Idiopathy

which she had not discussed with Daniel, but which she had also not forgotten, and this was, if nothing else, one of those times when being around someone who had a history of finding you attractive would be no bad thing at all.

    C laire Demoines had the office in thrall. She’d been to dinner with Keith. Keith had twanged his rubber band. He said he’d never imagined, after the awful techniques of aversion instilled in him by his therapist, that anyone could ever make him think about sex again, but somehow …
    ‘His restraint was amazing,’ said Claire, running a hand down the herringboned lace of her tights. ‘He said he admired me too much to hurt me like he’d hurt all the other women in his life.’
    ‘God,’ said Debbie. ‘What a man.’

    K een to once again reaffirm her faith in the basic shittiness of humankind, Katherine took herself off to her local strip club and sat sipping a daiquiri amidst the leering, boozed-out stares of AWOL men. Despite using the word ‘executive’ on its membership cards, its posters, even its drinks coasters, L’Après-Vie represented the cheaper end of male entertainment. The girls were foreign and got all the way naked. Private dances took place in clammy rooms that had, as Dawn would have said, dirty notes. Katherine wondered as to the etymology of all this: the precise moment in man’s history when the definition of eroticism had been agreed to include a skinny, sad-eyed tween in cheap heels launching herself off a piece of re-purposed scaffolding. She paid twenty quid for a private dance with a girl named Clover, who had pigtails and purple nails and a tattoo of a unicorn just above her groin.
    ‘It’s my power animal,’ she said.
    ‘I’m pregnant,’ said Katherine.
    ‘Congratulations,’ said Clover.
    Outside, shifty, awkward men queuing for their entertainment eyed her as she left. She felt no vulnerability. She walked home alone through dim-lit streets; crossed the car park under the flyover that she habitually avoided. She wondered idly about rape. It was as if every fuck and kiss, every lingering gaze and hot-breathed whisper, were deserting her, and as she paused in the gloom and spread her hands over the chilly bricks, assuming the stance of someone about to be frisked while she wondered momentarily if she might vomit or sob or both, she felt, rising up from the soles of her feet and leaving through the semi-permeable border of her skin, the evaporation of every intimacy she’d ever known.
    She went home and googled porn, only to find she could no longer look at men. She settled for body parts only, happily disembodied and algorithmically collaged. She couldn’t come. Afterwards she called three or four men whose numbers she had stored in her mobile, keeping an open line as the call went to voicemail; pacing the room with her phone in her pocket to give the impression of an accidental dial. She wanted to see if anyone called her back, at which point she would explain the mistake and say it was nice to hear from them anyway. She fell asleep holding a silent phone, and in the morning, when it did ring, it was a woman’s voice.
    ‘I have Daniel Bryce on the line,’ said the voice. ‘Please hold one moment.’
    Katherine held. He seemed to wait a long time before he came on the line.
    ‘Katherine?’
    Her thrill at the sound of his voice was old; almost threadbare. She had, she now realised, spent long stretches of time she would never be able to recoup imagining all the ways he might say hello: the calm; the nervous; the faintly sad; the falsely bright; the careworn; the compassionate; the cocky. She’d imagined all her possible responses: bright and breezy through to nonplussed. She’d wanted this, and now it was here all she could think was that the wanting was a weakness, and all she could feel was the remote and grey-edged disappointment you might experience as you left a party and walked to your car and realised that from outside the music and chatter sounded all the brighter for being muffled, all the more enticing for being far away, leaving you wishing you’d had a better time while you were inside and had the chance.
    ‘Daniel,’ she said.
    She’d done the wanting, wasted herself on it, and now it was over, and necessity stood in its place. If she spoke to him now, this second, she thought, he would know how weak she could be.
    ‘It’s, um … It’s a bad line,’ she said. ‘Let me call you back.’
    ‘It seems