The meeting is in a cold, institutional room with a whiteboard up the front and stained carpet. The kind of place where new migrants might be given regulation English lessons, cheap teabags in the break. Lexi thinks it probably does double as some kind of classroom: the whiteboard, and they’d had to help the midwife stack a bunch of chairs against the wall when they arrived. The midwife has gone into her office now, which is next to a little kitchenette at the other end of the room. She has left them to get to know each other.

All the other women have remembered to bring bunny rugs. There is a circle of kicking, shadow-boxing babies at their feet. Lexi keeps Drew on her lap. Drew rolls her little head this way and that, fish-mouthing through the air. Lexi tries to distract her with a squeaky rubber giraffe.

‘All the babies are being so good,’ one of the women says – the one with curly dark hair; Lexi thinks her name was Sarah or maybe Sandra.

The babies are being very good. Sarah-Sandra makes goggle faces at her little boy and the little girl beside him (all the babies are colour-coded for gender), who keep giving each other accidental fist-bumps and then looking around in short-lived surprise.

Drew twists her body sharply, knocking the giraffe to the floor. Lexi flicks her tongue bolt back and forth to calm herself. If she does have to breastfeed it will be alright. This is the unconvincing mantra that she and Rema ended up with last night, after Lexi’s outburst on the sofa: the baby sliding on and off the nipple with that wild self-defeating hunger; Lexi surprising herself with tears arriving from some place beyond the tired numbness. What if I have to do this in front of them?

The other women, the other mums, all staring down at their babies, not doing a good job of getting to know each other. These women have been stalking the edges of Lexi’s hallucinatory consciousness ever since she got the letter from the council. Non-compulsory, but recommended for new parents. Rema thought she should go. Lexi knew she should go, but still resented Rema for saying so. Rema went back to work three weeks ago, two weeks after Drew was born. Every day she puts on a suit and goes out into a world of KPIs that have nothing to do with the functionality of her nipples.

In the flesh there is nothing threatening about these women, not really. They are ordinary: jeans and loose pants, maternity tops stretched over the awkward bulges of upper bodies. Some of them have made small efforts – lipstick, eyeliner – but mostly these markers just draw attention to the dark circles of their eyes, the flaccid droop of tired flesh. They lean inwards towards their floor-bound babies as though they could all crash down into the centre of the circle at any moment, a heaped maternal nap on the itchy carpet.

But of course their ordinariness is the point. Lexi flicks her tongue bolt back and forth, leans down and coos softly to Drew. Where is the fucking midwife? She needs to get out of here and get home soon; her breasts have that low, dull ache. She looks up and catches the eye of one of the women on the other side of the circle – a tiny woman in a fleecy red jumper, who raises the corners of her mouth into a tired smile. Knowing and war-weary; a trench smile. Lexi offers it back, thinking, She thinks I am one of them. Long sleeves, no tattoos visible, and there hasn’t been time for a haircut since before the birth: the buzz cut along the side of Lexi’s head has grown out. Maybe I look like them. There is a sweet, dangerously sweet, molten core in the thought. Acceptance, safe harbour.

Drew gives a frustrated little cry and knocks the rubber giraffe to the floor again. Please wait. Lexi tries to convey the simple, urgent message to her baby telepathically. Please wait. To get out of the maternity bra she will have to unbutton her top, exposing one whole side of tattoos. But this is only a gateway worry. Once the actual breastfeeding starts they will all see what is wrong with her. The essential thing she is missing. In her tiredness she can’t quite name it – the thing that will undo her with its absence.

The old Lexi wouldn’t have cared what these women thought. First one out of the closet: every time, every new person, new job, new conservative dickhead she met since she was fifteen. But she left that self somewhere on the other side of all the shouting and can’t remember what she’d been on about.

No, she can: she’d thought she was brave. Flying the flag – we’re here, we’re queer, we’re not going shopping.

