The nurse stuck her head back into the room. ‘Anna, your mum is doing well and just staying in tonight for obs. Psych is with her now. Out in the morning after his all-clear, but it’s so late the ward is requesting no visitors tonight.’

‘Thank you so much,’ Geraldine said as the nurse dashed off again, and Geraldine began to pack away the ultrasound machine.

‘So,’ I said, pointing to the machine. ‘What could you see on there?’ I cleared my throat. ‘Could you see a heartbeat?’

Geraldine looked at me for a moment. ‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Can I see?’ I said. I waited for her to tell me that was also not a very good idea, given that I planned to end the pregnancy. But Geraldine didn’t say anything like that.

‘Of course,’ she said.

We were both silent as Geraldine reapplied gel and pressed the wand into my abdomen and this time turned the screen to face me. A small dark bubble came into view on the monitor, and after trying some different angles on it, Geraldine finally pointed at a little wobbling speck on the screen. ‘Not really much to see exactly, but if I –’ and she flicked a dial on the machine and a speaker clicked on and a quick pulsing ‘pish, pish, pish’ filled the air around us.

I gasped.

‘Amazing,’ I said. ‘It’s amazing.’

And it was, after everything that had just happened. This amazing sound, this pulsing, this flickering-on of life. It was so hard to fathom that this happened all the time. This started off every animal that had ever existed, inside every egg and embryo, from worms to horses to people to fish to squid and cockroaches, that electric pulsing. It had started me, in just the same way, inside my mother, and it was still going, there in my chest, would keep going until it stopped and I died, just like worms and horses and fish and squid and cockroaches. And it always stopped, just as often as it started, without fail, in fact. Mine would stop, my mother’s, Basil’s. It was shocking, but the pulsing brought me back to the fact that so often life was only a mere flash inside another creature, what Leonie had said about miscarriages: a moment’s promise and then gone, with no-one even knowing about it.

And I had got to see it, there on the screen. What a privilege.

‘Amazing,’ I said again.

Geraldine smiled at me. ‘Isn’t it?’

After Geraldine had packed away the machine and trundled it out I sat alone on the crackling bed. They wanted me to stay while they did some paperwork and arranged some referrals to services in Sydney. I was anticipating that a nurse would come back at some point, hand me some forms, and usher me out the door.

So I was surprised when Geraldine came in with them herself, and once again drew up a chair and sat beside me. She lay the white envelopes down on the end of the bed.