The Family way

At week four, Jessica's foetus was still too small to see without a magnifying glass - about a fifth of a millimetre long. Was it even a real baby yet? It was to Jessica.

'Paulo's going to tear out his study,' Jessica said. 'Just throw it all out and turn it into a nursery. He has started already. All the shelves have gone. It's going to be the most beautiful nursery in the world.'

Although her condition still seemed slightly unreal, the doctor in Megan knew that nothing much could stop her baby being born now, while Jessica's baby was still fighting for its life. And yet here was the funny thing.

Somehow Jessica's baby felt like the one whose future was secure. Cat sipped her champagne. Only she and her father were drinking the bottle of Mumm that had been produced from the bottom of the Shenyang Tiger's fridge. And as she watched her two pregnant sisters - Jessica spilling over with joy, Megan far more reserved, yet apparently happy that she taken the decision to have this baby - Cat knew that she had let her personal life drift.

Megan had a career and a baby on the way. Juggling the needs of both would be tough, but next year she would be a fully registered doctor and a mother. No matter how hard

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it got in Hackney, there was something enviable about a life so full.

And Jessica - Cat had never seen anyone so happy. She had the final piece of her jigsaw. The man, the marriage, the home - and now the baby. Cat was glad for her. Because she knew that for her sister, the rest of it would have grown sour and meaningless without a child.

Cat thought, what about me? What do I have? What will make next year any different from this year?

It was almost funny. She had always been completely ruthless in her professional life. Working hard, knowing when it was time to move on, finding a mentor in Brigitte, and then doing all she could to please her.

But in her private life Cat now felt she had been hopelessly passive, allowing herself to drift where the wind blew her. Cat liked to think of herself as an intelligent woman. But existing on automatic pilot - how stupid was that?

'The next generation of Jewells is on the way,' said their father, holding the hands of Jessica and Megan, but staring at Cat and lifting a wry eyebrow. 'You're next, Cat.' 'Not me,' she said. 'I'm a bit more careful than they are.'

Rory - what was all that about? He was kind, attentive, and clearly mad about her. But Rory's past wouldn't lie down and die. It couldn't. Not ever. Because there was a child involved. Because the ex-wife would always be there. Because of that stupid operation.

And as Cat watched her sisters with their father, she thought, what do I need to be happy? A job I love, a good flat, my own space. Children had never been on the list. And they were not on the list today. But perhaps she needed the possibility of children.

Even if Cat never had any of the little bastards, it would be nice to think she could if she really wanted to. If she ever . lunged her mind. That was the problem with Rory. She was not used to having her options limited.

Yet, as she sat listening to her sisters' tales of fatigue, sickness and swollen breasts - and as she guessed at Megan's tears of bringing a baby into a one-bedroom flat in Hackney

Cat felt a clearly identifiable emotion wash over her, and,i I most swooned with the force of it. Relief. Then suddenly Megan had to go. There were house visits to make on the Sunny View Estate before afternoon surgery. And Cat had to get back to Mamma-san. So they said their goodbyes on Gerrard Place, next to the long line of fire engines in Soho's fire station.

Jack and Jessica lingered, both reluctant to go home. They drifted across to John Lewis and went up to the fifth floor, losing themselves among the prams, cots, push chairs, Grobags, babygros and many things they didn't even recognise - tap protectors, bottle warmers, nappy wrappers, the products of an industry that had sprung up since Jack Jewell's daughters were children.

They didn't talk about it, but they both knew what they wished for Jessica's baby, and for the baby that Megan was at this very moment carrying around the Sunny View Estate, and it was a wish that grew within the walls of every broken home.

A family that was built on far stronger ground than the one they had known. Rory went to see Megan. She saw him in her surgery after hours, a small favour to her old martial arts teacher. Neither of them told Cat.

'I had an operation. Towards the end of my marriage. You know. A vasectomy.' Now she understood why he didn't want to talk on the

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phone. This was a big thing in his life. You didn't resolve it with a phone call. 'I think my sister may have mentioned it.'

'And now - well, I'm not sure it was the right thing to do. I mean, I knew I didn't want any more children with my wife. Ex-wife. And she certainly didn't want any more children with me. But perhaps it was too drastic' 'It's a common problem.' He was stunned. 'It is?'

'We're good at controlling our reproduction. But not so good at controlling our personal lives.' 'You mean you have seen this before?'

'What? Regrets from a man who has had a vasectomy? More times than I can count. I've also seen women who are sterilised, and live to regret it.'

'I thought perhaps - I don't know - I was the only one. It sounds stupid when I say it like that.'

'It's not stupid. Nobody talks about these things. Because what does it say about you?'

'That I am a complete idiot who has made a total mess of his life.'

'That's a bit harsh. I was going to say, it shows you have made one or two bad choices. Although I am sure it seemed like a good idea at the time. But how can I help you, Rory?'

'I want to know if it's possible to reverse what's been done to me.'

Megan had seen it all before. Even with her limited experience in a surgery, this conversation was not new. Perhaps this is how you become a proper doctor, she thought - seeing the same scenarios of human pain and sadness and illness again and again, until your response became automatic. What was different this time was that this man was in love with her sister. 'First off, they should have told you that the procedure is designed to be irreversible.' 'They did.'

'Secondly, you should never have had it done if you I bought there was the remotest possibility that you would live to regret it.' 'I know. I do.'

'All that said - of course life changes. You wake up one day and the world looks different. You don't want children with the woman you are married to. Years later, you meet someone you think you would like to have children with. Like, possibly, I don't know - my sister.' 'So they can reverse this operation? They can do it?'

'Happens all the time. Reversing it is not a problem. But it's far from certain that you would be able to produce a child. Your sperm are unlikely to have the degree of motility they had before. Maybe, maybe not. But there's one thing I've learned since I left medical school.' 'What's that?'

