Idiopathy

stubborn presence about the office. Katherine clocked him at the water cooler, making eyes at Claire Demoines, who was new and single and wore tights with complicated patterns and said things like ‘I get so many offers, you know? But … I don’t know, maybe I’m just too fussy.’ Then Katherine bumped into him on the stairs, which she had only started using through fear that she might encounter him and/or Claire Demoines in the lift. He was smugly calm; greased with a post-something glow and making a grand show of not making a grand show. To Katherine’s horror, he looked more attractive now that he was the father of her child, as if she were seeing him through a hormonal filter of potential happiness rather than in the chilly-eyed spotlight of rational thought.
    ‘Hey there,’ he said, pausing with one hand on the banister and the other fingering change in his trouser pocket. ‘How goes it?’
    ‘Great,’ said Katherine, eyeing him icily and feeling no need to slip into her usual routine of drawing attention to her own dishonesty. ‘How about you?’
    ‘Making some changes,’ said Keith, nodding the nod of a sage and pointing to the red rubber band on his left wrist. ‘Learning.’
    ‘Right,’ said Katherine. ‘That’s great. Why are you wearing a rubber band on your wrist?’
    ‘It’s for your protection,’ said Keith gravely. ‘By the way. Were you planning on going halves on that holiday or what?’
    ‘Not really, no.’
    ‘Right.’
    ‘What’s the matter? Short of cash to blow on your latest fuck-piece?’
    ‘Wow,’ said Keith, nodding seriously. ‘Lot of hostility there, duchess.’
    ‘Just asking.’
    Keith reached out and put a hand on her shoulder, squinting slightly as though pained.
    ‘You really need to respect yourself more.’
    ‘Keith?’ she said earnestly, softening her face and gazing into his eyes, lashes aflutter, sinking swoon-like into her hip.
    ‘Yes, Katherine?’ said Keith, tilting his head to one side and nodding gently in a way that said, I’m a Wonderful Person for Listening.
    ‘Do you think, one day soon, just for me, you could die in an autoerotic accident?’
    That same afternoon she saw him talking to Carol by the photocopier. He looked hangdog and up-to-something. He showed Carol the rubber band on his wrist. Carol touched his shoulder as she listened. He did one of those little smiles and thanked her. When Katherine came closer they parted. When she asked Carol what was happening she said Nothing.

    G alvanised by her isolation, and by the slow, creeping dread that Keith might slowly and subtly turn the women of the office even further against her through little more than implication and gentle persuasion, Katherine attempted to make inroads into her iciness. She made sure to say good morning. She stood in the staffroom and listened to Debbie go on about her son. When Jules’s close-male-friend-with-whom-there-had-never-been-anything-going-on passed away at the age of fifty after a protracted battle with pancreatic cancer, Katherine rushed straight to the supplies cupboard to upgrade Jules’ wrist rest and mouse mat just so that, if nothing else, her carpal tunnel syndrome wouldn’t exacerbate her grief. When someone in the office either stole or inadvertently appropriated Janice Johnson’s bag for life, which she had very sensibly brought in so as to allow her to transport her macrobiotic stew without it leaking all over her handbag, Katherine sent a global email that resulted, after just thirty minutes, in the bag miraculously reappearing in the staffroom. When Dawn Rickstadt, who Smelled So Good, wafted past Katherine’s desk smelling particularly good, Katherine made sure not only to note the name of her perfume (
Consensual
, by Chanel) but also to check how Dawn might feel if Katherine purchased the same perfume and so also ended up Smelling So Good, to which Dawn had generously replied that she had no problem at all with Katherine buying a bottle of Consensual because it was gorgeous and indeed, since she herself was nearly out, perhaps they could go shopping for it together at lunch.
    ‘This has lovely dirty notes,’ said Dawn in Debenham’s, misting Katherine’s wrist with
Reproach
, by Comme des Garçons. ‘It’s sea breeze meets knee-trembler in a Ford Capri.’
    ‘Is that supposed to be nice?’
    ‘It’s supposed to be sexy.’
    ‘I don’t want to be sexy,’ said Katherine. ‘I want to be clean.’
    ‘Gotcha,’