When I was 13, a grown man beat me up. A doctor had to photograph my body for the police. It was evening in the children’s hospital. A dark, hospital blue across the interior design, like the sky needed picking up too. The doctor’s office was bigger than I would have liked, already feeling overexposed after I’d taken my school shirt off. I avoided eye contact with the doctor and her camera. Braced. But whatever, It would be over soon. I’d shown the police where the weapon was. A crowbar in the umbrella stand like a shit game of Cluedo. Just a few more photos and life would be neutral once more. I would do my homework, pinch ticks off the cat. Put stickers on things. Straighten my hair cross-legged on the bedroom floor.

Teachers at school were especially nice to me, I remember that. I lived in my Nan’s house over spring and summer, watching her soaps each night. An autopilot life until one day, when we were watching telly, she told me the police had dropped the case. According to someone, somewhere, who had seen images of my arms and my neck and my back and ignored the painting entirely; or someone who hadn’t bothered to look at anything at all; whoever this elsewhere-person was, they had concluded there wasn’t enough evidence to make a conviction. So, that would be the end of that. I didn’t react. It was a bit like leaning on the remote in the middle of a horror film and turning the screen off. A black rectangle might have been a relief for the audience but I was still in the film. Trapped from then on in a memory with the devil.

No reaction. Not then and not for a long time. But I’ve been feeling angry lately. Finally. I have been full of an anger given to me against my will. First put there by an angry man, then kindled by police in fancy dress costumes. That anger has since been stoked by time; by growing up and realising that I have inherited a world of casual violence where these things just happen; and where they still happen, and will happen. These things and worse. War, hate crimes, incarceration, the endless cruelty of money. I’m too cold in this rented house which I’m buying for my landlord. It took three years for the NHS to let me see a consultant cardiologist, who did me the honour of just one year for a follow-up. I’m pissed off at the generations that came before us who could have solved these horror stories, or could have lived differently so that the problems never existed in the first place. I’m angry every time Father’s Day comes around. And all of this anger feels entirely justified because utopia is so overdue.

I was moaning to a friend recently about how I wish I’d been born in the future. Just way later. I’ll come back after all of this stuff’s been figured out. My friend prescribed me a book: Woman on the Edge of Time, written in 1976 by the American writer and activist Marge Piercy. And then, a few months pass and I’m talking to another friend in another city. We’re updating each other on friend and family drama, comparing notes, and worrying about the most at-risk people in our lives (at-risk of suicide, becoming homeless, overdosing). She says she doesn’t think there is a single fix for everybody’s problems, because different people need and desire such different things. Maybe, she thinks, the answer is a world full of various utopias, like she’d once read about in this book called Woman on the Edge of Time — a book I have now also read; a book that feels like one more friend to confide in.

The story is built out from its own anger, like I am. 37 year old Mexican American woman Consuelo Ramos is at her limits after a life of poverty, death, racism, and state intervention. She is angry when a man tries to hurt her pregnant niece, and so she hits him in a bid to protect her. That man ends up getting Connie institutionalised for insanity, hemming her into a small space away from family. The little she had is now gone. But Connie has been getting contacted by a person called Luciente from the year 2137, and those interactions don’t stop after she is locked away. Luciente uses experimental technology that allows Connie to leave her body behind in that hospital in the 1970s in order to visit a future Mattapoisett. And, god, the fictional, utopian life that Marge Piercy describes there has left me homesick for a place I could never possibly visit.

In Mattapoisett, each child is grown in an artificial womb called a brooder. The controlled biotechnology means the village can achieve their own ideal racial diversity: ‘decisions were made forty years back to breed a high proportion of darker-skinned people and to mix the genes well through the population. At the same time, we decided to hold on to separate cultural identities. We broke the bond between genes and culture, broke it forever. We want there to be no chance of racism again.’ There are around 600 people in the base, and when one dies, a new baby is brought out of the brooder to replace them. Babies are then assigned three co-mothers of any gender who are all able to nurse after hormonal treatments. There are no surnames. In fact, nobody owns anything or anyone. Everyone shares in the co-operative lifestyle, taking turns at part-time work and farming and protecting the community. Monogamy is therefore a taboo because of its proprietary implications.