She wasn’t brave; she just had nothing to lose. No risk. In this new world – too-bright; objects illuminated with sharp shifting edges – everything is a risk to her central defenceless part. The small writhing weight of Drew, starting to cry for real now, not aware of what she is doing to her own chances. Please wait.

The woman next to her nods towards Drew and says, ‘Getting hungry?’

Lexi wishes she could deck her.

A few of the babies on the floor have actually fallen asleep.

Drew lurches desperately, veering towards Lexi’s body open-mouthed, scavenging tongue. All right, little one, all right.

She jiggles the baby with one arm while she fumbles to unbutton her shirt. The ugly maternity bra is exposed, and the large lizard across her shoulder, the ink bleeding into itself, her lovely old blue-tongue a relic from sun-bleached days in WA. No one is looking at her; they are all staring down at their babies, perhaps deliberately to give her some fiction of privacy. Flying across her breast is the row of small delicate bluebirds, and then the cracked, scarred nipple. Her breasts have not taken on much milk-dripping roundness. Still little and pointy. But the large, chewed nipples are not her own. She hoists Drew up and clamps her on quickly, willing her to find that sweet, oblivious place that doesn’t hurt and allows her to feed freely. It has only happened a few times, and not for weeks.

For a moment she thinks it has worked, miraculously: Drew’s eyes droop shut and her mouth moves busily. But the pain arrives like distant sirens, spreading from the nipple outwards into an increasingly urgent blaring. Drew detaches for a moment and lunges again. It is not alright. A small noise comes out of Lexi, a reflex cracking consonant from the back of her throat, just as the door beside the kitchenette opens and the midwife comes out.

She stands for a moment, swaying slightly and considering the small circle of women.

‘Everyone getting to know each other?’ She speaks slowly, a slight break between each word. She is rounded and soft with tassels on her top; indeterminate age somewhere between thirty-five and fifty. Something goddess-like about her, beatific.

The women stare down at their babies.

‘What a lovely collection of bubs we’ve got today.’ She pulls a chair from the wall and positions herself in the circle, smiling around. ‘You must all have wonderful maternal instincts. As I mentioned when we introduced ourselves, I’m Marla. I’ll be here just to guide the group and answer any questions you have. I’ve been a midwife for eighteen years and I’m a registered lactation consultant, so if anyone has any questions … ?’ Her eyes travel the circle, just slightly above their heads. Lexi keeps her eyes on Drew and tries to shove a bit of burning breast tissue more firmly into the baby’s mouth.

‘Anything at all,’ Marla says. And then, when no one speaks, ‘Gosh, what a quiet room of babies. Honestly, you wouldn’t believe the noise a few newborns can make.’

‘Newborns,’ the woman next to Lexi says quietly, dreamily, almost under her breath. Lexi thinks she might not have meant to speak it aloud, but Marla says, ‘Yes, although technically most of them are infants, as they’re past the first twenty-eight days. Does anyone else have any questions?’

Her eyes travel the circle again at that slight altitude, until they get to the air above Lexi and Drew. The baby’s head hides some of what is going on at the nipple: the painful blind slurping burrow. Lexi has given into it – sharp-edged ripples of pain that crest outwards from her nipple. There’s no point trying to detach Drew and reattach her; she’ll never get it right. Drew will be on formula by the time she’s two months old. Lexi has read the brochures and taken in words like immunity, IQ, bonding, obesity. Drew’s whole life will be blighted by Lexi’s sad little faulty breasts.

Marla’s eyes have come into sharp focus on Lexi and the feeding baby. Without taking her eyes off the breast she walks around the circle and stops behind Lexi’s chair. ‘Looks like a bad latch,’ she says, some of the melodic softness flattened out of her voice. ‘Let’s take her off and reattach.’

