I pushed the door shut behind me and leant my back against it, closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I would not bring anxiety across the threshold with me on a Friday night. 

I could hear Ellie in the kitchen, obviously still on the call she’d told me would be over by now. I hoisted my grocery bag in front of me like an offering, put on a smile and moved into the kitchen.

Ellie didn’t see me. She was wearing the VR headset and haptic gloves that made her look like a cyborg from an early twentieth-century graphic novel. She was immersed in a world I couldn’t see. Her helmeted head turned its blind gaze on her team in VR as she talked. Her gloved hands made swift elegant gestures that reminded me of a conductor leading an orchestra as she shared data to support her points about today’s water system engineering problem. I let her warnings about over-dependence on flawed digital-twinning models and her insistence on increasing the use of real-time data from micro-drones flow over me without trying to parse them and instead let myself focus on her vibrant physical presence. 

She still has the lean runner’s body that she’d had twenty years earlier and she pays it as little attention now as she had then. She was dressed in cargo shorts and a vintage Just Stop Oil t-shirt, that brought back memories of our first meeting. We had been arrested at a Just Stop Oil protest and bundled into a police van, pushed up against each other, hands zip-tied together. I was worried about what would happen next. About whether I’d keep my job. About what my parents would say. Ellie, who looked completely at ease, as if being arrested was nothing new, saw my anxiety, grinned at me and said. “Don’t worry. It’s all going to be fine.” and most of me believed her.

I put my grocery bag on the island in front of Ellie and touched her gently on the forearm. 

She turned her head in my direction, even though she couldn’t see me, smiled and said, “OK guys. I’m going to end it there. It’s Friday night and my wife just got home so engineering will have to wait. Update the data over the weekend and we’ll take another look on Monday.”

Ellie pulled off her headset and gloves and, without looking up, reached eagerly for the groceries. Engineering is what Ellie does to keep the world working. Cooking is what she does to keep us working.

“Did you get everything?” she asked.

“Yes. Even the fresh coriander.” 

“Wonderful. You’re a miracle worker. I can…” 

I don’t know how Ellie knew that something was wrong. I’d tried to sound normal, but Ellie looked up at me, let go of the food, reached across the island and took my hand. 

“Ann, what happened?”

I hadn’t expected to have to talk about it straight away. I’d thought I’d bring it up over dinner but as soon as I had Ellie’s hand in mine the words started to flow.

“Someone plinked next to me today,” I said.

“Plinked out?”

“No. Just plinked.”

“Did you count?”

“Yes. She plinked four times.”

“Only one more to go then.”

Ellie came around the island, put her arm around me, shepherded me to a seat at the kitchen table, the place where all our serious conversations took place, sat next to me and asked, “Who was she?”

“Mrs Shah’s girl, Jasmin. She was returning her grandmother’s books to the library. It was almost closing time so there were only the two of us there. She’d just handed me the first book when she plinked.”

“How did she handle it? How did you handle it?”

“She was calm. Serene even. She put her fingers to her lips, the way I’ve been doing to her since she picked up her first library card when she was five and she looked into my eyes as we both waited and counted. At the third one, she tensed and I knew she was waiting to see if there’d be another. I put my hand on hers, to help her wait.”

“You touched her while she was plinking?” 

Ellie sounded alarmed but she didn’t shrink back from me.

“I touched her to let her know she wasn’t alone.”

Had that been it? Or was I the one who had felt alone?

“I was still touching her when the last one happened. Her whole body pulsed. She leaned hard into the counter but she kept eye contact with me and then she smiled. A deep smile that reached all the way into her.”

I hadn’t known what to say. There I was, middle-aged, with two degrees to my name, half a lifetime of experience and I had no idea what to say to the young woman in front of me.

Ellie took my hand in hers, leaned close and asked, “What happened then?”

“It was strange. She put her other hand on mine and said. ‘It’s OK. It’s going to be OK. Don’t worry. I’m ready.’ then she handed me the next library book and life returned to normal.”

Except I knew it hadn’t. I wasn’t ready to admit to it yet but something I couldn’t name had changed.

Ellie squeezed my hands and stayed silent, looking at me the way she looks at data that she hasn’t pushed into a pattern yet.

We both waited in silence. I don’t think either of us knew why. 

Then Ellie smiled and said, ‘Well, you’ve had quite a day. Why don’t you take a good long bath while I take the wonderful food you brought home and make us a meal?”

That was typical of Ellie, cooking and caring while letting the difficult data run in the back of her mind. I knew she’d have more questions later but for now, she needed to be busy and she needed to feel that I was being looked after.

“That sounds good,” I said, “how long until dinner?”

“I’m going to need about an hour so take your time.”

Yes, Ellie was definitely going to have more questions. I had no idea what my answers would be.

The tub is my favourite thing in the whole house. It’s a massive clawfooted free-standing thing that sits on top of two tiled steps. It looks like an altar, a place of worship and it nearly always brings me peace.

Ellie doesn’t really understand why the tub means so much to me. She grew up in this house and she takes everything in it for granted. Except me. 

I grew up in a small flat where the water ran cold if I showered for more than ten minutes. A bath, any bath was a luxury for me. A huge steel bath, fed by an inexhaustible supply of hot water was heaven.

I turned on the taps, stripped off my clothes and tried to clear my mind in preparation for climbing up into heaven. 

