I was so alone, in my big body, with all that breath. I looked at my phone under the table for most of the meal and smiled benignly whenever I looked up. At the end of the meal, as we said our goodbyes, Ray had clearly forgotten my name. ‘Je-mima?’ he said eventually. Well, I wasn’t going to relieve him. ‘Jezebel,’ I said. And I let my Spanx slide down as I waddled to the door.

Back at ours, we drank tea in the lounge. Art said: ‘You were quiet tonight.’

‘I was just listening.’

‘You were looking at your phone. I bet Ray thought you had narcolepsy. Your head kept dropping.’

‘I didn’t feel I had much to add to the conversation.’

‘You just sound jealous, now. Who are you, Jenny, between these parameters you batter?’

I think he was right. My ambivalence about life. About people. About everything. Art saw straight through it to the nothingness beyond: the nothingness that was me. The many flying fragments.

He sighed. I sighed. The elephant in the room trumpeted.

‘Listen, is it really really okay?’ he said.

I looked out of the window, across the street, into the window of the ground-floor flat opposite. A man was often there in his kitchen, pottering around. He was there now, making a hot drink. We had never looked at each other directly but I felt connected to him in that way we often do in cities: by proximity, by similar living spaces and activities. I had fantasised about going over there, pressing his buzzer, walking into his flat and fucking him against his cooker, looking back out through his kitchen window and across to my lounge, straight into the eyes of Art.

I said: ‘Define okay.’

‘I guess I might just feel like you’re starting to resent me.’

‘Resent you about what?’ I mean. Bless me.

He looked at me. ‘The baby thing.’

I wondered whether to say it. I thought of my options in the quickfire way I always do – down every avenue like a rocket, to each conclusion and back again and down the next, testing each hypothesis, a series of blistering speculations. For some reason I decided to be brave. I said, ‘I just know that we have both refused to budge but in that, it’s my desire that has been pushed down. How is that?’

‘Because yours is the thing rather than the not-thing, and the thing is too much of a risk.’

It was a prepared answer, I could tell. Our conversations had been going round and round.

Why should I back down?

Why should I?

Why should I?

But how?

How do you know you want one?

How can you be sure?