‘Yeah.’ They were reminding themselves. ‘People are scared of protesting but hanging out and doing crafts is doable.’

‘I’ll be there.’

‘Yeah.’ Heidi was unpacking the vegetables. They were both members of a co-op. The fruit and vegetables would arrive at the community hall and one of them would go and pick them up and drop them off at the other’s house on their way home. Heidi lived in the house behind Margaret’s with her wife Bisi and their kid Ash. Heidi was smelling a fennel bulb, sniffing in between everything she was saying. She was saying a lot.

Margaret and Heidi had aged well for a while, but the last few years had been hard on them. Margaret had wanted her hair to go grey – she’d thought it would be easier than the slow gradual dimming. But then as she got more grey hairs, she’d thought a lot about dyeing it again. When she brushed her teeth, she looked in the mirror and she looked haggard. It was the only word you could use. She was fat as well. She hadn’t changed a thing about her life, but she was fat and getting fatter and everything tasted bad. Really bad. She’d be dead in thirty years – if she was lucky, and she’d been luckier than plenty of people they knew. She was still sober, and she still went to meetings and called Diane and did what she could to help other people. She’d been able to carry on. Even though she was alone. ‘What am I? Chopped liver?’ Heidi would say. Margaret had been able to minimise the harm she’d done other people and she knew where she was, and she was safe most of the time. She had a job and a place to stay and that was more than most people had now. Heidi was still close, too.

Which was a lot more than most of them had. Most of the women who had split into two had been separated now. You hardly ever saw any of them walking down the street together anymore. But Margaret could still spot them – could tell they were one half of something. Nobody noticed it now except for the women who had experienced it. The women didn’t usually stay in touch with each other. Sometimes one of them would send a Facebook request and it wouldn’t be replied to. Sometimes one of them would see another at a mall and say hello, as a reflex, and the other one would say, ‘Do I know you?’ and it would be embarrassing. Some of them were dead. All over the country there were ones where there used to be twos. Sometimes neither of them was left. At first, everyone else had worked hard to not see them, then it had become second nature, and now the women weren’t there to be seen.