At eighty my stomach grew so large my family got frightened. The scan found something — and then a twelve-year-old record with my late husband’s name on it, and a folder called PROJECT AGNES.

And that mine was the second largest of the four.

I am eighty years old and I had been carrying twenty-one kilograms of fluid around that house for about eighteen months.

Up and down those stairs. Out to the bins. To church on a Sunday.

The fluttering in the night was fluid moving.

That is all it ever was. It shifts when you turn over in bed and then it settles again, and it feels like nothing else on earth, and it is completely harmless.

I had spent three weeks lying awake at two in the morning with my hand on my own stomach being frightened of a thing that was just liquid finding its level.

Those things grow slowly. That is their entire character and it is the reason they get to that size.

Nothing hurts. Nothing bleeds. Nothing happens suddenly enough to make anybody do anything about it.