'You never know your luck. I have to tell you, in all honesty, it's a long shot. That's the reality. I'm sorry I can't be more positive.' 'That's okay.' 'And anyway - oh, this has got nothing to do with me.' 'Go ahead.' 'I don't think my sister wants children.'

'That's fine. That's great. Because you know what? Neither do I.'

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nine Endings sneak up on you, Cat thought.

You think you are in control. You think you can decide when it's all over. And then suddenly it all slips away, and you are reminded that you are not in control at all.

It was just the two of them now. Just how she liked it. Jake was back with his mother, his stepfather and his half-sister - complicated or what? - and Cat could sleep over at Rory's place without bumping into anyone with acne.

But late one night, as he poured two glasses of something red and full-bodied, she noticed that he had cleared out his spare room. This was where he kept the stock for his business - the white karate tops and trousers, the coloured belts in their cellophane wrappers, the black and red leather pads for kicking and punching. Now it was all gone, replaced by a flatpack from IKEA. A single bed.

'I thought I'd prepare a room for Jake,' he said, joining her in the doorway. 'It's not fair on the boy, expecting him to always sleep on the sofa.'

'But - but what about all the stuff you need for your business?' What she meant was, but what about us? Kory handed her a glass, and shrugged. 'I can keep it at iln dojo. The important thing is that Jake feels welcome hi?.' He stared at her, his face hardening. 'What is it?' Nothing.'

'(nine on, Cat. You're pissed off because I'm making a (??? for Jake. I can tell. I've got a son - can't you under-M.IIKI that?' 'And I haven't got a son. Can't you understand that?' I'm not going to argue with you. I can't apologise for hiving a child.'

'I'm not asking you to apologise.' Suddenly she felt an overwhelming sadness. This wasn't what she wanted. 'Just

I don't know. I just wish the present mattered to you as much as the past.'

'Look - it'll be fine. The pair of you used to love each other. It's just a difficult age.'

'For him or me?' Cat shook her head. 'This is no good, is it? Of course you want to make your boy feel at home. There's nothing wrong with that. What kind of heartless cow could object to that? I just think - we should maybe not see quite so much of each other.'

His face fell. 'Because I want to make some space for my son?'

'Because I need some more space for myself. It's not your fault. It's mine. Wanting your son to feel at home - it's only natural.'

And leaving him then felt natural too. If she was going to find something else in her life, then she had to allow herself - what did they call it in all the magazines? Search time. They called it search time. As part of her vocational training scheme, once a week Megan caught the bus to the local hospital and sat around with a dozen other GP registrars, discussing their problems.

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Trainee quack coffee mornings, Megan thought, though she could see their value. She always came away from these gab sessions thinking, oh, it's not just me then. It's a screaming nightmare for all of us.

The other GP registrars were from every class and race -almost half of them were from Asian backgrounds - and yet Megan had no doubt that they were all people like her. Late twenties, bright-faced high achievers, academic virtuosi who were starting to look a little worn around the edges. Megan thought it was wise of their masters to set up this ritual. Because they couldn't talk to their friends and family about what they were going through. Nobody else would understand.

'I've got this patient who is being bashed about by her husband,' said one young woman, a blonde with pony clubs and privilege in her every vowel. 'Comes in once a week, cuts and bruises, the occasional cracked rib. I don't know whether to alert the authorities or not.'

A fat Chinese boy peered at her through black-rimmed spectacles. 'What's stopping you?'

'Arranged marriage,' sighed the blonde. 'If the police turn up at the door, I'm afraid that hubby or his family will kill her.'

'Cultural diversity,' smirked a smooth young Indian man. 'Don't you just love it?'

'Don't tell anyone,' snapped the Chinese. His accent was that strange mixture of Cockney and Cantonese. Everything sounded like a command. 'She'll never press charges, and it will just make it worse for her. That's what they're like round here.'

'I hate it when my patients tell me to fuck off and die,' said a Pakistani girl in a mini-skirt who looked as though she should still be doing her A levels. 'Have you noticed? They tend to do it when you refuse to give them their pill of choice.'

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? Inn.i/epam,' drawled the Indian. 'They always tell me |0 fuck off and die when I decline to dish out the Temazepam «? demand.' Megan took a deep breath and blurted it out. Tm pregnant,' she laughed.

Ilu-y stared at her. And kept staring. Megan found herself grinning into the embarrassed silence.

After a few months in general practice, these young? l.i. lors thought they had seen and heard it all. The man with a hamster bite in his rectum. Wives who slept with a It.iinmer under the pillow, not to protect themselves from burglars, but to protect themselves from their husbands. The IMoilier and sister who were left to fend for themselves when their parents went dancing. In Ibiza. ? grotesque parade of feral children, thieving junkies, neglected pensioners, men with their cocks stuck inside Ntcuum cleaners, more men with assorted fruit and vegetables stuck up their back passage, women who had been beaten and bashed by men who were drunks, or religious fanatics, or jealous to the very edge of murder, all the abusers and the abused.

In rotting neighbourhoods full of baseball bats where not one single person played baseball, the finest minds of their generation tended to the sick, the diseased and the dying. Iliey had seen it all, and written the prescription.

But one of their band of high-flying, straight-A brothers and sisters pregnant? They had never heard anything like it.

'I think it will be fine,' Megan said, smiling with a confidence that she didn't feel. 'The baby will be born towards the end of vocational training, so I will probably be breastfeeding during the final MRCGP exam, and the father's out of the picture, but I really think I can handle it. You know?' They didn't know what to say.

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They had all come so far, and all worked so hard, and seen so much, and were now struggling through their final year before full registration. A baby on top of all that? A baby now? It seemed perverse - like an exhausted marathon runner staggering into the stadium, and deciding to do the final lap on his hands.