Normally, I’m good at doing that, pushing thoughts aside and focusing on sensation, I could write a book on Zen And The Art Of Bathing, but today was not normal. Today, I’d held a young woman’s hand as she’d plinked.

I sank into the water and let my mind fill not with physical sensation but with the small amount that I knew about plinking. 

Even though it had been happening across the world for two years now, some people still refused to believe that plinking was real. That didn’t surprise me. Beliefs have little to do with knowledge.

I’d first heard of plinking as an urban legend that I’d dismissed as another variant of the I was abducted by aliens stories. At that point no one had plinked out, they’d just plinked. It was called plinking because PLINK was the noise you heard when someone near you had this strange thing happen to them. Or at least, it was the noise some people heard. Others heard nothing. It turned out that the plink wasn’t a sound. It couldn’t be recorded. The plink was just something that some people ‘heard’ in their heads if they were close enough. 

It sounded delusional to me. Then I saw the first video of a woman plinking out. 

She was an A&E doctor at the local hospital and she was giving an interview on plinking to a local TV news crew. She said that people had been coming to A&E complaining about strange fits or episodes. She’d been present when one patient had had an episode and the doctor had heard her plink twice. The doctor went on to say that she’d recently started to plink herself. It had happened to her four times and each time there had heard one more Plink. The reporter had just asked her what it felt like when the doctor broke into a smile and said; “It’s happening again right now.” She knew that the plink wouldn’t make it to audio so she counted the plinks aloud, holding up a finger for each plink. When she held up the last finger on her right hand, her eyes widened and then she was gone. Her clothes lay in a heap on the chair she’d been sitting on.

Of course, we all thought it was a stunt.

When it became a frequent occurrence, disbelief turned to panic. Some people were sure that those who plinked out were being abducted by aliens. Others thought it was the work of a secret international organisation. Some Evangelical preachers declared that the rapture had arrived and distributed ‘Pray To Plink’ bumper stickers. 

Ellie and I only took it seriously when an international group of scientists researching the phenomena said that they didn’t know what it was or how it worked or how it spread but what they did know was that only women plinked and on the fifth plink, they disappeared.

The West treated plinking as a disease and tried to quarantine the women who plinked. The quarantine didn’t last long as most women had their fifth plink within twelve weeks of their first and then they weren’t in quarantine anymore. In other parts of the world, plinking was seen as the work of the devil and women who were caught plinking didn’t live long enough to disappear.

Either way, plinking soon became one more thing that women kept secret from men. Women who were ready to plink out hid themselves away. This allowed the authorities to deny that there was or ever had been a plink epidemic. Yes, there had been an increase in disappearances but women disappearing was not a new phenomenon.

I’d never met anyone who’d plinked. Until today.

Jasmin. Why Jasmin? A nice girl but an ordinary girl. And she’d been so calm. No, more than calm. Serene. Quietly happy. Expectant.

I hadn’t just heard her plink. When I’d had my hand on hers I’d felt her plink. It was like… well it wasn’t like pain or a shock or even pleasure. It was… a sense of being connected, welcomed, summoned. wanted.

Maybe she’d seen all that on my face. Maybe that was why she’d put her hand over mine and said, “It’s OK. It’s going to be OK. Don’t worry. I’m ready.” What was she ready for? And how did she know it, whatever it was, was going to be OK? 

How do we ever know that we’re going to be OK? 

Anyway, I was Ok already, wasn’t I? I had a good life. Not my heart’s desire perhaps but who gets that outside of romantic fantasies? Yes, Britain was becoming a more brutal place with every passing year as kindness and goodness were ground down by an increasingly totalitarian state finally confronted with the reality of climate change but what Ellie and I had was real and it was enough. Most of the time. As long as I don’t look too far into the future or think too much about how fragile the bubble of relative affluence we lived in was. I did have a good life. I was OK.

I shivered. The bath water wasn’t hot anymore. I climbed down from my altar to ablution and wrapped myself in the wonderfully soft bathrobe that Ellie has given me for Christmas. 

The mirror was too steamed up for me to see myself, so I closed my eyes as I wrapped a towel around my hair.

Then it happened.

PLINK.

Not just a sound. A tremor that rippled through my whole body. A brief sensation of being touched, maybe even blessed and then… nothing. A nothing that felt like an absence of something essential.

“Ann, we’re five minutes away from plating up. Get yourself down here.” Ellie’s shout brought me back to myself. 

I’d just plinked.

And Ellie hadn’t heard me?

Would she have heard me if I’d been closer?

Would she plink too?

I didn’t know.

I opened the bathroom door and shouted, “Ellie, open the good wine, The stuff your colleague smuggled back from France.”

“Ok. What are we celebrating?”

I thought about that.

“Fridays. Life. Us.”, I shouted.

“The good wine it is then,” Ellie replied.

I went into the bedroom and dressed in a T-shirt and shorts to match Ellie’s look. I didn’t look as fit or as strong as she did but then I never had and it had never mattered. Maybe it was even part of what made us work. And we did work. I knew that. And tonight I would prove it all over again to Ellie and myself.

I smiled at myself in the mirror and headed downstairs to Ellie. 

Even then, I knew that a part of me, an important part of me, the part I think of as my inner self, was silently waiting to hear the second plink.