Kevin asked three questions, all of them about whether I was all right, none of them about them, and the woman doing the scan smiled at him in a way that suggested she had seen a lot of men ask that question in that order.

The girls came later, at the next one, and we had argued about whether we even wanted to be told.

Kevin was for knowing.

I was against it for about a fortnight on the grounds that we had spent ten years having information handed to us by professionals and I would quite like, just once, for something about my own body to be a surprise.

Then I changed my mind in the car park, because I wanted to be able to think about them properly, and you cannot think properly about a person you have no pronoun for.