When Lexi starts trying to lever Drew delicately away from the breast, Marla reaches down and inserts her little finger in the side of Drew’s mouth, a hard little probe. ‘This is the best way for a quick detachment.’ She makes a demonstrative sweep with her other hand to indicate that everyone should watch, all of them focused on Lexi’s breast, which the baby breaks away from with an angry bleat. ‘That nipple looks painful,’ Marla says. And then, addressing the group, ‘This kind of damage is a result of feeding with a bad latch. There should be no pain associated with breastfeeding. Any pain or discomfort is a sign that you haven’t achieved the right attachment.’ Drew’s head weaves around this way and that, cat-cries. ‘Let’s get you back on properly, little miss,’ Marla says. She holds the back of Drew’s head in one large palm and aims the baby’s mouth at the bullseye. ‘Can everyone see? You want to wait until baby’s mouth is at its widest point, open and receptive. Wait. Wait …’ as Drew’s bleats become more insistent, twisting her head to escape Marla’s grip. There is a break between cries, Drew gearing up for a proper scream, eyes scrunched and mouth opening wide. ‘Now!’ Marla says – the clipped urgency of a drill sergeant – and rams the baby’s head onto the breast with more violence than you’d think was safe.

Lexi sits like a statue, willing herself to become dumb, insensate stuff as she watches her baby get clamped on. With Marla’s dramatic force, Drew has taken so much breast tissue that Lexi thinks she may gag on it. But she only lies there for a shocked moment with her mouth full of boob, and then Lexi can feel the little gullet up close to her nipple, the undulations of tongue as Drew starts to suck. At first it doesn’t hurt at all – there are many seconds, maybe ten of them, when Lexi sits stock-still within a widening circle of hope. If this works she will forgive Marla for everything; for her big doe eyes and the whole catastrophe.

Marla has started talking about attachment technique by the time the pain arrives. She is saying, ‘A sweeping motion, sweep, that’s how you want to achieve a good latch.’ Lexi tightens her jaw against it and tries to interpret the frenzied needling as something other than pain. (Perhaps it’s a normal part of breastfeeding. Perhaps this is just how milk ducts feel. Perhaps she is a wuss.)

Marla says, ‘Think of your breast as a hamburger. How do you approach a really messy hamburger? You go at it quickly with your mouth wide open to try and catch all the drips.’ Still standing next to Lexi and Drew, hovering with her hand on the back of Lexi’s chair as though she is shielding them from something. She illustrates the hamburger breast with a flourish of her hand towards Lexi, now in undeniable agony, and Marla’s eyes catch on her face. ‘Is this hurting?’ The question, combined with her shielding pose, is a parody of solicitousness; she sounds suspicious, mildly accusatory. Lexi doesn’t want to open her mouth to speak. This small aperture to the world will allow the pain to rush in and fill every bit of her.

‘A little,’ she says stiffly.

‘No, no.’ Marla’s hands go to the breast and to Drew’s mouth, little finger delving into the delicate hinge of her lips. ‘You should have no pain during breastfeeding. Leaving the baby to suck will only compound the attachment problem.’

She levers Drew off and again stands with her hand guiding the baby’s head, watching intently for the right moment, Lexi exposed to the room. The other women must be getting a good look at her ink. The thought has only an abstract sort of horror now; she is far beyond the edge of land where that level of humiliation matters. ‘Wait,’ Marla says, ‘wait.’ Lexi thinks, in a detached kind of way, that there is nothing keeping her here: nothing physically binding her to the hard-backed chair and the chilly room full of normal women. She could just get up, sling Drew under her arm and walk away.

It won’t happen. The logistics are frighteningly complicated: bra, shirt, stroller across the room, angry baby. Marla has her trapped. Fucking motherhood.

One of the women on the other side of the circle, the small one in fluffy red, breaks the watchful intensity of everyone staring at Lexi’s breast. She says, ‘I cried every time I fed Eddie for the first three weeks.’ Eddie, at her feet, is one of the sleepers: arms thrown above his head in adorable blue-overalled abandon. ‘The pain was so bad. I think my husband thought I was putting it on, till my nipples started bleeding – and then he got worried about the blood getting in the baby’s mouth, so he said to stop for a few days and just express. And then when I started again it was different, it was like I’d grown this kind of new skin.’ She rubs her fingers together, a puzzled look on her face. ‘And it didn’t hurt anymore.’