The other young doctors stared at Megan in silence, offering neither congratulations nor commiserations. They had seen some strange sights on the front line of the NHS - but this? It was as if they didn't quite believe her. Megan looked at all those different-coloured faces wearing exactly the same expression. She's kidding, right? Megan knew how they felt. Sometimes she couldn't quite believe it herself. 'Once they've got their baby, it all changes,' said Michael. 'Not just their body - although there's certainly that - but their entire outlook.' He drained his beer and signalled the bartender for another one. The bartender ignored him. 'The baby becomes the centre of their world. And the man barely shows up on the radar.'

They were in a pub just off the Hollo way Road. It was close to their business, but they had never visited it before. Neither of them were drinkers - 'There is no word in Italian for alcoholic] their father had always told them, when their English friends were all growing beer bellies in their late teens - and both of them had somewhere they would rather be. But Michael was increasingly reluctant to go home. Not that staying out made him happy.

'Do you think that's what happened to our mum?' Paulo said. 'She lost interest in our dad?'

Michael shot him a look. 'Don't talk about Mum that way.' 'I'm just thinking. She always seemed like such a real mum ? me.' Paulo smiled at the memory. 'Cooking, and bossing I iround, and all that stuff.' Michael smiled too. 'Yeah, she was good at it. Good at .1 mum.' M.iybe she changed. Maybe when we came along we !•• i.ime the most important thing in her world. And maybe D.ul was glad. They always seemed happy together, didn't I lappier than couples now.' Ii's different these days. Men like the old man, they II»ni tod the first girl that came along, they got married, and 111.11 was it. Work and home and no rumpy-pumpy in between. Now we've got all these temptations. Now there .?? all these women out there who like sex as much as men do. Until you marry them.'

Paulo watched his brother staring moodily into the gloom of the Rat and Trumpet, and he realised how close he still felt to him, how much he still cared about this man. How much he still loved him. -

'Let me get this straight,' said Paulo. 'It's not actually your fault you were taking Ginger from behind. It's your wife who's to blame.'

'Keep your voice down, will you?' Michael glanced around nervously, a hunted man. 'I'm just saying - they go all mumsy on you. The big difference is not living together or living apart. It's not being married or being single. The big difference is being childless and then having a kid.' Michael stared at his brother defensively. T love my daughter, I couldn't love her more.'

Paulo placed a hand on his brother's arm. T know that. So stop shagging around. You don't want a divorce, do you? You don't want Chloe to grow up with you not around. You want her to have the same sort of family we come from, don't you? A family as solid as that.' 'It can never be like that any more.'

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'But it's madness to chuck your family away for the sake of a quick poke. It doesn't make any kind of sense. You love your family, Mike. You don't want to lose it.' 'Ginger's very special.'

'Well, they're all special when you've got a boner, Michael. But it wears off, doesn't it? That boner. That passion. That - I don't know - that hunger. It melts away. You know it all better than me, the number of girls you've had. But what you've got with Naoko is something to build a life on.'

Michael hung his head. 'I love Naoko. And I love Chloe. But since she's been born, I just wonder - how can you have so much love in your life, and so little joy?'

'Is that your idea of joy? Meaningless sex with a virtual stranger?' 'Well, it's a start.'

'You stupid bastard. She's the one who is supposed to get postnatal depression. Not you.'

Paulo thought, it will be different for us, for me and Jessica and our baby.

I don't care about the sleepless nights, or the teething problems, or changing nappies, and whatever else it is you have to do. And I don't even mind if the baby becomes the most important thing in my wife's life and we only have sex by appointment. I want her to love our baby that much. A baby deserves to be loved more than me.

Whatever is happening with Michael and Naoko and Chloe will never happen to us. We are going to be fine. The only thing we have to do, thought Paulo, is get through the next nine months. That's all.

Then he left his brother in that miserable pub and went home to his pregnant wife, and gently pressed his ear against her still-flat abdomen, and it was the best thing in the world, both of them smiling and full of unalloyed joy, listening for that tiny heartbeat, waiting for some small signal from the I cntre of the universe. Week fourteen, thought Megan, heaving her weary legs down the steps of the surgery. She could hear a shaven-headed man in a grubby vest shouting at the receptionist that he knew his rights.

Week fourteen, she thought, lightly running the palm of her hand across her abdomen, a gesture of reassurance, although Megan had no idea if she wanted to reassure the baby or herself. The bump was starting to show. Her clothes were tighter. The baby was learning to suck its tiny thumb. It was really happening.

In the surgery there was a leaflet called 'The First Trimester' for next year's mothers, full of sensible sound bites for women with a bun in the oven and perfect lives.

Involve Your Partner. Try to Fit in a Daily Nap. Give in to Your Exhaustion. Get Fitted For a Proper Maternity Bra. Get Your Partner to Give You a Soothing Massage. Swim Regularly. Talk to Your Partner. Don't Suffer in Silence.

Megan often looked at the leaflet when she wanted a good laugh. 'Megan?'

It was Will, all shy and anxious, and for a few moments she was absurdly pleased to see him. Involve Your Partner, she thought. Get Your Partner to Give You a Soothing Massage. But Will wasn't her partner any more, and he wasn't the father of this child. He had sent her a barrage of text messages that she had deleted without reading. What was there to say? And still she felt the sweet and sour pang of regret for a road not taken.

If he had loved only her, they would still have been together. They would probably have drifted into marriage and, eventually, had some sweet-looking children who would

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have spent Sundays with their doting grandparents in Hampstead Garden Suburb. Now she wouldn't even look at his text messages. Megan thought, how we rush to forget those we once loved. 'You look good, Megan.'

