Idiopathy

behind their harried, stringy-haired mothers; getting screamed at outside the supermarket; dangling dead-weight from a white-knuckled parent as they were dragged from bus-stop to bus-seat and back again. Sometimes, in passing, they seemed to eye her, and she could never tell if they were seeking her solidarity or, in some eerily psychic way, saying to her:
You’re next
.
    Where children led, pity unerringly followed. The office was lousy with charity. In a convenient twofer, Dave on floor one was growing a beard for orphaned Malawi babies, then planning to shave it off for domestic violence. Donna on floor three was immersing herself in a bath full of baked beans for the dispossessed street kids of Burkina Faso. Birthdays were heralded with pinkly embossed cards proclaiming that the person in question’s gift had been converted into goats and couriered to Kenya. Even her alone-time wasn’t safe.
Elle
and
Marie-Claire
, usually such bastions of cheer, were smeared with weepy-eyed close-ups of little Ngugi or Jésus or Kalifa, with their cleft palates and Biafran bellies.
Just two pounds a month can keep little Esmé in clean drinking water
, they blared.
Fifteen pounds buys Fatima a wooden leg
. What, Katherine wondered, about the mothers? Feminism, it seemed, extended only as far as the childless or partnered. Once you popped a sprog and went it alone, you were little more than the unthinking delivery mechanism for another wasted innocent; the medium by which the misery of the world was multiplied. Why, she wondered, were people only capable of locating their pity in the most unchallenging of places? They responded to sadness only when it expressed itself as sadness, she thought. Sadness expressed as anger or hostility just turned people off. Why not a picture of her in a glossy magazine, streaked of makeup and ruffled of hair, with a caption that said
Help us to stop Katherine going absolutely bat-shit mental
. She couldn’t temper the outer manifestation of her sorrow. She would, she thought, go through all of this alone; the fear and the bitterness and the icy, nauseous starts to grey, lonely days, and at the end of it, whatever happened, all anyone would ever say would be
oh, that poor child!
    Single mother
, she thought. It had a branded ring to it: class-bound, wide open for judgement. No more the offhand excuse of never having met the right man. Now the truth was plain for all to see: fucked a very wrong man indeed. All this time, she thought, spent so carefully maintaining distance from and control over the lesser gender, and now here was this thing inside her that not only served as a continuous reminder of some of the most unsatisfying and ill-judged sex she’d ever had, but also, disgustingly, turned the absence of a man in her life from a secret sadness easily disguised as an ideological stance to a full-on yawning deficit.
    She was already assembling a protective veneer of tragedy. The father, she imagined herself saying, had been a wonderful man: masculine and independent; sensitive and attentive, with a job that was both altruistic and admirably dangerous. Nothing military or police related, of course – there was something deeply unfeminist about being an army widow. Perhaps an award-winning photojournalist renowned for documenting the human toll of under-reported wars. Touchingly, with a carefully controlled glisten in her eyes, she would tell the story of how he’d placed his handsome, desert-toughened hand on her belly, his Tag Heuer diving watch glinting in the candlelight, and told her he was giving it all up to be with her and his baby.
Just one more job and I’m through
, he would have said, promising a desk job, an end to the nights of worry when she’d woken in the early hours fearing that some awful yet wonderfully poignant fate had befallen him. There was, he’d have told her, just one more atrocity to document; one more global tragedy to brilliantly yet reductively symbolise in the face of an innocent yet suspiciously well-posed child. She would describe in detail their last night together; the conversation they’d had about names (Leica if it was a girl, Pentax for a boy); about moving to a bigger home; about the values and skills they would instil in little Pentax from the moment he was born; the way she’d woken in the morning to find a rose on her pillow and his watch on the nightstand to remember him by; and the way she’d woken again in the night, two days later, and