Something about this little story makes Lexi want to weep with gratitude. She smiles across the circle at the woman.

Sarah-Sandra says, ‘And I bet your husband took all the credit for things working out.’

It gets a laugh.

Another woman says, ‘Sometimes I express so my husband can have a go with the feeding overnight. It takes hours and I always end up having to get up to settle Charlotte anyway, but Geoff is so pleased with himself I can’t bring myself to tell him it’d be less trouble not to bother.’

‘You’re lucky yours even tries. My husband Luke seems to think if he goes near any milk he’ll grow breasts and turn into a woman.’

Laughter, fuller. Lexi sits alone, separate on her own small island as the ice cracks around her and Marla finally sweeps Drew back onto the breast.

‘Mine seems to think he’ll turn into a woman if he goes near a pile of washing,’ someone else says fondly.

‘Or a dirty nappy.’

Everyone laughing now, united and collegiate against their men. At least Marla seems to think she can leave them to it – she goes back into her office, door slightly ajar.

‘It’s not that he doesn’t try,’ Sarah-Sandra says. ‘It’s like … he doesn’t even see it. Or hear it. Or smell it.’ Gesturing towards her baby, ‘He can be screaming in the middle of the night, and I’m up and down feeding and changing and pacing, and then Jim wakes up in the morning and says, The baby had a quiet night, didn’t he? Maybe he’s started sleeping through.’

Lexi, to her surprise, is nodding.

‘Oh I know, I know,’ someone else says. ‘And then even when the baby’s screaming right in front of him, it’s like Luke has no idea what to do. He’ll pick her up and say, What seems to be the problem here? in a funny voice, as though that’ll work on a six-week-old, and I’m like, Well clearly she needs to be changed or burped or whatever. And it ends up being less trouble just to do it myself than to talk him through it.’

‘Men are so clueless.’

Lexi winces: at the predictable waves of pain that have started spreading through her chewed breast, and also at this last comment, which twanged against some delicate thread of identification, of belonging, that she has started following through the war stories.

‘They don’t even know that they’re clueless. If a guy changes a nappy the whole world acts like he should get some kind of parenting award.’

Lexi says, ‘My partner Rema hasn’t changed a nappy since she went back to work.’ She has spoken in a rush, holding tight to the back of Drew’s head. The feeling of betrayal is vertiginous and alluring – a straight drop that she launches herself over with the pain flying behind her. ‘I don’t even know if she realises, but since she went back to work three weeks ago it’s always, She wants you, you can settle her better, she won’t settle if you’re not here.’

Heads cocked sympathetically, nodding; no one seems to have batted an eyelid at the gender pronouns. Lexi feels braver, swelling into the feeling that she has something to say, something only she has a clear view of. ‘And all that stuff is true, Drew does settle better with me. Of course she does.’ Nodding down at the baby against her breast. ‘But where’s it going to end if I keep doing everything and she’s only used to me?’ Chorus of murmured assent around the circle. ‘And Rema, it’s like she’s got the right, or the mandate to be clueless now, to not hear Drew in the night or not know how to settle her. Or do the washing or cleaning or any of that stuff.’ The shame of saying these things, of bitching about Rema to strangers, is almost gone; she has flown away from it with the air in her face, and it feels as though the pain in her breast has receded a bit, everything muted by tiredness and adrenalin so that this scene she has suddenly entered seems interesting but not quite real. ‘And obviously it’s not about her gender, right? Because she’s the “right” gender.’ One-handed quote marks in the air, looking down at Drew.

‘Before I had her I never thought all the gender stuff applied to me that much, and I thought women were sort of crazy for getting stuck in those old-fashioned roles.’ The straw woman of her old imagination: fifties styling, waving from the front door, waiting for her man to bring home the bacon while her whole orbit goes into freefall because she has a uterus and he doesn’t.

