‘Me neither!’ I said. Geraldine began to palpate my stomach. After a while I said, ‘Your interpersonal seems pretty good.’

‘Well, thanks for that.’ Geraldine grinned sheepishly. ‘I’ve worked on it.’

She paused to lean over to look at the urine test. ‘Well, according to this first indicator you’re still pregnant but we’ll need to do a blood test to really know what’s going on.’ And then, catching my interested face, she explained further. ‘Urine tests can still show positive for a while after a miscarriage because of the hCG, so we need to know whether the hCG levels in the blood are going up or down.’

‘Okay.’

‘Four weeks,’ Geraldine said, thinking to herself. ‘Sickness?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Ah. So you know that most women don’t start to experience morning sickness until at least six weeks?’

‘No. No I didn’t know that.’

‘Sometimes implantation bleeding can seem like a period. Timing’s slightly different, but if you’re not paying super-close attention . . .’

‘Shit,’ I said.

‘We’ll see.’

Geraldine returned her hands to my abdomen. She had a look on her face like she was listening with her fingers, as if my abdomen was speaking directly to them.

‘Now, you tell me if it hurts.’

In each new hand position she raised her eyebrows at me, and I shook my head – no, no pain. And suddenly I liked her so much – more than that, I wanted to be her. This woman who was using her fingers and her whole focus to try and ‘read’ me; I wanted that level of skill, to be so attuned to another person’s body that it told you things about itself. It looked like magic. And I felt so safe with her, so safe and so privileged. I wanted to make people feel like that. Medicine wasn’t just somewhere to run to, it was something worth heading for.

‘I’ll get the nurse to take your blood,’ Geraldine was saying. ‘I am really actually very bad at it, doctor’s prerogative. And then we’ll do a little ultrasound.’ She straightened up and stuck her head out of the curtains and looked around for a nurse. After a moment she stepped back through. ‘The ship is abandoned. How do you usually go with pain, Anna?’

‘Pretty good.’

Geraldine opened a supply cupboard and pulled out a blood-drawing kit. ‘I don’t do this for just anybody, you know.’ She loaded up the needle on the vial. ‘Okay, here I go – just a sharp scratch,’ she said, which was clearly a lie as she dug around in my arm before finding a vein.

‘Fucking hell!’ I said.

‘Did you know they’ve done research that shows swearing reduces the experience of pain?’

‘Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!’ I said.

‘Good on you! That’s the way. Okay, done now. Hold that cotton wool there for a moment.’

Geraldine pressed the nurse’s button and wrote on the vial and scrawled a note on a pathology form, popped it all in a tray on top of the side table, and then disappeared out for a moment and came back trundling a machine. ‘I can’t promise we won’t have to do a transvaginal ultrasound if this doesn’t find anything, but this machine is new and powerful and if that last period wasn’t a period it should give us a pretty good idea of what’s going on.’