The next morning it was Saturday and for a long time Margaret couldn’t get out of bed. She woke up and couldn’t get out of bed. The sun came into the room and it got hotter and stuffier and she lay on her back and looked at the ceiling and then rolled over and looked at the wall and the space that was empty next to her and she shut her eyes and rested with them shut and listened to the noise of her own breathing and her pulse in her ears and behind her eyes and in her temples. An hour went by, then two and then it was one o’clock in the afternoon. She checked her phone, but no one had called, and no one had messaged, and she realised no one missed her. She was hungry. Dizzy. Probably more from thirst than hunger, but she was hungry, and she just couldn’t get up and there was no one to get her any food and she was between a rock and a hard place. Hungry and wanting to stay in bed. She couldn’t have it all. That was life – compromise.

When they were drinking, when they were maybe not even eighteen, a guy had told them that was their problem – they were never willing to compromise. And then he’d stormed out and they’d laughed. Both of them had the memory, but there had only been one of them when it happened.

‘Do you remember that, too?’ one of them would whisper.

‘Of course,’ the other one would say.

They talked about it, late at night, inches from each other, in whispers. But now there was no one for Margaret to turn to. No one to talk to about any of it. Heidi didn’t want to know, and Margaret didn’t know any of the others well enough anymore to even know how to contact them and was she even one of them now?

On the night it happened, Peggy and Greta found themselves next to each other. Everything except the handful of them was in the right place when it happened. Everyone else was sober and together – in themselves. Margaret had been blacked out. She was walking around and moving around but not all of her was in the margins of her body, so her guard was down – she had no defence.

Peggy and Greta asked the others. It had to be quick because it was rude, and you had to catch them off guard. You got one shot. Someone had asked them – that was how they’d started to understand it, and that’s why they started asking the others.

‘Blackouts, eh?’ they’d say.

‘Yeah.’

‘Were you blacked out the night this happened?’ Pointing at each other, not pointing at the other two.

‘Yeah. What?’

‘Nothing.’