‘But now I feel like I sort of understand it. Like, there are these tracks, or roads, and once you get on them you just go and go and go, both of you off in different directions.’ Lexi breastfeeding in the early-morning gloom while Rema throws back a coffee, grown-up work boots clip-clopping on the kitchen tiles, pecking Lexi on the lips on her way out the door. ‘And the tracks have gender labels on them which are meant to make you think those tracks are where you belong, and that there’s something wrong with you if you don’t go smoothly on them.’ Drew’s mouth slips off the nipple, blessed relief. ‘But I think – what I think is that we’re making the tracks as we go. They’re not laid there before us like some natural path we should just be able to step onto. We’re making them by doing these things all the time, all the domestic stuff making the tracks deeper and longer.’ Still speaking to Drew through the comforting buffer of not-quite-realness. ‘And the others, the partners, they make their tracks deeper by going to work and missing all that stuff. But it feels like some kind of failure to recognise that it’s not nature, it’s not some beautiful eternal thing tied up with being a woman. I don’t know what it is. I guess it’s just, like, industrial relations.’

Drew is off the nipple now, and without bothering to button herself up Lexi reaches into her bag – slowly, slowly – and gropes for the dummy, fingers closing over it in the side pocket. Drew stirs, but once her mouth closes on the little rubber teat her breathing settles into an easy rhythm.

Only then Lexi starts to button herself up, all the women still watching her in a silence whose weight she hasn’t gauged yet, and somehow doesn’t really care about anymore.

‘That’s interesting,’ one of the women says – a mousey blonde who so far has sat silently in the circle. ‘All that stuff is interesting. My boyfriend Ben hasn’t gone back to work yet. He wants to take six months off if they’ll let him. He likes giving Toby feeds overnight and he always seems to hear him first when he cries or know when he’s wet. And he’s better at settling him than me.’

Lexi smiles, recognising the act of bravery, the risk.

The babies are almost all awake now, squawking and kicking on their bunny rugs. Marla comes out of her office and hovers near the circle. Sarah-Sandra’s little boy is the first to start crying, an open-mouthed wail very different to Drew’s little cat mewls. Sarah-Sandra picks him up and lays him longways on her knees, jiggles him and reaches into her bag for one of the ubiquitous squeaky giraffes. The baby bats at it with a clenched fist and wails louder, crying with gusto, and it starts catching on around the circle, the other babies beginning one by one to cry.

Marla moves around the circle and stops behind Sarah-Sandra. ‘Looks like he wants to nurse,’ she says.

Sarah-Sandra nods, but there is a slowness, perhaps a slight shakiness in her unbuttoning hands. She keeps cooing and talking softly to the baby as she unclips her maternity bra. The woman beside her, a redhead in a tent dress, has slipped one arm out and started breastfeeding without any apparent effort, no unclipping of bras or arranging of boobs, the baby nuzzled comfortably against her with one hand. With her other hand she reaches into her bag and checks her phone.

Sarah-Sandra leans forward over her baby in a protective huddle and positions the breast in his mouth, repositions it almost immediately, her face as tense as a pilot making a difficult landing.

‘How’s the latch?’ Marla says, leaning over the back of her chair. And then, looking up, eyes travelling the circle, ‘You have to learn to trust yourselves, your maternal instincts. It’s what the men don’t have, bless them.’ She looks back down at Sarah-Sandra’s baby. ‘It’s a bad latch. Here …’ slipping her little finger into his mouth. ‘Now wait, wait,’ as the baby mouths around, searching for the lost breast. ‘Your maternal instincts will tell you everything you need to know.’

Marla looks up and around the circle again. When she sees that Drew is sleeping peacefully she smiles, full and warm, and Lexi feels a flush of beatification, of rightness almost.

Marla nods at Drew. ‘I don’t recommend the dummy,’ she says, still smiling as Lexi’s sense of rightness melts away. ‘It’s not good for her little mouth.’