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She felt like a violin being tuned, she thought, as she stared up at the ceiling. The twisting of the hair-fine needles along with the checking of various pulse points made it feel like some sort of fine-tuning was going on.

  ‘And that?’ asked Mae again, turning another needle.

  ‘Yes, but not as strongly,’ Liz replied.

  It seemed to work by administering little shocks to get things moving again. Stalled fluids. All the chronic stuff doctors hated, that’s what it was supposed to be good for; autoimmune conditions, IBS, asthma, backache. From what she’d understood.

  ‘Was the migraine less severe this time, would you say?’ asked Mae. ‘In terms of intensity?’

  ‘No,’ said Liz. ‘Unfortunately not. Worse if anything. Flashing lights, nausea; flat on my back in a darkened room. But it may all simply disappear when I hit the menopause! You said so last time.’

  ‘That does happen sometimes,’ said Mae, raising her eyebrows slightly and smiling. ‘I’m not offering empty hope.’

  They lapsed back into silence while Mae stood and held Liz’s wrist, testing her pulse. Quite a lot of any acupuncture session seemed to be filled with this careful pulse-taking. As far as she had understood, there were twelve different pulse points, six along each wrist, all useful for reading the selfsame central pulse in subtly different diagnostic ways. And the changes in pulse quality that happened when Mae slid a new needle into one of the body’s eight hundred or so acupuncture points provided her with clues as to what should be done next. Or something like that. At any rate it was a quiet, painstaking business as well as a leap of faith, and Liz was finding it surprisingly restful.

  The room was bare and clean and bright, though without the strip-lit glare of the hospital space where she had last week seen the specialist. ‘Be happy,’ he had said, patronisingly, at the end of an inconclusive appointment. Her GP had snorted when she told her this: ‘Another consultant telling a middle-aged woman she’s hysterical.’ Certainly his advice had not been noticeably more scientific than anything Mae had said so far.

  ‘So, what are you working on now?’ asked Mae, returning her arm carefully to the table.

  ‘I’m finishing a paper on the Risorgimento for a conference at Senate House next week. Mazzini’s identification of liberty with blood sacrifice, all that.’

  ‘The Risorgimento?’

  ‘It was the big freedom movement of the nineteenth century.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ murmured Mae mock-seriously, then: ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about but it all sounds very impressive.’

  Mae had been recommended to Liz by an insomniac colleague in the History Faculty. He had earnestly assured her that he felt better than he had done for months and that a needle between the brows was the sovereign remedy against sleeplessness; Liz had decided to go along with an open mind.

  ‘He was quite impressive, Mazzini. In exile all those years. He never gave up. Though Marx did call him “that everlasting old ass”.’

  ‘History passed me by,’ shrugged Mae. ‘I couldn’t take the rules at school, the lack of freedom. I did no work. I was a rebel.’

  ‘I was a swot,’ said Liz. ‘I’ve never really stopped being one.’

  ‘Um,’ said Mae. ‘I was quite wild.’

  ‘It doesn’t seem to have done you any harm!’

  ‘I don’t know about that.’

  They lapsed back into silence. How strange and welcome, thought Liz, the distant intimacy which had sprung up between them. They could afford to say anything that came into their heads since they had zero contact with each other outside this bare quiet room. Lying on Mae’s padded table seemed to liberate all sorts of illuminated ramblings, which, combined with the sporadic nature of the treatment, made for an unusually dreamy, intermittent sort of conversation.

  18:15 GOTHIC

  While she had been taking Liz’s health history in the preliminary session, Mae had laughed and commented that the two of them happened to be almost exactly the same age. Born in the same month fifty years ago, both were coalescing a step deeper into middle age. What would it be like, now wondered Liz, this shift away from the heightened sensitivity which regularly, tidally, made itself felt in advance of blood? And, parrying her own embarrassed, automatic self-accusation of self-indulgence: why shouldn’t the private life of the body be acknowledged as it crossed this new threshold?

  ‘Aren’t we supposed to feel fear and loathing about it?’ she said now.

  ‘I don’t,’ said Mae. ‘Do you?’

