The cow lost its footing on the asphalt, sprawled, recovered, turned again, and thundered past Daniel and Katherine up the road, its hooves ringing out on the quiet street, an absurd banner a-flap in its wake.
    ‘Katherine,’ said Daniel again, valiantly dashing forward and pulling her aside now that there was absolutely no danger whatsoever. She ignored him. She felt shot through with delirium and awe.
    From inside