They had been so close. That was why she was happy to see him. She wasn't sure she would ever be that close to a man again. They had all that precious time to waste during their student years. Nights when they talked for hours and told the secrets of their soul and the stories of their life. Nights when they didn't sleep because they couldn't stand to be apart. Nights when they smoked and drank and watched the sun come up.

It wasn't that Megan couldn't find a better man than Will. It was that she would never again have all that time to waste. She realised how lonely she had been. 'I want you back, Megan.'

Not possible. Because of what he had done. Because of what she had done. Best to get it out of the way. 'I'm pregnant, Will.' His jaw fell open. 'It's not yours,' she added quickly.

Megan had always thought that scene in Four Weddings and a Funeral was a bit unrealistic, the one where Andie MacDowell tells Hugh Grant about her sexual history, and all he does is look a bit sheepish and say, 'Oh golly gosh, matron, oh bugger me.' Megan always felt that was a little too enlightened.

'You slut, Megan,' Will managed, his face red with rage, not very Hugh Grant-like at all, and trying to stop himself from crying. 'You bloody slut!'

Men didn't expect virginity these days, Megan thought, but they certainly expected the illusion of purity. The truth? They can't handle the truth! 'Who is he, you filthy slut? I'll kill him!' Virtual purity, Megan thought. That's what they all w.mted. Impossible when you were in the family way. Jessica entered From Here to Maternity with shyness and pride.

Women at various stages of pregnancy moved slowly around the store, lifting maternity clothes from the racks -combat trousers with huge expanding, elasticated waistbands, flowery smocks, austere black business trousers, again with one of those expanding waistbands. All kinds of maternity clothes for all kinds of lives, and all kinds of future mothers.

The women occasionally made that protective double or triple stroke of their pregnant bellies, that gesture that Jessica had caught herself doing - the Masonic handshake of pregnant women.

From Here to Maternity was different from other clothes stores. There were no bored husbands and boyfriends sitting around sighing. Nobody seemed to be in any mad rush. The women seemed to have all the time in the world. Occasionally they would talk to the sales assistants, and their conversations seemed like a mixture of the trivial and the momentous. Can you get these combat trousers in khaki as well as green? Oh, I'm due next month. Jessica couldn't stop smiling to herself. Because she belonged here.

Jessica picked a pink, flower-print dress from the rack. She could see that some of these clothes were no different from what young, non-pregnant women would wear to a bar or club. Okay for Megan perhaps, but not her. But the pink, flower-print number was exactly Jessica's idea of what a maternity dress should look like. 'It's pretty, isn't it?' an assistant asked.

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Jessica smiled. 'I love it.'

'There's no reason why you can't look stylish and sexy when you're pregnant. From Here to Maternity wants you to show off that bump with pride.' Jessica glanced down at herself.

'Don't worry.' The assistant smiled. 'The bump will get bigger, I promise you. So you're around three months, I guess?' 'Not quite, actually.' 'Would you like to try it on?'

Why not? Jessica was part of the club now. And even if her normal clothes still fit her, there was no reason on earth why she should not start preparing her wardrobe for the coming months. She always did things a bit early.

She left work to have a baby before she was pregnant. She told the world about her pregnancy before she reached three months. And now she was shopping for maternity clothes when she was still only a size ten. And this was because Jessica couldn't wait, she just couldn't wait to hold her baby, to start a proper family, for everything to be okay again.

She was in the changing room, still fully dressed, when she felt the wetness in her shoes. That's what she didn't understand. The wetness was in her shoes. That's why she didn't realise she had started bleeding. Because the only sensation was the wetness in her shoes.

The fear rising, Jessica started to remove her clothes and that's when she saw the blood. All that blood. On her hands, on the unbought dress. She felt the panic flood her heart.

There was all that blood and the wetness in her shoes and the dress with flowers still in her hands, somehow flecked with red. My lovely baby.

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ten At first he thought she was his wife.

There was something about the curve of her face, the set of her eyes that for just a moment made Paulo think, there she is.

From the other end of the hospital corridor, it was an easy mistake to make, what with his nerves still jangling from the mad drive, and with this terrible need to see her. But it was one of the sisters. It was Megan. Sipping a cup of coffee she didn't want. Waiting for him. She looked up as he ran towards her. 'Is she all right? Is she all right?'

'Paulo, Jessica's going to be fine, okay? But there's been a lot of bleeding. They have to do what's called an ERPC

He struggled to understand her. How could this be happening?

'It's standard procedure. Very straightforward. An ERPC is a short operation. Nothing to worry about. It means evacuation of retained products of conception.' 'But she's going to be okay?' 'Yes, Paulo. I promise you Jessica's going to be okay.' 'And the baby's going to be okay?'

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Megan stared at him, took a breath. 'Paulo - Jessica lost her baby.' 'What?' 'Jessica had a miscarriage.'

'A miscarriage?' He shook his head, looked away, struggling to grasp it. 'Our baby's gone?' 'I'm so sorry.' 'But - she's having this operation, isn't she?'

'The ERPC is just - it's to clear out the uterus. We - they - can't leave anything inside Jessica. Because that can lead to infection. We have to wait for a few hours before she can be given anaesthetic'

Paulo seemed to unravel before her eyes. 'We lost the baby?' 'You and Jessica will have a beautiful baby one day.'

He shook his head again. How could this be happening? 'But what did we do wrong?'

'You didn't do anything wrong. I know this is a terrible thing. But it happens every day. One in four pregnancies -' 'Where is she? Where's my wife?'

Megan indicated the door behind her. Paulo nodded, wiped his eyes with the palm of his hand, and went inside.

Megan took out her mobile phone and, ignoring the withering looks from a couple of passing nurses, called Cat yet again, and again got nothing but the metallic voice of the woman on the answer machine. My lovely wife, he thought.

