THERE’S THE TUG of it in her stomach, always, a heavy thing. Sarah’s hot, clammy like she knows she shouldn’t be on a day like this – nearly forty years old and yet every month the worry like something the hormones make you forget – the reason she’d snapped at Kieran yesterday, why she’d thrashed out this morning with the iron cord stuck round the back of the cupboard door on the walk-in where she plugs it when she has to iron something not done in time by the woman she pays to do the ironing and she’d whipped the cord out of the wall and shook it and said fucking hell, shit fucking cunt of a thing. It was just a cord. A cord. She wonders if men remember something of the moment they make a baby. If they can feel it. She asks that sometimes. Did you feel me? When it’s real.

God she’s hot. Her breasts feel full in her bra. Nicely, but too sore to be useful. There’s the nagging pain in her gut. I must be, she thinks, but maybe not. She’s checked the toilet paper five times already this morning, checked her underpants the same, each pulling down denied, the baleful look, each wipe, eyes closed and then opening like a prayer. Still nothing. This has happened before. Surely it should explain the aggression. Maybe not. Every month for nearly thirty years and nothing’s changed – just a bitch twenty-four seven, seven days, three sixty-five.