  ‘No,’ said Liz, with slight surprise. ‘But other people seem to. Younger women. Men. I haven’t mentioned it to anyone else except you, because of that.’

  ‘It does creep men out,’ admitted Mae. ‘The very mention of it. But then, so does any mention of periods.’

  ‘Even the language is Gothic, isn’t it – the Curse and the Change.’

  ‘The Change!’ said Mae. ‘Very doomy, yes. But menopause isn’t much better. It even sounds miserable and moany.’

  ‘Moanapause.’

  They both started to laugh, quietly.

  Sometimes when she woke from a flabbergasting dream Liz would lie very still to see if she could net it before it fled; perfectly still, eyes closed, not moving her head, as if the slightest shift would tip the story-bearing liquid, break its fragile meniscus and spill the night’s elusive catch. Here she had to be still too, even rocking gently with laughter as she was now, in order not to displace the various long fine silvery needles which bristled from her face and arms and fingers and toes, and which quivered slightly as she moved.

  ‘Also, had you noticed?’ she said, once their laughter had died away. ‘Calling a woman menopausal is the ultimate insult.’

  ‘I thought that was the C-word,’ said Mae, eyes downcast, professionally circumspect. ‘The ultimate insult.’

  ‘Except that’s a noun, and menopausal is an adjective. Menopausal is used to write you off, isn’t it.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Whereas the C-word carries more hatred.’

  ‘It’s what men call other men,’ commented Mae.

  ‘Is it? Yes, you’re right – I suppose it is.’

  ‘In Russia they call it your money-maker,’ said Mae. ‘The C-word.’

  ‘How nasty! No, we’re not having that.’

  Les Grandes Horizontales, she thought, gazing up at the ceiling; wasn’t that what they used to call the courtesans of nineteenth-century Paris? At least we’re now allowed paid employment in other areas; equal pay, sometimes. But yes, upwardly mobile; vertical job opportunities. In much of the world, anyway.

  ‘In Chinese traditional medicine they call it the Gate of Mystery,’ added Mae, after a long pause. ‘Also, the coital muscle.’

  ‘Hmm. Interesting. But neither of those will do either really.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘There’s always “vagina” of course, but I’ve never liked that because I did Latin at school, Caesar’s Gallic Wars, and it’s Latin for scabbard. Still, I suppose it’s the best of a bad bunch.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘I’m certainly not calling it a coochie or a foo-foo or whatever the latest suggestion is,’ she added.

  ‘No,’ said Mae. ‘I find I don’t want to personalise it in that way.’

  ‘You’re right. Neither do I. And that’s how it should be. That’s OK. If there was a good name they’d only take it and trash it.’

  18:19 AUGUST

  It can be useful for chronic conditions that flare up, Mae had told her, mildly, at the start of these sessions. If it brings inflammation down and holds it down, acupuncture can give more years not dominated by the condition; inflammation that flares up and feeds on itself is not great. As for the menopause she, Mae, had observed from her clients that it seemed to be pure luck of the draw how it affected you.

  ‘Some women are unlucky and have a bad time,’ came her voice from behind Liz as she stood at the head of the table and checked the needles in her scalp. ‘Night sw
eats. Drenched sheets. They have to get up and change their sheets in the middle of the night.’

  ‘Not us!’ said Liz, rolling her eyes back in her head at her like a racehorse.

  ‘Of course not,’ said Mae drily.

  They were quiet. Mae moved to the wooden chair in a corner of the room and sat checking her notes.

  ‘It’s interesting,’ she said at last. ‘Your migraines do tend to occur in the same week of your cycle.’

  That heavy dream-dogged sleep of the week before, thought Liz; the headache and slowness and central unwillingness to stir: would these disappear along with the heady waterlogged desire to be inward?

  ‘I realise I think of the menopause as extra time,’ said Mae, after another pause. ‘If I’d been born elsewhere in the world I might easily have died long before now.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Liz. ‘Or, a hundred years ago, here, of course. Pure luck. It would help though if we knew whereabouts we were on the scale now, wouldn’t it. Towards the end? In the middle?’