The room was lit by nothing but the buzzing bar of fluorescent light behind Jessica's bed. But even in this sterile twilight, Paulo could see it all written on her face. The loss of blood. The grief. The exhaustion. And on top of it all, the terrible weight of the lost life. She was propped up on pillows, but seemed to be sleeping. I'.iulo pulled a chair close to the bed and took her hand. I In ii lie buried his face in the covers of the hospital bed,,..M»mg into the starched sheets, choked with grief. Sorry,' Jessica said. 'You have to use a condom,' Cat said.

The boy smiled, and tugged at the edge of his woolly |?-.t in Timberlake hat. 'But I want to feel myself inside you.'

He reached for her and she lightly held his wrists. 'Well, you can feel me through a condom, or tonight you'll be feeling nothing but your fist.' She smiled, friendly but firm, "lour choice.'

'I'll see what I can find,' he grumbled, and went off to wake up his roommate.

He had taken his shirt off as soon as they walked into the flat. Perhaps he thought his tanned, pumped-up torso would take her mind off his peeling, shagged-out accommodation. Now she was alone, she suddenly felt out of place. There were takeaway pizza boxes and stacks of dirty laundry and the remains of a spliff in an ashtray. She had gone home with him to wake up her body. But did she really want it to wake up here?

They had met in a club frequented by the kitchen staff of Mamma-san. She had admired his hat. They had danced. She had asked his name and soon forgotten it - Jim? John? - then been too shy to ask again, and not caring anyway.

They had necked - ridiculous, Cat thought, kissing like a couple of teenagers, but nobody looked twice at them. Conversation had been minimal, their shouted introductions and small talk drowned by the music, but that was okay too. She was tired of talking.

He came back with a packet of three, scratching the eagle tattooed on his biceps, and she realised she wanted to go home. Her body definitely needed waking up, but she

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thought she would let it nap for a little longer. And there was something else, although she knew it was crazy.

If she was going to wake up her body, she sort of wished it could be with Rory. 'I'm sorry,' she said. 'But I have to go.' 'Why?'

She shrugged helplessly, and remembered a line she had once learned under grey Manchester skies.

'Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade.' 'What?' 'I just got my period.'

She was afraid he might turn nasty, but he just took off his woolly Justin hat and shook his shaved head. He even called her a minicab.

'You modern girls make me laugh,' he said as she was leaving. 'You don't know what you want, do you?' She couldn't argue with that.

The next morning, when she had breakfast alone in the Starbucks at the end of her street, Cat thought - it's easy to meet someone. But how do you meet someone who doesn't wear a woolly hat unless it's a bit chilly outside? How do you meet someone good?

Then Cat switched on her phone, and listened to Megan's messages, and turned her face away from the boys and girls who had not yet gone to bed, so they would never guess that she was nothing like them. Paulo drew the curtains, and double-locked the front door, and shut out the world.

He went into the living room and checked on Jessica. She was still on the sofa with her feet up, idly leafing through one of the glossy magazines he had bought her. 'I'll make us something to eat,' he said, and when she looked up at him and smiled, her face drained of all colour, he felt his eyes and his heart filling up again. He was going i" have to stop doing that. 'What do you fancy, Jess?' 'Anything,' she said, shaking her head, still smiling.

He went into the kitchen and began searching through i lie freezer for something that would make her strong. Meat sauce and pasta, and maybe a little green salad if there was anything in the fridge. Some red wine. He wanted to make? good meal for his wife.

People thought he loved her because of the way she looked. And of course that's how it begins, he thought. But there was a quiet kind of bravery about Jessica, she wasn't as fragile as she seemed, you could see it in the way she lifted her face when every instinct must have been telling her to look down and hang her head.

She raised her chin when she looked at you, and he thought of that simple gesture as he cooked their dinner, occasionally going to the door of the other room to make sure she was okay. And every time he appeared in the doorway, Jessica would look up from her magazine and smile, lifting her chin, the way she always did, and he would smile back at her. They didn't need to say anything.

When the meal was ready, he came into the living room with a tray containing two steaming plates of spaghetti, two side salads made of limp lettuce and squashy tomatoes, and a bottle of the best wine they had in their rack.

'Speciality of the house,' Paulo said. 'The famous Baresi Bolognese.'

He was afraid that she would tell him she wasn't hungry, but she dropped the glossy magazine and rubbed her hands.

'Do you want to eat at the table or on our laps?' she said, swinging her legs round so she was sitting on the sofa. He looked at her bare feet and felt a pang of longing.

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'What do you want?' he said, placing the plates on the coffee table. He began uncorking a bottle of Barolo. You're meant to let it breathe, he thought. 'I'm happy here,' Jessica said. 'Then let's have it here.'

So they sat in front of the television eating their dinner, sipping red wine and talking about what he had to do at work the next day.

The doors were locked, all the curtains were drawn, they were safe and warm and well fed, and it was almost as if there were just the three of them left in the world. Jessica and Paulo and their unimaginable child. 'What's that song you keep singing?' Jessica said.

She was sitting at the top of the stairs. At the bottom, Chloe was on her hands and knees, huffing and puffing towards her as if climbing her own private Everest while Naoko followed close behind, ready to catch her daughter if she fell. As Chloe slowly scrambled up the stairs, grunting through the Hello Kitty dummy she had stuck in the side of her mouth, throwing her little arms high above her head in a swimming motion as she dragged her pink knees onto the next stair, Naoko sang to her in Japanese. Maigo no Maigo no Koneko-chan. Anata no ouchi wa dokodesuka?

'It's a really silly nursery rhyme.' Naoko smiled. 'It's about a policeman, who happens to be a dog, right, and he finds this lost kitten.' 'She loves it.' It was true. Chloe had been in a cranky mood all week, «nil a large tooth pushing its way through her sore gums,.miI only a few of her favourite things soothed her.