The people of Mattapoisett are not men and women. They are persons, and as such ‘his’ and ‘her’ pronouns become ‘per.’ They are mostly androgynous to Connie’s eyes. If conflicts arise, parties involved hold something called a worming to talk through nagging differences and find long-term ways to move forward together. There’s no school to speak of, just kids learning directly from adults. Most work is automated to free up people’s time. Every seven years, an adult takes a sabbatical from all responsibilities to do whatever they want. And kids decide when to leave the nest — choosing when to leave their co-mothers behind. In a ritual, a kid survives alone in the wilderness for a week, and picks a new name for themselves while they’re out there. After they return, their co-mothers are not allowed to speak to them for three months, ‘lest we forget we aren’t mothers anymore and person is an equal member.’

I guess this last detail got to me the most because every single character in Marge Piercy’s future appears to have more agency than anybody I know alive today, of any age. If there is a perforated edge to my body, everybody in her future is completely in tact. Luciente first says on meeting Connie, ‘I see you as a being with many sores, wounds, undischarged anger but basically good and wide open to others.’ I needed to read this book. I needed Luciente to visit me too. Luciente is mother to a child called Innocente. Innocente chooses to go through the end-of-mothering ritual aged 12, the year before I ended up in the doctor’s office covered in my own sores, wounds, just before I was given my undischarged anger. I wish I’d been away in the woods. I wish I had left home in time. How good life could be if we stopped being someone’s kid and belonged to ourselves instead.

I needed the other small joys that decorate this place. The low-level communication with cats. The one-time, elaborate, compostable outfits called flimsies that the villagers wear to festivals. Some do without clothes altogether. Even the names people choose for themselves. Sojourner, Sappho, White Oak, Jackrabbit. Who would I be? Memories are annexed on smart watches, so nothing is forgotten. If you want to change your hair colour, simply fiddle the proteins you ingest. Oh, and if a person wants a go of a special artefact from the past, a jewelled crown perhaps, or a painting, they can check it out like they would a library book. I’m only including these details because I want you to feel the good heights before we whiplash back to the hospital where Connie’s body rots in wait.

The book snaps back and forth between these two times and moods. I know that when people read books that do this kind of thing, they often prefer one side of the coin to the other. But I like that the book was always flipping. Reading it is like running towards an open door just as it is constantly slammed in your face. It has a devastating rhythm, one I think I walk in step with; this completely uneven, unstable, vertigo-inducing inequality that splits the body like a bleeding nail. With the heart condition I have, I feel this whiplash pulse inside me every time I try to stand up. The culture moves with me, its back-and-forth structure does a job. It shows us clean floors, then blood falling, then blood being swept up, so that we wonder why we ever let anyone bleed at all.

In 1969, seven years before Woman on the Edge of Time was published, the same year Neil Armstrong tried to speak for everyone on planet Earth, jazz poet Gil Scott-Heron wrote ‘Whitey on the Moon.’ The poem starts, ‘A rat done bit my sister Nell, with Whitey on the Moon. Her face and arms began to swell, and Whitey’s on the Moon. I can’t pay no doctor bill, but Whitey’s on the Moon. Ten years from now I’ll be paying still, while Whitey’s on the Moon.’ I think of the poem now because he swings from one state to another, the Moon a wrecking ball between them. I think of him now because his completely normalised anger was also interrupted by the surreal, alternate lives other people get to live; and so, his lived-in anger was made surreal for a moment too.

More violence comes for Connie, and more violence will come for me and for you, and I don’t want it to touch either of us. I don’t want to feel violent back, swinging like this forever from the mental institution to the Moon. Utopia is overdue because it will not be the vast, easing, panacea I’ve been counting on. Waiting for it like I did for the police all those years ago. In Piercy’s book, different communities organise themselves according to their own interests. A smaller world. My own Mattapoisett. Somewhere I can start life again. Leave home aged 12 with no anger to discharge. Breaking off like an iceberg. No one before me. No one coming after. Just somewhere to do my homework, pinch ticks off the cat. Put stickers on things. Somewhere to straighten my hair cross-legged on the bedroom floor. Somewhere I can choose my own name.

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