Hot flush

Fiction, about two adults over 18. Nobody writes about what happens to this when your body starts rewriting the terms without consulting you.

Fiction. Every character in this story is a consenting adult over 18.

A story by the editor.

The flush arrived about nine minutes in, and my first thought was not about the heat. My first thought, with total clarity, was: this is the beginning of the end of this.

I am fifty-one. Perimenopausal for about three years now, in the way where nobody hands you a certificate, you just gradually accumulate evidence and then one day realise you have been living in a different body for eighteen months without formally acknowledging it.

The evidence, in the order I noticed it. Sleep going first, which is the one that makes everything else worse. Then the temperature business, which is not the comedy hot flush of sitcoms but a strange internal switch being thrown, top of the chest upwards, entirely uninvited. Then the mood, which I resented most because I have always been the stable one.

And then, quietly, the skin.

That is the one relevant here. My skin now marks from about two thirds of what it used to take, and holds it about half as long again. A session that would have left me pink and pleased at forty-two leaves visible evidence at fifty-one. Nothing dramatic. Just a body that is doing the same arithmetic with different numbers and did not tell me it had changed the formula.

David and I have been married twenty-three years and doing this for about nine of them, which means the arrangement has already survived one house move, one redundancy and both of us getting reading glasses.

What it had not survived yet was me deciding, privately and without telling anybody, that I was becoming unsuitable for it.

That is the actual subject of this story, and I want to be honest about how stupid and how powerful it was. Nobody said anything to me. David did not go off it or become careful or make a single remark.

I simply began, somewhere around my fiftieth birthday, to conduct a running commentary in my own head about a woman of my age wanting this, and about how much longer it could reasonably go on, and about the point at which he would be doing it out of kindness.

So: the Thursday.

Nine minutes in, over the arm of the sofa, everything perfectly ordinary, and the switch went. Chest, neck, face, that horrible prickling under the hair. In about forty seconds I went from a woman having a lovely time to a woman who urgently needed to not be where she was.

And I did the thing I have done my whole life, which is nothing. I stayed where I was and waited for it to pass and said not one word, because saying it meant saying the sentence, and the sentence was: I am having a hot flush. Which contains within it, at least in my head at that moment, a much longer sentence about what I now am.

David stopped anyway. About thirty seconds after it started. Put the strap down and said, "Right, up you get, come on."

Then he opened the window, got a glass of water, and sat on the floor with his back against the sofa while I stood in the middle of the room going through it, saying absolutely nothing and not looking at me, which was exactly right.

When it had passed I said, from somewhere I had not planned, "I think I'm getting too old for this."

He said: "For what, the strap or the window?"

Which made me laugh, and then cry, in about that order, and then finally say the entire eighteen months of private commentary out loud in one go while he sat on the carpet and listened.

Here is the part I did not know until that night.

He had noticed the marking change about four months earlier. He had already adjusted for it, downwards, without mentioning it, in the same way he had never mentioned adjusting for the fact that I cannot lie on my left hip since the accident. He had assumed that saying anything would embarrass me, and had been quietly recalibrating a moving target for a third of a year.

And at some point in that period he had read about it. Actually read about it, the way he reads about a fault on the car, and had a small store of facts I did not know he had: that skin thins and gets drier, that healing slows, that heat and adrenaline are a bad combination in a warm room, that sleep and mood change how a comedown lands two days later.

I asked him why he had never said any of it. He said, "Because you'd have had to talk about it, and you're not talking about it."

Which is the most accurate sentence anybody said to me that year.

We changed four things and none of them were dramatic.

The window is open now, always, even in January, and there is a fan in the corner in summer that we do not comment on. He swapped the strap for something broader that spreads its force, because the sharper implements now write on me in a way that lasts into the following week and neither of us wants that.

We start earlier in the evening, because I sleep badly enough without adrenaline at ten o'clock. And he checks in on the Saturday now rather than the Friday, because the flat, tearful day moved and we both noticed it move.

That is the entire adaptation. Four things. Against eighteen months of me privately drafting the obituary of my own sex life.

I keep coming back to the disproportion of it. Eighteen months of a private, grinding, entirely internal argument about whether I was still a person this could happen to, and the answer was a fan from Argos and a different strap.

Nobody was ever going to arrive and tell me I had aged out. There was no committee. There was only me, at two in the morning, deciding on everybody else's behalf what a woman of fifty-one was still allowed to want, and being absolutely certain that everyone else had reached the same verdict silently and was too polite to say.

The GP conversation, since I have written everything else down: I did go, about two months later, about the sleep mostly. We talked about HRT and I am on it and it has helped with some things and not others, and that is a conversation for me and her and not for a story.

What I will say is that I went in with a whole apparatus of embarrassment prepared and did not need any of it, and that the single most useful thing she said was that none of what I described was unusual.

Not unusual. I sat in the car afterwards and thought about how much of my fifties I had already spent assuming I was becoming a special case, when I was in fact doing the same thing as most women I know, silently, in parallel, none of us mentioning it.

Last Thursday, nine minutes in, the switch went again. It does, still, most weeks.

I said, into the sofa cushion, "Window."

And he said, "Yep," and got up and opened it and came back, and we carried on, and it cost the evening about ninety seconds.