She liked chomping hard - definitely not sucking - on her Hello Kitty dummy. She liked the climbing-the-stairs game. \IHI she liked this lilting Japanese song.

(Ihloe never tired of the things she loved. She wanted ilicm endlessly repeated, and was ready to kick up a fuss if In-i orders were not obeyed. Naoko and Chloe had come to i In liouse every day that week. In their different ways, Jessica.1111.1 Naoko were lonely. Alone all day with Chloe, Naoko i raved adult company, while being around Naoko and Chloe seemed to salve some raw wound deep inside Jessica. The arrangement suited all of them. Naoko could have a conversation that didn't consist of baby noises. Jessica was happy to have company in a house that would be silent until her husband came home.

Jessica would keep Chloe amused while Naoko mashed up her food - the milk was being phased out and she was on solids now, but squashed to the kind of chewy pulp that four teeth could accommodate. Jessica could change her, bath her, persuade her to have a little afternoon nap. The only thing that Jessica couldn't do was sing the special song. But she felt that she almost knew the words by now. Maigo no Maigo no Koneko-chan Anata no ouchi wa dokodesuka?

'The kitten can't tell the cop where she lives or what her name is,' Naoko said, as Chloe ran out of puff near the top of the stairs, and began roaring with frustration. 'All she can do is cry.'

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Maigo no Maigo no Koneko-chan Anata no ouchi wa dokodesuka? Ouchi? kitemo wakaranai Namae? kitemo wakaranai. Meow meow meow meow Meow meow meow meow! Naite bakari iru koneko-chan. Inu-no omawari-san Konatte Shimatte. Woof woof woof woof Woof woof woof woof!

Chloe got her second wind and scrambled up the last couple of stairs. Jessica snatched her up and kissed her fiercely on her cheek. As always, the newness of the child shocked her. That heartbreaking mint-fresh milkiness. Jessica held Chloe on her lap and Naoko sat beside them. There was an easiness between them now. They were real friends at last. 'Tell me what it means,' Jessica said.

'I'll try,' Naoko said, and translated the song with a smile on her face. Being lost, being lost - you dear little kitten. Where is your home? She doesn't know where her home is. She doesn't know what her name is. Meow meow meow meow Meow meow meow meow She only keeps crying. But the dog cop is lost too.

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Woof woof woof woof Woof woof woof woof! 'I guess it loses something in translation,' Naoko said.

'Not at all,' Jessica said. 'I didn't expect the dog to be lost too. So they're both lost - the man and the woman.' 'Well - the dog and the cat.' 'It's lovely, Naoko.'

They sat there for a while not feeling the need to talk, waiting for Chloe to catch her breath and indicate that she was ready to return to base camp and attempt another ascent.

Then Jessica said, T saw my baby. She was in a little creamy-coloured sac. A tiny, tiny thing. But a real baby. They tell you it's not a real baby yet, and that's just not true. She was a real baby -1 saw her. Among all that blood. She didn't have a name. And I don't even know if she was a she. Might have been a little boy. I don't know. But there was a real baby inside me, and now it's gone and this is what they don't understand when they talk about having another baby and how you ought to snap out of it and not take it so hard - I'll never have that baby again. That baby's gone. They don't understand that. The doctors, the nurses. They think you're crying for yourself. They don't understand that you're crying for the baby who will never be born. For that baby.'

She looked at Chloe wriggling in her mother's embrace, growling to herself, anxious to be free. Ready to play the climbing-the-stairs game again. 'Michael's having an affair,' Naoko said. It was all she had to give her. Jessica stared at Naoko. 'How could he do that to you?' 'It's not me he's done it to. It's our family.' 'How do you know?' 'The woman wrote to me. I would show you the letter

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but I've thrown it away. She's pregnant.' She laughed bitterly. 'If you saw her, you would think she was too old for all that. It's the woman where they work. The woman on the front desk of the showroom.'

Jessica had seen Ginger, and she had always thought, she must have been quite a looker once upon a time.

'He swears it's over. Says she's left the firm. Promises on his mother's life he's never going to see her again. But how can I believe a word he says?'

Naoko lifted her baby up and buried her face in her neck. Jessica knew that she was smelling it too - that impossible newness. It took your breath away. How could anything be that pure and unspoilt?

'It's not easy to walk away when you've got a kid,' Naoko says. 'It's her life too. It's her family I'd be breaking up.'

Jessica watched Naoko carry Chloe to the bottom of the staircase and carefully place her on the carpet. Then she came back up the stairs and sat next to Jessica. Chloe grinned up at them, amused at the prospect of climbing the stairs without a chaperone.

'It's okay,' Naoko said. 'She's not going to fall. She's good at it now.'

T)a,' Chloe said, pointing a finger the size of a match-stick at her mother and Jessica. TJa.'

It was her first word, her only word. Michael insisted it meant daddy, but he was wrong. It meant look at you. It meant what's all this? It meant this is a funny old life. It meant everything, and would do so until Chloe learned her second word. 'What's going to happen?' Jessica said.

'I don't know,' Naoko said. 'Michael says it's over and I want to believe him but I think he's lying. I could ask him to leave but then Chloe grows up without a father. Or I can let him stay and then I know I am living with a husband In, prefers going to bed with someone else. Either I lose.,i my baby loses. So I don't know what happens now.' h,sica and Naoko sat on the stairs together, and as the 1.11»\ began her ascent of the staircase, they started singing i In song she loved so much, Jessica hesitantly following: J.n.ko's lead, as they watched Chloe's determined little face i?.I ihe evening gathered around them. Maigo no Maigo no Kuneko-chan Anata no ouchi wa dokodesuka?

