Then she repeated what I’d heard so many times before:

‘What’s the use of telling you? There are no more men.’

Anger flared up inside me, but I was no longer a little girl among women: however old I’d been at the start, we’d been out for seven years now and I was certainly over twenty. I was one of the women who thought, who organised our communal life. I’d become skilled, I could saw, nail, sew and weave, and I didn’t want to be treated like a child.

‘Because I want to know! Sometimes, you can use what you know, but that’s not what counts most. I want to know everything there is to know. Not because it’s any use, but purely for the pleasure of knowing, and now I demand that you teach me everything you know, even if I’ll never be able to use it. And don’t forget, I’m the youngest. One day I’ll probably be the last and I might need to know things for reasons I can’t imagine today.’

Then she told me everything—men, the penis, erections, sperm and children. It took some time, because there were so many things to learn, I forgot details and she had to go back over them. I had a very good memory, but Anthea said that not even the best memory in the world can remember everything at once. She also explained my own body to me. Since I didn’t have periods, I didn’t know I had a vagina. She was surprised.

‘But you must have realised, felt something, even if it was when you were washing?’

Then she surmised that, having started life as I had done, always surrounded by others, I hadn’t been able to become intimately acquainted with my own body. Of course, I’d soaped myself carefully, from my anus to my vulva, as the women had told me to do after each visit to the toilet, but those washing movements hadn’t taught me that those parts of my body had special qualities. I didn’t tell her about the eruption, which I had in fact long forgotten, and it was only much later that I made the connection between that brief thrill and the pleasures of love.

Our conversations were fairly haphazard because often Anthea was so amazed at my ignorance that she lost the thread of her explanations. I imagined my insides. Sometimes she cleared a patch of ground and drew in the dirt. She told me about the stomach, the intestine, and then the heart, the blood vessels and circulation. I was interested in everything and I asked her more than she knew.

‘When I was training to be a nurse, I learned lots of things that I’ve forgotten because I never used them after the exams. Besides, I think that years of being drugged made me forget some of the rest. Dorothy probably died from heart failure. While it was happening, I tried to remember: the weakness of the heart affects the circulatory system, the kidneys and the lungs, it’s all part of a perfectly logical system that I used to find so beautiful, but I couldn’t recall how it worked.’