While she waited, Anna leafed through the magazines. Homes You Can’t Afford offered high definition photography of listed buildings in Surrey and Perthshire. Old issues of Mine and Get brought her the clothes, gadgets and, especially, the elective surgeries of the rich. The eight-year-old male heir to one of the bigger hedge-fund operations of the 2010s had persuaded the family surgeons to fit him with the uterus and womb of ‘an unknown East Asian donor’ for a month; while his mother, upon having her skin genetically modified to produce downy feathers a calculated charcoal-grey colour, announced with satisfaction that she had ‘achieved the look she had always wanted’, as if she’d done the procedures herself at home. She looked a little like a Porsche. Mother and son smiled languidly out of the papagraphs, thoroughly warmed by themselves. September’s Watchtower, meanwhile, promised Comfort For The Elderly. Anna stared at it with dislike. Then, because she had been awake all night, she fell asleep and dreamed about sex. Marnie woke her not long later, and they went across the road to a branch of Carluccio’s to drink cioccolata calda, ‘nun’s revenge’, a favourite of Marnie’s since she was eight. Anna ordered an almond croissant, but instead of almond paste it turned out to have a kind of thin, rather unpleasant custard in it.

‘Well, I’m glad that’s over,’ Marnie said. She put her hand on Anna’s. ‘Thanks for coming with me,’ she said. ‘Really.’

‘Just remind me what kind of scan it was?’

Marnie took her hand away. She looked despondent. ‘You might at least try and keep up with my life.’

‘I think you probably told me but I forgot.’

‘Anna,’ Marnie said, ‘I don’t feel as if you have any kind of grip on things.’

‘If you’re still upset about the bathroom—’

‘It’s nothing to do with that.’

‘Marnie, anyone can make a mistake.’

‘It isn’t the bathroom.’

‘Well then what?’

Marnie turned away and looked out of the window. ‘I’m ill and you pick a quarrel with the receptionist.’

‘He was patronising me.’

‘I’m ill,’ Marnie said stubbornly. ‘I wouldn’t have gone for a scan if I felt well.’

‘I thought you said it was nothing.’

‘It is nothing. I’m sure it’s nothing. But that’s not the point. I tell you not to worry and you just accept that?’ Marnie made a dismissive gesture. Suddenly she pushed back her chair. ‘We don’t seem to live in the same world any more, Anna,’ she said. She got up and walked out.