The two women laughed as Chloe crawled up the stairs towards them, her angel eyes shining, her new teeth gleaming, and never tiring of the game.

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eleven The Here Pussy Pussy bar is on P. Borgos Street in the heart of Manila's red-light district.

The bar has stood on the same spot since the Vietnam War. Originally its clientele were American soldiers looking for rest and recreation. Today the men are usually expatriate businessmen in search of intercourse and intoxication. After more than thirty years, only the music has changed at the Here Pussy Pussy.

Young women in bikinis still sway and smile on the stage, while men in short-sleeve shirts still nurse a San Miguel beer and watch the lazy dancing, never quite knowing if they are the hunter or the game.

Kirk became a regular at the Here Pussy Pussy after he was laid off by the dive school in Cebu. The British owner was very apologetic - only months earlier he had persuaded Kirk to move from Sydney to the Philippines. But the spate of terrorist bombs had frightened away the tourists, and on most days Kirk was alone on the dive boat.

Maybe he should have felt angrier with his boss. The truth was he had been glad to get out of Australia. His girlfriend kept talking about where they were going and Kirk knew

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in his bones that it would never be where she wanted to go. He had never doubted that he would marry this girl, but he had been wrong. Kirk just couldn't pretend it was the same as when he had left. Two years away had changed him. Meeting Megan had changed him too.

He had lost his girlfriend in Australia and his job in the Philippines. So now he propped up the bar in the Here Pussy Pussy, watching all those acres of golden female flesh, and trying to stave off that point of drunkenness where he would pay some girl's bar fine - the fee paid to the Here Pussy Pussy for losing an employee for the night - and take her back to his hotel. 'Where you from? What hotel you stay?'

A slender woman in a green lycra string bikini had appeared by his side. She lightly touched his arm.

'You very gwapo,' she said, framing his face with a thumb and index finger.

'Thank you,' Kirk said, though he knew she would have told the Elephant Man he was gwapo, meaning handsome.

Like most of the girls in the Here Pussy Pussy, she was a strange mix of shy and shameless. After the introductions were over, she was stroking her side and wiggling her hips, her frail body swaying on her towering high heels. 'I never enough,' she said. 'Oh! Ah! I never enough.'

He smiled politely and looked back at the stage. Usually the girls at the Here Pussy Pussy moved as though they were sleepwalking. This was part boredom, and part exhaustion. Although they all had youth on their side, none of them older than their middle twenties, if nobody paid their bar fine they were expected to dance until four in the morning. Yet occasionally the Here Pussy Pussy DJ put on a record that made them burst into life, and when that happened they laughed and swung their long black hair and moved with real joy and abandon, no longer dancing for the men in the bar, now dancing for nobody but themselves.

There was no rationale behind the songs they loved. Although the Here Pussy Pussy dancers were all dedicated students of popular music, the songs that moved them were as likely to be years old as they were to be last week's number one. They were way beyond fashion.

The girls at the Here Pussy Pussy came to life for 'Jump Around' by House of Pain. 'Without You' by Eminem. 'Sex Bomb' by Tom Jones and Mousse T. 'See You When You Get There' by Coolio. 'Macarena' by Los del Mar. But most of all they went wild when the DJ played, 'A Girl Like You' by Edwyn Collins. That girl, Kirk thought. That girl Megan.

It was stupid. He knew it was stupid. It was only one night, but she had got under his skin. He wasn't over her. Maybe because it was only one night. Maybe because he never had the chance to get her out of his system. But probably because he cared, and she really didn't.

Megan, he thought, looking at fifty other girls, all of them half-naked, any of them his for a night for pin money. He could have two of them if he wanted, or even three, if he could afford it, and if he had been eating his greens. But that wasn't going to happen. Megan, Megan, Megan.

After another few San Miguels, the bar girl was still by his side, a small, proprietorial hand laid on his arm. Even in the pulsating gloom of the Here Pussy Pussy, he could make out the Caesarean scar on her stomach.

Most of them have babies, these girls, he thought. Why else would they be here? Because they enjoy it? Because the guys that come here have such terrific personalities?

Seeing him watching her, she closed her eyes and opened her mouth, winding and unwinding her slender hips.

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'Oh, I never enough!'

He knew he would not be seeing Megan tonight, or possibly ever again. So he paid the girl's bar fine to one of the Here Pussy Pussy's mamma-sans, and waited while she went to the dressing room. When she finally returned he felt an enormous wave of tenderness. She had changed from her professional bikini and heels and was now dressed in the heartbreakingly ordinary T-shirt and jeans of her civilian life. From whore to girl next door, in just one costume change.

Once they were out of the Here Pussy Pussy, away from the bar's bouncers and the smiling owner who kept a shotgun in his desk, the girls were at the mercy of their customers. They walked into strange hotel rooms with middle-aged Germans and Scandinavians and Brits, or even young Australians, and were expected to negotiate a price, an act, and still get out with their life.

Kirk didn't negotiate. He just gave her everything he had in his wallet and told her to buy something for her child. She was grateful.

'I never enough, Dirk,' she whispered in the steaming darkness of the Manila night. 'Oh, Dirk, I never enough.' And he knew it was true. This would never be enough. Megan wearily climbed the concrete steps of the Sunny View Estate.

Inside her, the baby was sleeping. She - and Megan knew it was definitely a she - always slept when Megan was moving, the rocking motion of the working day soothing the unborn baby girl to sleep. It was only when Megan was attempting to sleep herself that a tiny fist or foot would be slammed with alarming force against the wall of her uterus.

That's my girl, Megan thought, giving her enormous stomach the protective, possessive double stroke that was second nature to her now. Poppy. My daughter, Poppy. She was running out of space in there.

