But while we didn’t know where to go, we didn’t have any better reason for staying, and we set off afresh. So far, we’d walked southwards, and now we changed direction. There were still cabins, bunkers and corpses. When Mary-Jane fell ill, we decided to stop. Until she was better, we said, but we knew it was until she died.

I hadn’t had much to do with Mary-Jane, a fairly selfeffacing woman who followed without protest and never made any suggestions. She collected firewood when it was time to build a fire, carried her load without getting out of breath, and was neither among the last nor the first when we walked. In fact, she didn’t stand out in any way. I suppose that’s what is meant by easy-going. She was one of the women who didn’t sleep alone, and she was often seen with Emma, the first woman who thought that this planet wasn’t Earth. True there were so few of us that we all knew one another, but certain affinities had created loose groups. I wasn’t in the same group as Mary-Jane, but was with Anthea, Greta and Frances, in other words, the group that had formed around Dorothy and which took the decisions. Perhaps that’s what they meant by friendship, but in any case, illness brought us all together.

Mary-Jane had stomach pains. One day, she lost a lot of blood, whereas she thought she’d reached the menopause a long time ago, and then the pains started. That night, she slept little, a spasm of pain woke her and its suddenness made her cry out. We all went rushing to her side. She immediately got a grip on herself and we heard her groan, her fists in her mouth, her forehead wet with perspiration. We stood beside her, helpless and desperate. At first, she told us to go back to bed, that there was nothing we could do, but none of us was able to and she eventually accepted our presence.

Emma gently dabbed her forehead with a damp cloth, Anthea placed a hot compress on her stomach which Mary Jane said was soothing. The attack slowly subsided and she fell asleep, exhausted by the pain. Then we lay down on the ground around her and allowed ourselves to go back to sleep. One morning, on waking up, we saw she was no longer with us.

We’d stopped quite close to a cabin so as to have easy access to supplies. We sat there looking at one another in surprise, seeking her among the others, when it occurred to me to go down into the bunker. There she was. She’d torn her blanket into strips which she’d tied together, then she’d hanged herself from the bars, alongside the forty male corpses. We decided to leave her there. We just cut the rope, laid her out on the floor, carefully wrapped in another blanket, the newest one we had, her hands crossed over her stomach that had hurt her so much, and, for once, Rose agreed to come down and sing in a bunker. Then, we shut the door behind us as we always did. We drew our symbols on the ground and left.