Under the pretence of checking her email, she used the hotel’s criminally expensive internet access to google Daniel – a habit she’d quickly fallen into after he’d unfriended her on Facebook and thus forced her to employ more creativity in her virtual stalking. A few well-practised clicks and there he was: smiling and well-groomed and just the right side of smug, beaming out at her from his staff picture on the website of a biological research facility somewhere in Norfolk, where, apparently, he was the public face of research his biography described as groundbreaking. There were even one or two YouTube clips of him at press conferences, talking about sustainable development and secure food sources. She had no idea how this had happened: he’d somehow edged out of the drabness of office life and into a position both admirable and faintly glamorous. It was predictable, really, and she could picture him being good at it, but it still gave her something of a jolt. She imagined him at work – Daniel and his Jesus complex – surrounded by chrome and glass and Petri dishes. It was his natural environment, she thought – icy and microscopic. Sometimes, when they were together, she’d called him the Vulcan. She’d meant it as a term of endearment but it had cut a little close to the bone. Now here he was: sartorially, facially and interpersonally sharpened; every inch the beatific boffin.
She wondered if he thought about her and, if he did, what he thought. Perhaps she might even have passed him in the street and not realised. Perhaps he’d seen her and turned away. She wondered if he talked about her, if his new partner, whoever she might be, knew about her and had an opinion. Maybe they laughed about her, late at night after a glass of wine. Or maybe Daniel stayed quiet. Maybe he’d erased her completely. He was capable of it. Indeed, she’d seen him do it. Just a few short months after their friend Nathan had disappeared, Daniel had stopped talking about him almost entirely.
Out of habit, she googled Nathan too. There was, as always, a long-cold trail in the chat rooms. Coded locations for parties. Discussions of the night before. Substance inventories. Casualty lists. Difficult, she thought, to reconcile all that with the Nathan she knew: the Nathan who sat up with her late into the night after Daniel had invariably exceeded his limits and blacked out in the bedroom.
She trawled for anything with a recent date, but got nothing. Wherever he’d gone, she thought, he was doing a good job of not being found.
Unable to bear another unbroken afternoon of Keith’s silent sunbathing, and keen to at least keep up the pretence that they were holidaying as a couple, Katherine coaxed him into the pool with her. She climbed awkwardly down the steps and stood bobbing in the shallow end. Keith entered the water with a graceless dive and then churned a path towards her through the overcrowded, heavily chlorinated stewpot of cooling, pinkening flesh. When he arrived beside her and stood, unnervingly breathless after a two-metre crawl, a long shoelace of snot swung from his left nostril. Making a face, Katherine reached out quickly and tugged it away, washing it from her hand in the blue water and watching it drift towards the filter like some sort of primordial sea life – ribboned and faintly green and seemingly possessed of mind. When she looked up again, Keith was eyeing her with undisguised repulsion. He didn’t say anything, didn’t comment in any way, but his face stayed with Katherine. In a way, the expression stayed with him, too, as if all of their interaction from that point on was sullied by the imprint of his phlegm upon her hand. Even as she stood there, bobbing slightly in the heat of Keith’s gaze, Katherine knew that something had died between them, and that whatever that something was, and whatever the exact form of its passing, it was primarily sexual in nature. It wasn’t the snot itself that threw him, she thought, or the surface-level disgust he experienced at the thought of her pulling matter from deep within his sinuses, it was the humanity of it – the horrible glimpse of Katherine as a base being in contact with the base being inside him.
Sometimes, when Keith drifted off during the late afternoon, when the sun was low and the streets were quiet, Katherine went walking alone. Across the bay, through the field of sails and masts, Valetta seemed to keep watch over its neighbours – timeless and tight-hewn and closely carved; more like a nest created by giant rock-eating insects than an actual city.
Occasionally, rarely, she had an ice cream. She was eating less these days, and when she did her guilt was pathological. She had a sense of ruining herself, of making everything worse by eating. She wanted to be light and loose – free not just in life but also, if possible, at a near-molecular level. Food had begun to feel like baggage: a taking-on of matter which then had to be processed and displaced using energy her body didn’t have. She thought of Daniel and his efficiency: his clean, unfettered approach to everything that came his way; how she’d envied it; how she envied it still. Daniel always seemed to be shedding, she thought, always seemed to be growing lighter. How ironic that he now spent his time tinkering with the food chain while she simply consumed and expanded. She needed to be more streamlined. In her body; in her very being. She imagined herself passing through the world like an arrow, straight and deadly and keen.
She felt, she noticed, infinitely lighter without Keith. Keith was a burden. He was something to be carried when what she wanted was to be carried herself. How liberating it was to walk alone, to think alone, to have one set of decisions to make, to consider only her own inner drives and needs. But contrast that, she thought, with the awful burden of singledom and spinsterhood. What a chore, what a daily struggle it was, to be alone, to spend every day wondering if this was the day, if this man was the man, if your solitude was a fault of the world or a fault of your makeup.
She closed her eyes and listened to the creak of the yachts as they rocked in the harbour; the soft chatter of foreign voices along the promenade. She and Daniel had never holidayed. At first, they were too busy; later, they’d kidded themselves they were saving – the oldest excuse for failing to live – when really they were just terrified of being alone together.
Now there was a burden, she thought: loving someone; being loved. Dreams of houses. All that crap about forever. The conversation about kids that never quite happens. And what a weight to be loved, too; to know that another person had invested their future happiness in your weak self. The walking on eggshells; the daily effort not to hurt, and when you did, as of course you always would, all that effort was erased, the memory of all that you’d done to spare them pain simply obliterated by pain itself. Christ, the thought of going through it all again, all that love stuff …
A man disturbed her in the toilet as she was pulling up her bikini bottoms, then blushed claret and bolted. When Katherine told Keith she saw a pilot light ignite in his eyes. He told her to go back to the toilet and leave the door open. He followed her in and fucked her against the sink without removing her bikini, each of them looking themselves in the eye in the steaming mirror, Katherine all too aware of what had stirred Keith’s libido: the fantasy of her as a nameless stranger, disturbed in the toilet, fucked without introduction. She could be anyone, she thought, watching Keith’s reddening face in the mirror. Anyone at all and he wouldn’t care.
Fuck you, she mouthed into the mirror. He didn’t see. He’d closed his eyes as he came, imagining, no doubt, some other time and place entirely, some other fuck, some other Katherine.
Back at home, after a wordless flight and a relieved parting at the airport, Katherine discovered she was pregnant. Her period was a week overdue. She’d put it down to the strains of the holiday, but pissed on a plastic stick to put her mind at rest. The stick promised total confidence. Nothing in her life had ever given her less. At the sight of the little blue bar in the stick’s predictive window, she threw up. Then she went out and bought five more sticks of differing brands, all of which promised relief, reassurance, an end to doubt. She was not relieved. Reassurance was not forthcoming. She was riddled with doubt. She called Keith and said she needed some space. He gave it, of course, and save for a cursory text thanking her for a great time, he made no effort at contact. She was glad and disappointed. She had three days left of her leave and spent them pacing her flat and smoking. She googled Daniel again and stared at his picture. She called her mother and told her she was fine. She washed down takeaway pizza with cut-price wine and watched confessional television. She thought about the pills again and decided it was simply too pathetic, too predictable, and would allow her mother to wring far too much sympathy out of family