  ‘I like to think we’re somewhere around August,’ said Mae dreamily. ‘The very end of summer.’

  August, thought Liz: the sudden chill in the middle of brightness and warmth; confident wasteful growth starting to go to seed. Something casual and wild about it. Confidence. Strength. The smell of dust, and sudden thunderstorms.

  ‘I’ll tell you my own idea of it,’ continued Mae. ‘Here and now. For us.’

  She paused and lifted Liz’s arm again, silently counting for a few seconds.

  ‘There’s a sort of game I play when I’m trying to get to sleep where I parcel out the years,’ she continued. ‘So, up to the age of ten when you’re still in waiting and time goes slowly, that’s when you’re in January and February. From ten to twenty it’s March and April. Then it’s May, which takes you all the way to thirty since you’re fully in the world at last.’

  ‘OK,’ said Liz, smiling. ‘And at that rate, June is your thirties, July your forties, August your fifties.’

  ‘September until sixty-nine, that’s autumn,’ continued Mae. ‘Early old age, whatever anybody says. Then October is the seventies, that can still be early to middle-old age if you’re lucky; and November and December are middle- to proper old age, because let’s face it, we’re probably not going to make it beyond a hundred.’

  ‘August sounds good,’ said Liz.

  18:24 SHIBUI

  ‘Now, if you’ll close your eyes I’m going to try something new. I’m going to try some needles in the eye sockets.’

  ‘Really? Give me a moment,’ said Liz. ‘I could never have a face lift, could I. OK. Go ahead.’

  She closed her eyes and freewheeled into her thoughts, breathing through the little shock as the needles were inserted one at a time.

  ‘So how do you feel about looking older?’ she asked, eyes still closed. ‘Do you care?’

  The room was quiet for a while.

  ‘It’s harder in some professions than others,’ said Mae at last. ‘I have a client, she’s an actress, she’s quite famous. You know what they say about an older woman having to choose between her face and her bum? Well, she chose her bum and she tells me she wishes she hadn’t.’

  ‘Serves her right.’

  ‘But still.’

  ‘Talking of which,’ said Liz. ‘Have you noticed how you never can tell from a man’s face how big his bum is going to be?’

  Mae cast her gaze up at the ceiling and considered. There was silence.

  ‘That’s true,’ she conceded after a while. ‘That’s very true.’

  There was a pause while they thought about this, Liz with her eyes shut and Mae gazing out of the window, giggling gently, waves of submerged laughter rippling through them.

  ‘She’s also gone down the Botox route, this same client,’ continued Mae after a while. ‘She’s had little bits of work done and she does look younger than her age. But she doesn’t think she looks good, so what’s the point? She groans when she looks in the mirror.’

  Yes, the challenge is to see whether you can carry on liking your own face, thought Liz. There is such a thing as the beauty of ageing. The Japanese have a word for it, don’t they – shibui. I leave anemones in their vase for as long as I can, tulips too, for those wild swoops they do on their way out, the way their stems curve and lunge and shed soot-dusted petals. In fact I like them best at that stage. I’m not a vase of flowers, though, am I.

  ‘Is that all right?’ asked Mae, adjusting a needle. ‘Can you feel that?’

  ‘Ouch. Yes.’

  But let’s not luxuriate in self-disgust, continued Liz, taking herself to task. We wouldn’t riff on how hideous our grandmothers look – it’s disrespectful of life, that sort of spite, for one thing. It’s childish to criticise people for looking older. Including ourselves. And the spite comes from fear.

  ‘I honestly don’t think I’ve ever loved anyone less for growing older,’ she said now. ‘For looking older. Even friends where I’ve started off drawn to them by their looks. In fact, I usually love them more because they’ve become more vulnerable. I feel extra tenderness on top of everything else. I love them more. Don’t you find that?’

  ‘Mmm,’ said Mae. ‘Not sure.’

  Some of the people I’ve loved most in my life have been quite old, thought Liz. One or two have been very old – the ones who’ve continued to change and grow. And some of them – particularly the ones who’ve had worldly success – have probably been much nicer and more interesting older than in their unkind powerful youth. They’ve acquired vulnerability.

