When the bleeding comes, the first dull smear on toilet paper, and then the first, warm drops, she will be so relieved (and sad, and scared) all over again that she will cry. She’s bought maxi-pads instead of her usual Lil-Lets and the trickling feeling between her thighs will make her think of her first-ever period, of climbing into her mother’s lap and feeling too big to be there, sobbing. Everything that is irrevocable now: all that has been lost. You mustn’t think like that. She will remind herself: the bleeding and cramps are likely to be worse than a normal period, and there may be clots. Light bleeding may continue for up to three weeks. In most cases, four to six weeks after bleeding stops, your period will resume. She will recite it to herself, over and over again, like a litany, a prayer. She will be one of the lucky ones. She will. She will.

21

People Tell You Everything

In a tiny basement cocktail bar around the corner from the office, I was having drinks with Rachel Work. They were technically birthday drinks, though she didn’t know that, and wouldn’t, unless I got drunk and blurted it out, which I was hoping I didn’t, because that would just be weird.

I also had to remember to call her Rachel or Rach and not Rachel Work, which she was saved as in my phone. I didn’t know her full name – the office had an email system that only used first names, and on the website it just had first names too. Rachel, Ben, Dmitri, Alex, Paola, each with a quirky photograph, white-water rafting or hula-hooping or face-painted at a music festival. Rachel’s was at a masked ball, or maybe a Secret Cinema, holding up a gold eye mask with plumed red feathers and blowing a fake, extravagant kiss through pillar-box lips to whoever was taking the picture. The photo was entirely not like Rachel, or at least the Rachel Work I knew, which I supposed was maybe the point – we were a creative brand agency, after all.

The second cocktail, Rachel was saying, had not been as 22good as the first. ‘Sorry, the online reviews of this place looked really good. Maybe I’m getting too old for Shoreditch,’ she said, and we both laughed, though it crossed my mind that I didn’t actually know how old she was: five years older than me, ten? Her hair was in an asymmetric platinum bob and behind her square black glasses her eyes were crinkled, though that could have been because she laughed a lot.

‘Well, here’s to getting too old for Shoreditch,’ I said, and we clinked glasses and downed what remained of the gin-whatevers she’d chosen.