Idiopathy

him a favour and so offered to take him out for a beer, after which he told them about the parties he sometimes threw in remote and often rural locations, until the day, quite by accident and without any prior thought, they both simultaneously, in conversation, referred to him as a friend and, as much to their surprise as anyone else’s, meant it.

I n Katherine’s mind, necessity and loss had always been one and the same: what had to be done came always at the expense of what she wanted. Even if whatever it was that needed to be done had, at some time, been exactly what she wanted, the very sense of its shifting from desire to requirement would mean she no longer wanted it. The job she’d spent weeks fretting she wouldn’t get became drudgery in practice; the cashmere sweater she’d coveted for months became an annoyance the second she had to hand-wash it. Even Daniel, on whom she’d expended weeks of flirtation and tactical blanking when they’d both briefly temped in the same company and he’d caught her eye by apparently having no interest in catching her eye, became just another source of resentment once the excitement of snaring gave way to the effort of keeping. Disappointment was, disappointingly, something of a habit.
    So it was hardly surprising, given this long-standing and, in Katherine’s eyes, perfectly reasonable trait, that she experienced the gradual reality of her pregnancy not as an event, or even really as a crisis, but as a loss. Her decisions were no longer her own. She was unfree, and her unfreedom was an ache that woke her in the night and numbed her in the day.
    Acceptance was slow. She clung to what she could control. She was smoking heavily, drinking immodestly, eating too modestly by far. Rejection and disavowal were her dance partners. She was holding on, she knew, to all the wrong things. She was in denial about her denial. Daniel hadn’t called. Daniel would call, she was sure, but it had been four days and each was harder and colder than the last. Muddy with lack of sleep, she’d passed grainy pre-dawn hours imperviously googling pictures of babies. She thought she might have been born without a cuteness receptor. Where others saw gifts she registered only a ransom demand. A child’s needs were occult and various; the knowledge required to meet them arcane and unwelcome. There were patterns of feeding and weaning and putting down and picking up that were near Kabbalistic in their ritual complexity. It was important, she knew, to
support the head
. People kept saying they were a sponge at that age. She feared what the child might absorb. She imagined clasping its ankles and folding it in half and then juggling one-handed the awful array of wipes and creams and wadded packages of shit-filled nappies. People had special bags loaded with equipment. There was a commando element to the whole thing, a sense of technological and biological preparation. People lost their looks when they had kids. They aged; died a little. Katherine had seen it in the office. Zombies: pinched of eye and frayed of nerve; garbed in the rags of defeat. And never mind the psychological issues. That little sponge, sopping up everything you’d sloughed off, then spilling it all to their shrink after half a life of failed relationships and voguishly unfocused life choices. And this if the thing was even born right in the first place. She wondered how people had ever achieved comprehensive worrying before Google, which listed fears you never knew you had in the order other people had them. Global Delay, Down’s Syndrome, Cerebral Palsy, Deafness, flippers for hands. Pregnancy post-thirty was something of a fraught business. Worst of all were the unnamed afflictions; the grey non-diagnoses of freakdom. Every parent wanted a label for their kids. At least if you had yourself one of those disabled children you earned a lifetime’s free supply of sympathy and respect, like Debbie Boyd on floor three, who was, in the Dances-With-Wolves-style naming system to which the office seemed to adhere,
So Patient
, and who no one ever told off or teased for sleeping at her desk because she was widely regarded as being a saint and a martyr thanks to the fact that her son scoffed foil wrappers while binning the chocolate they contained and had a predilection for whapping his willy against the thighs of his Rainbow Daycentre classmates, whereas having one of those children that was just, as some children can be,
not