Idiopathy

right
, be it in the head or in the body, meant everyone simply assumed you were a terrible mother who’d ignored some nutritional or pedagogical footnote in the bible of parental perfection. Indeed, now that she thought about it, people were pretty likely to assume she was a terrible mother anyway since there was no father to speak of, and she was, she had to admit, a touch wayward at times, and had probably gone about this whole business with less than the required degree of planning. She’d be blamed for everything. In twenty years time, when little Whatever-It-Was-Going-To-Be-Called-Presuming-Of-Course-She-Kept-It grew into a fully matured clock-tower sniper and started picking off sales shoppers with some form of coldly efficient semi-automatic weapon, it would be
her fault
.
    She wondered if she was becoming manic. Every occurring thought felt like some chubby-thumbed tyke was pawing a pinball machine in her head, with one thing caroming off another and lights and bells going off and then, at the end of all that noise, the thought, whatever it might have been, disappearing down a hole and being replaced by an entirely new thought. Was it her hormones? She wondered how one went about checking one’s hormones; wondered if wondering if you were becoming manic was itself a sign of mania.
    Eating would have helped, but it seemed to have slipped rather far down her agenda; so far, in fact, that her stomach now prepared itself to vomit on approximately the same schedule as it would ordinarily prepare itself to eat. Now that she was not-eating for two, starvation brought a spangled, almost psychedelic sensation of fizz. It was like pressing her face cheek-deep into a champagne curtain. It pulled at the corners of her eyes and tightened her lips. It was a state of alert, a heightened experience. Even as she felt her insides being eaten, she found herself savouring the buzz. She liked to think of it as a protest. Already, she could feel that little smear of life inside her grasping at scarcely available resources. It wasn’t eligible for support, she felt, until certain decisions had been made. The more she fed it, the more it would grow, and anyway, feeding it when she hadn’t yet firmly decided for or against exterminating it seemed something of a mixed message.
    She wondered how big it would be now. She thought of it as a sort of stain; a thickening puddle or a jellified sac with one unblinking eye.
    She made an appointment with the doctor. Her usual GP had left. She picked a woman’s name, only to find that Dr Leslie Rubrick was in fact a man. She asked him why he was called Leslie. He asked her why she thought she was pregnant. She told him she’d weed on a stick.
    ‘That’s not always an accurate guide,’ he said, skim-reading stats on his Mac.
    ‘Nor are names,’ she said. ‘I also haven’t had a period.’
    ‘Have you been taking precautions?’
    ‘Clearly not enough.’
    He clicked on a file and nodded.
    ‘It’s really important you don’t feel judged,’ he said.
    Initially, there was a mildly pleasing sense of furtiveness and secrecy that, not altogether coincidentally, mirrored the feelings she’d had when she was secretly fucking Keith (yes, past tense for that now). There was something about having a secret, she thought, that brought with it a sense of elevated moral standing or general day-to-day importance. Not telling people removed the burden of explanation, of the need to emote; it allowed her to look at the problems of others as nothing more than the problems of others. How pleasing it was to watch the other women in her office – Jules and Carol and all the rest – go about their daily distractions in blissful ignorance of Katherine’s secret martyrdom. Secrecy was an ethos, a point of pride. She wanted it, then of course felt constrained by it and wanted its opposite: attention. People surprised her in their ability not to notice. Not telling them her problems meant she had to listen to theirs. The pains of the supermarket; their Very Repetitive Strain Injuries; the fact that their husbands were too ‘closed’ emotionally (‘I try to ask him why he’s angry all the time, but he’s so
closed
, you know?’); and the way their neighbours were encroaching on their back garden by shifting their fence six inches over. She started to feel they should know. Not that she should tell them, just that they should know, that they should look up from their trifling,