After Catherine

For no obvious reason I started to call people I knew. I would just ring and say “hi, how are you?” — that kind of thing. It wasn’t that I had much to say. I don’t know why, I was just starting to feel lonely. In reality, I was starting to feel the grief I should have felt when Cat left. Her absence had left a vacuum in my life that I was just allowing to grow, unchecked, in the corner of the room. I truly did understand why she had done what she did. I wasn’t good for her, and I’ve always been a strong believer that if something isn’t healthy for you anymore you get rid of it. But something rankled and hurt me, not necessarily the act but the deception. She had slept with someone else, maybe more than one person, but she had kept that from me for some time. Not just to agonise over it, but as a secret; a small piece of excitement in a life that was slowly growing stale around my condition.