Credit where credit’s due, though. ‘The Dress’ deserves full marks for ingenuity. It contains the following line: ‘Know this: whatever happens to the body, the true Self – who we really are – cannot be destroyed. We are Awareness, not flesh.’ When I read that, I laughed out loud. I had thought that men, collaborator-women and all the enemies of feminism in between might have run out of ways to invalidate and erase the lived experience of female-bodied humans by now. It seems I was wrong. You’ve broken new ground, Billy, in approaching it from a spiritual angle. If all that matters about women is our spirituality in the form of cosmic Awareness (which you coyly capitalise), if our bodies are neither here nor there, then of course it’s no big deal if we’re shot, stabbed, raped or mutilated – and who better to tell us so than self-proclaimed enlightened men whose souls still comfortably inhabit their highly privileged but allegedly irrelevant physical shells long after they’ve destroyed ours?

Don’t bother sending me any more stories, Billy. I won’t read them. I didn’t sign up to attend your Spirituality for Misogynists class, and I won’t let you inflict it on me. And let’s face it, you’re no deity. You’re not even the guru you seem to think you are. You’re just another run-of-the-mill man whose idea of metaphysics is woman as disposable body, man as essential soul. And there was you, thinking you were special. Bless.

Chapter 19

19

19/1/2015

‘He-ey, Simon.’

Simon hated speaking to Dr Kerensa Moore on the phone. Her greeting never varied, which told him that at some point she must have decided always to answer the phone in that way. Simon wished she’d amend her ‘He-ey’ to a more palatable ‘Hello’.

‘What can I do for you?’ she said. ‘I’m just rushing out to a dinner.’

‘Can they manage without you for ten minutes?’ Simon couldn’t help feeling superior because he was having his evening meal cooked for him at home by someone who thought cooking was a waste of time. Like many of his feelings, it made no sense. ‘This is important,’ he told Moore.

‘All right. I’m all ears.’

In the kitchen, Charlie was singing along to her current favourite song on her iPod: ‘No water in the water fountain, no phone in the phone booth …’ What a stupid racket. Simon imagined she was dancing around with her headphones on. That’s why she took so long to cook when it was her turn. All she ever did was open a jar of something and pour it over pasta; she made sure it took an hour and a half so that she could stage a kitchen disco.