Idiopathy

cow to be filmed. Beside me here is local vet Bob Chevington. Bob, tell me what we’re seeing here.’
    Bill Palmer was an ex-war reporter stuck doing domestic reports after valiantly getting himself shot on camera. He was, Katherine thought, clearly relishing this unusual opportunity for drama, and had become something of a ubiquitous presence through what it now seemed de rigueur to refer to as the crisis. His approach was basically sartorial. Outside embassies he wore the foreign correspondent’s uniform of blue cotton shirt and pleated chinos. In Afghanistan it was sandy camouflage and a range of helmets. Now, clearly alert to the possibility of both drama and further journalistic recognition, he was in a white boiler suit with the hood pooled insouciantly at his neck, his mane of white hair thrust sideways by a stiff breeze; his generous eyebrows knitted into a frown that spoke of news valiantly borne in the face of heavy peril.
    ‘Well, Bill, what we’re seeing here is classic Bovine Idiopathic Entrancement,’ said the vet. ‘This animal has been staring straight ahead for over twenty-four hours. It remains completely motionless. It is totally unresponsive to stimulus.’
    ‘And what’s the prognosis, Bob?’
    ‘Death. Probably by dehydration.’
    ‘Dark times,’ said Bill. ‘Here’s Chastity with the weather.’
    The camera lingered on the stricken cow, its glazed, dead eyes seemingly looking straight at Katherine.

    A ll the old patterns were resurfacing. She could see them; name them; but felt powerless to intervene. The feeling was similar to jamming her fingers down her throat and dry-heaving all the food she’d neglected to eat. She was gagging on an emotional nothingness, and in an attempt to circumvent it she returned to the tried-and-tested method of ascribing to Daniel the things she couldn’t feel for herself, or perhaps felt but couldn’t name. It was all so familiar – her disaffection with kindness at the office so neatly mirroring her disaffection with Daniel. She used to test his commitment by hurting him. She threatened to leave him, or cheat on him, then watched his face and measured the depth of his feelings for her by the extent to which it crumbled. He was insecure; prone to worry. If he ever became confident, she thought, it would mean that he no longer loved her, since to love someone is to worry; to need someone is to fear the inevitability of their absence. Without fear, she thought, without drama, there was only the grey blankness of late-middle-age relationships, where, as far as she could make out, concepts like love and passion were replaced by what she saw as the wretched terminology of codependent ennui: companionship, contentment, compromise; where one person’s love for another was no longer stated simply because it was no longer questioned; where the key indicator not only of love but also of solidity would simply be the mere fact of the solidity and love that had gone before. No, no, she thought. Better the sense of odds, of struggle; the ongoing and repeated relief of trauma endured and survived. Without it, there was only the security of the unimaginative: an unspokenly dwindling sex life; roiling resentment; his-and-hers facial hair.

    S he went back to the charity shop where she’d donated Keith’s vibrator. She told them she’d left something in the bag by accident and wanted it back. The woman looked blank yet suspiciously relaxed.
    ‘I haven’t seen anything,’ she said. ‘What was it you left?’
    ‘A vibrator,’ said Katherine.
    ‘Oh. Um …’
    ‘You can’t miss it,’ said Katherine. ‘It’s shaped like an enormous penis and on the side it says The Widowmaker in day-glo letters.’
    ‘I don’t think I …’
    ‘I know you’ve got it,’ said Katherine.
    ‘I assure you I haven’t.’
    ‘Give it back.’
    ‘I would if I could.’
    ‘Whatever,’ said Katherine.

    C laire Demoines did a lap of Katherine’s floor and dropped the news, to which she had, she explained, been privy for some time but which she had promised not to disclose as it was both private and sensitive.
    ‘He really wasn’t sure he wanted anyone to know,’ Katherine overheard her saying in a low voice to Jules and Debbie and Carol. ‘But I mean we’ve talked about it a lot and I said I thought he’d probably feel better if it was out there and he didn’t have to cover it up any more.’
    ‘Mmmm,’ said Jules, being So Compassionate. ‘He’s being So