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and all, but Craig is creepy.
    He’s sweet.
    He’s the only one who made a special announcement that he was single when everyone introduced themselves at the beginning of the seminar.
    Gail pauses for a briefmoment: There’s nothing wrong with that.
    And when we had the receptiony thing after, his fly was open the whole time and there was this little white cotton bulge pooking out.
    Eew.
    And he has that arrogant psychopath look.
    ...OK, yeah, he does have that.
    (And now Maxine feels completely guilty, because just the other day in the supermarket she took off her coat and a security guard gave her a funny look, and then a woman near the toothpaste called out with some urgency Ma’am, excuse me, ma’am, and Maxine went over, wondering what the woman could possibly want from her—she didn’t look like an employee, was she going to ask Maxine for money?—and the woman said Your pants, ma’am, and sure enough Maxine had been wearing the burgundy jeans with the unreliable zipper, and did that make her a bad person, any more than Craig?)
    I’m sure he’s a nice guy, though, Maxine adds.
    It’s not as if Maxine has never had a boyfriend. She just hasn’t seen a suitable candidate lately. She and Keith were together for a few years at university, but he went away to do a master’s in Amsterdam and there wasn’t much point then, although she sometimes wonders what would have happened if she’d gone with him. Keith had round granny glasses, dark hair with lots of curls, an easy, lanky way about him. He wore outdoorsy sorts of clothes and looked like a wildlife biologist, which he wasn’t. They haven’t kept in touch. Maxine thinks of him occasionally with affection. Later there was Andrew. They shared an apartment and Andrew wanted to get married but, although he was a nice guy, small things about him got on her nerves, more and more things, until almost everything he did was irritating. It can’t be the individual things, Gail had told her. You don’t have to marry the guy if you don’t want to, but there’s no such thing as an annoying way of tying your shoes. Maxine wasn’t convinced at the time, although now she sees the reasonableness of it. There was a shirt he wore—a metallic grey shot through with something orangey—and she couldn’t help hating him a bit when he wore that shirt. She was not, she now realizes, considerate in the way she let Andrew go, although that wasn’t intentional. Letting go of people wasn’t her area of expertise.
    Maxine flicks on the radio and washes a small head of lettuce. A British high commission has closed in Kenya. There’s an al-Qaeda connection and it’s all over the radio again. Fear. Terrorism. Doubt is poisonous. The more people doubt some things—the pacific intentions of certain religious groups, for example—the more they doubt absolutely everything. Whether the meat’s full of chemicals, whether the guy next door’s going to hack someone’s head off one day for no reason. It’s a generalized suspicion. They’ve had over a year of suspicion now, and no one can agree what to be suspicious of. Maxine has the urge to walk up to Middle-Eastern-looking people and say I know it wasn’t you. You didn’t do anything wrong—but she realizes that, however well-intentioned, this behaviour might be misconstrued. And she doesn’t know. It would be just Maxine’s luck to absolve the only hardened terrorist within thousands of miles, out of fuzzy fellow-feeling. What could one say, anyway? I’m sure it had nothing to do with you? I don’t imagine there’s any proof of your involvement? (That one runs a tad lukewarm.) I believe you are innocent? But then you’d end up adding, hastily, No, of course no one has accused you of anything, I didn’t mean, look I was just trying to. Maybe something simple: I love you . But