  ‘OK, then, say it hasn’t made you love them less,’ said Mae. ‘Has it made you fancy them less, though?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Liz. ‘Ah. Yes. Let me have a think.’

  ‘Because it’s about that, isn’t it,’ said Mae, starting to remove the needles from her eye sockets with practised deftness.

  18:31 SEX

  ‘Yes it is interesting, all that,’ said Liz, opening her eyes. ‘I am interested in what happens about, um, sex. I mean, at what age that’s supposed to stop.’

  Mae raised her eyebrows as she contemplated the fan of needles in her left hand, and looked thoughtful.

  ‘They say,’ she said cautiously, ‘they say the menopause takes women one of two ways. Either they grow more libidinous. Or the opposite.’

  ‘What, it can just turn off?’ said Liz, also raising her eyebrows.

  ‘Maybe it happens that one day you stop wanting to. And then you find you don’t regret what you don’t want.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Liz doubtfully.

  She, Liz, was still married to the girls’ father though there was little opportunity for sex any more – most nights he was up and waiting for the return of one or the other of them, texting and swearing and generally on their case. There was always the possibility that a daughter would return early from a disappointing night and walk in on them. Their bedroom had become a general family meeting place over the years, incorrigibly domesticated – Christmas stockings; sick children being cosseted; forum for passionate and extensive discussions about vital matters (like when bedtime was); meeting place for post-mortems of fascinating teen evenings and resumés of movies watched. He had suggested a bolt on the door; she had worried that would seem unfriendly; he had fixed one, nonetheless. ‘Ha ha ha, they’re trying to have sex,’ came the voices from the other side. In the service of tact as when under parental roofs of their youth they persisted in grim silence, clenching their teeth.

  ‘I do have clients who say they feel nothing but relief now that “all that”, as they put, it is over,’ said Mae, opening a new packet of needles. ‘I’m going to try your right temple next.’

  Liz drew a long slow breath and closed her eyes again. Into her mind floated the lunchtime concert she’d attended at St Pancras Church last week, Schubert’s Death and the Maiden. Most of the heads in the audience had been white- or grey-haired. And she hadn’t been able to help noticing the smell: nothing awful, just the s
ubdued but unmistakable smell of under-washed jumpers and hair that had been left to go an extra day. They weren’t expecting anything.

  ‘I can’t see how you wouldn’t regret the loss of that,’ she said.

  Regret was surely too dilute a word.

  ‘I’ve heard it’s sixty, sixty-five,’ she continued. ‘That sixty-five’s about average. For women and men.’

  ‘It can go on to seventy,’ said Mae ‘Eighty.’

  ‘Eighty?’

  ‘It would be different, though,’ said Mae thoughtfully. ‘Older. Different things.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Communication would be key.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  But Mae had lapsed into silence again.

  18:37 SANDWICH

  Her own girls, fifteen and sixteen, were at the start of it all. They still hadn’t got used to their bodies gearing up, thought Liz with a pang; they oscillated between pride and outrage at the new conditions of life to which they now saw they would have to reconcile themselves (and in strict silence, too, publicly at least). Presently emerging into lunar beauty they were virulently critical of her appearance and frighteningly sensitive about their own. They shudder at my arms, Liz thought, at my elbows; but they’re savagely self-policing too. It’s all part and parcel. I wish I could make them know how effortlessly beautiful they are.

  ‘It’s when you come out the other side,’ said Liz now. ‘Isn’t it.’

  ‘The other side of what?’

  ‘All that. The reproductive life. If you’ve had children. Even if you haven’t. It’s when you’re returned to yourself. So they say.’

  ‘My middle daughter is in a bulimic phase just now,’ shrugged Mae. ‘Meanwhile my mother’s lost it; she opens the door with nothing on.’

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  She twirled the needle in the crook of Liz’s right elbow.

  ‘Can you feel that?’

  ‘Ouch. Yes. They call us the sandwich generation, you know,’ continued Liz. ‘They’re trying to blame us again, of course. Caught between teenagers and aged parents and all because we left having children until our thirties. But it doesn’t wash!’