Tonight will be chaotic, but this morning feels calm. Harri is lying in bed. She has not yet opened her eyes. She is waiting for the sun to rise and listening to the skylarks. At least—she hopes she hears skylarks, they are one of the few songbirds she can name. She can only confidently identify the sound of a blackbird, and she secretly thinks of everything else as not-a-blackbird. In north London, the noise is homogenous, anyway. All birds copy car alarms. Art imitates life and improves upon it. In the unlikely event of a robot uprising, would there be a musical mirror bounce, with the cars singing along with their avian imitators? This is very silly, thinks Harri. But she feels silly. Or rather—expansive. New. Free. It is as though someone did a loft conversion in her mind, in the night. Something has gone. A heaviness. She did not know the weight of the heaviness until she felt this lightness.

Harri idly rubs her thumb along her bare collarbone. Behind her eyelids, behind her curtains, a cloud rolls and parts.

I’m alone, here. But not all alone. Not by myself. With my self.

Harri’s thumb dips and circles her breastplate. Her skin, she notes, approvingly, feels smooth, firm. Far firmer than she deserves—a pale Yorkshire woman with almost five decades of beer gardens, and cavalier sunscreen use behind her.

Her thumb slides a little further down.

Oh.

The curvature of her breast surprises her. She’s made of slopes, bends, undulations. She cannot remember when she last touched herself. In the shower she’s brisk, perfunctory, and yet trepidatious, grabbing bits of her body and patting herself down for bad news. Now, with her index and middle finger, she traces a shell spiral all the way to her nipple.

Oh.

Harri’s vagina, her vulva, really, her cunt, no, she can’t; she supposes, exasperated, her pussy—is present.

What would it be like to touch, to trace, to follow this pulsing and swelling? She daren’t. She won’t. It is too tender. Too much love has been left there. She can’t open up again, she might have to close for ever.

And yet.

She can take her fingers and draw a soft line up her inner thigh. Harri does not, at this juncture, wish to think about Imogen. But she does.

‘I want to write about desire. Not vibrators that cost a hundred pounds. I want to write about women wanting themselves, on their own terms,’ Imogen had told Linda Morris, who had nodded approvingly, and signed a sizeable investment deal.