off, a constraint out of which he needed to reverse. ‘Fuck me like you’re scared of me.’
It proved to be too much of an imaginative leap. She fucked him like she pitied him and then told him afterwards he was pathetic.
‘You’re right,’ said Keith. ‘You’re so right. Next time fuck me like I’m pathetic.’
‘Maybe you should join a group of some kind,’ her mother said. ‘That’s how you meet people. You’ve got to get out there.’
‘By people do you mean men?’
‘Well who wants to meet women?’
She told herself that what she couldn’t feel in life she could at least feel watching the news. Emotion was like exercise, she thought. You didn’t want to do it but it was good for you. You had to push yourself.
She told herself she would be moved by the very next story that came along. She would really try, she thought. She’d look so closely at the flies in that little kid’s eyes. She’d picture them on her own face. She’d conjure the heat and the dust and the stink of rotting goat. She’d imagine how that pissy, cholera-riddled water would taste as it edged its way down her dry little throat and pooled malignantly in her horribly distended belly. How awful to have a belly like that! How awful that must feel! It was wretched, she thought, a wretched existence, and she knew, now that she’d given it such close consideration, that the second she saw one of those poor, poor children, she’d erupt into hot sweet tears, just like any other normal human being. She’d cry so much it would more than make up for all those other times when she didn’t cry, when she just stared, dead-faced, at the wall of suffering … God, how she’d cry … if people could see her …
Then the news cut to talk of the virus, with grim-voiced narration over montages of men in boiler suits and face masks fork-lifting cattle onto smoking pyres, and Katherine sobbed like a baby and then ran to the bathroom to purge, the vomit hitting her fingers before she could pull them free; second-hand coffee and chunks of doughy matter spraying the bowl and turning her tears to nothing more than a gag reflex.
‘Where did you go on holiday?’ she asked Keith mid-fuck, having suddenly (but with careful premeditation) kicked him off her at his most vulnerable moment, sending him sprawling to the floor with only his hard-on to break his fall.
‘Jesus … fuck, I think you … what?’
‘Your holiday,’ she said, lying back on the bed and eyeing him coldly. ‘Where did you go?’
‘Tenerife,’ he said, inspecting his rapidly shrinking cock for permanent damage. ‘Do we have to talk about it now?’
‘No, we don’t have to talk about it now,’ she said calmly. ‘If you like I can just get dressed and go and we don’t have to speak about it ever again.’
‘I don’t understand why this is suddenly such a pressing issue that you have to …’
‘Who did you go with?’
‘Oh, I see.’
‘You see?’
‘Yeah, I see. I see what this is all about. You’re jealous.’
‘I’m not jealous. I just want to know. Who did you go with?’
‘Is it possible to break a dick? I’ve heard it is. I’ve heard they can snap.’
‘Was it someone from work?’
‘I’m going to have to go to work with my dick in a sling, you fucking …’
‘They’d never find a sling small enough. Was she blonde or brunette?’
‘Blonde,’ he said miserably. ‘Her name’s Janice. Are you going to make me stop seeing her?’
Katherine was repulsed.
‘What do you mean make you?’ she snapped. ‘How could I make you?’
‘I don’t know I just …’
‘How come she gets to go on holiday? That’s what I want to know. How come she gets to go on holiday while I have to make do with intermittent screwing in your shabby little flat?’
‘We can go on holiday,’ said Keith. ‘If that’s what you want.’
‘Is that what you want?’
‘Well … I mean, yeah, of course, but …’
‘Because I’m not sure now. I’m not sure I’d want to go with you. I’m not sure I could bear it.’
This was in fact true. The more Katherine thought about it, the more going on holiday with Keith sounded like an awful idea. All those inane conversations in sunnily bland surroundings. His sweat-shined love handles; his shrivelled ball bag in Speedos.
‘Why not?’ said Keith. ‘What’s wrong with me?’
‘You want a list?’ she said.
He called her two days later and begged, offering a last-minute booking. No one at work would think anything of it, he said. They’d stagger their days a little. Katherine agreed, victorious and relieved.
‘Where are we going?’ she asked.
‘Malta,’ he said. ‘God I’m fucking haemorrhaging money.’
In Malta, everything was clearer and more muddled at the same time. They fell into an easy routine of lazing, drinking and eating, then fucking and sleeping, which after the drinking became somewhat indistinguishable. For Katherine, everything seemed to pass not so much in a blur as in snippets. Here she was sitting alone on the balcony, staring out across the bay at the huddled, stone-cut splendour of Valetta, feeling both calm and deliciously lonely. Here she was by the pool, either drifting with her thoughts or squinting through one eye at the array of flesh around her. Brown flesh, reddened flesh; German and English and Italian flesh, all pressed together and sizzling under the sun. It was erotic and vile at the same time – the only kind of eroticism she seemed to experience these days. Here she was at dinner with Keith, exchanging heavy clods of conversation so deadening she was tempted, at times, to cause physical injury, either to him or to herself, just to have something distinctive to discuss. He said things like, It’s hot, and then followed that statement seconds later with a clarification (It’s really hot) and then, after a bit of thought, some further exposition (It’s so hot I feel like I’m melting in my seat) until finally his thought processes reached their natural conclusion and he ended with a sort of ruminative coda (So hot …).
He’d turned an odd colour, Katherine noted: a deep leathery tan with a thin cherry varnish. This was partly to do with the dedication Keith applied to his sunbathing. He lay in the heat with the gritty focus of a man making a long-distance drive. He took scheduled breaks. On the beach, by the pool, he was a ridiculous sight. There was, Katherine speculated, no possible way of concealing his Englishness, or any English person’s Englishness for that matter. You could spot them immediately – pasty white; muffin-bellied; Rorschached with quasi-Celtic tattoos.
Not that Katherine was immune of course. She had, though she was loath to admit it, a worryingly English physique.