At twenty-nine weeks, Megan no longer recognised her body. There were thick blue veins visible in her new breasts. Stretch marks on her stomach and thighs that brought with them an unbearable itchiness. She slept in one-hour shifts, woken by the need to scratch, or pee, or Poppy giving her I firm right hook.

Near the top of the stone stairway, with all the grimy sprawl of Hackney stretching out below her, Megan felt the contraction.

The sensation was uncomfortable rather than painful, and although her heart fluttered with panic, she knew this wasn't the real thing. This was a Braxton-Hicks contraction. False labour - a bit like a dress rehearsal for opening night.

She sat down on the cold stone stairs and waited for the discomfort to pass. A pale thin child in a baseball cap wheeled an enormous bike past her as she sat rotating her ankles and gently stroking her bump. 'Not yet, Poppy,' she whispered. 'Not yet.'

Wearily pulling herself up, Megan made her way to Mrs Marley's door. Thrash metal was playing loud enough to rattle the windows. Sighing, Megan knocked. No response. She knocked louder and longer. Mrs Marley opened the door. The music hit Megan's face like a blast of hot air from a suddenly opened oven and she felt herself recoil. Mrs Marley regarded Megan with a cold stare, a cigarette dangling from her lower lip.

'Daisy's inside,' she grunted. Then her sneer turned to a smirk as she regarded Megan's bump. 'Left you in the lurch, did he, dear?'

Megan ignored her and went into the flat. It was even more squalid than usual. Dirty clothes and the stinking debris of takeaways beyond number were strewn around. There

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were broken toys underfoot and, inexplicably, perhaps a dozen TV sets and DVD players pushed into the corner of the room. Daisy was reclining on the sofa, a Hello Kitty duvet pulled up to her chin, a half-eaten Egg McMuffin in her little paw. Megan knelt by her side, smiling.

'Do you think you could turn that music down?' Megan said, not looking round.

'It's me brother,' Mrs Marley said. 'It's Warren. He says you can't appreciate it if it's too low. It's why he got slung out of his council flat.'

A shiftless, scrawny young man in Adidas tracksuit bottoms came into the room, lighting a cigarette. He leered at Megan, scratching his crutch. 'Could you turn it down, please? The music?'

T don't give a fuck,' the young man said. 'I've got the fucking right, haven't I?'

He went into the bedroom, trailing cigarette smoke and outraged resentment. Megan turned back to Daisy, giving up.

The child had been complaining of stomach pains. Megan examined her, took her temperature and then watched her quickly inhale the rest of her Egg McMuffin. There was nothing wrong with her appetite. 'Daisy?' Megan said. 'Yes, miss?' 'Is anyone being nasty to you at school?' A pause. 'Elvis takes me sweet money.'

'That's horrible. Can you try talking to your teacher? Or Elvis's mummy?' Silence.

1 reckon it's her appendicitis,' Mrs Marley diagnosed. 'I reckon she wants it out.'

'There's nothing wrong with Daisy,' Megan said, standing up. 'She's being bullied.' 'You got it wrong before, didn't you?' Mrs Marley flared. 'Think you're so smart. Coming round here. And you got it wrong, didn't you? Nobody bullies my Daisy.'

'Mrs Marley,' Megan said. And then she saw it. Poking out from under the ragged sofa. As casually discarded as a pizza box. The syringe. Megan crossed the room quickly and picked up the phone. 'Who you calling, Lady Muck?' 'Social services,' Megan said.

Mrs Marley didn't stick around to argue. She went into the bedroom to get her brother. Megan was vaguely aware of pandemonium being played out behind her. Raised voices, thrash metal, the sound of a child sobbing.

A pre-recorded voice was telling her to press the star button twice when he grabbed her from behind. An arm lock around her neck, dragging her down and away from the phone.

I should be able to deal with this, she thought. Four years of wado ryu karate. I should know what to do. Smash his knee with my heel. Grab a hunk of flesh from the top of his thigh. Seek out the nerves in his wrist. But her mind was blank. She could not remember the lessons that Rory had taught her every Wednesday night for all those years.

And then Warren Marley was screaming obscenities as he slammed her head hard against the wall, then pulling back and doing it again. Like a battering ram.

'I've got the right, you cow,' he was raving. 'I've got the fucking right to do whatever I fucking well like.'

Four years studying in a dojo with Rory and she didn't remember a thing. Endless martial arts classes and she was as helpless as a punch bag. Four years of striking, kicking and blocking, of white pyjamas and war cries, and she couldn't find it in her to put up a fight. It felt like she had just been pretending to be tough, and now she was in the real world.

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All Megan could do was cover herself and think, but what about my daughter? It was way after midnight but the infamous Greek resort of Ratarsi was still swarming with people.

Almost all of them were tanned, drunk and British. Pierced, pissed and tattooed. Modern boys and girls having fun in the sun. Which largely consisted of turning a five-hundred-year-old fishing village into an al fresco vomitorium.

Cat was at least ten years older than most of them, although she was in better shape than all of them. Junk food, junk sex, buckets of alcohol - it took its toll.

But what really made her different to the young folk in the streets of Ratarsi wasn't the fact that she was older, but that she was sober. And alone.

It wasn't meant to be this way. Cat wasn't meant to be going on holiday by herself. Brigitte was meant to be coming with her. But then Digby begged Brigitte to take him back, and suddenly Brigitte's plans changed, and Cat was off to Ratarsi all alone. 'What happened to Digby and the bimbo?' Cat had said.

'It didn't work out.' Brigitte smiled. 'I think his recovery time was a problem.' 'Recovery time?'

'You know. The time it takes a man to be ready to go again.' 'Go again? Oh - go again.'

'These young girls are not like us, Cat. They might be easy for a guy like Digby to pick up, but they expect to get fucked two or three times a night. Digby is forty-five and a prime candidate for a dicky heart. Even with his half an aspirin a day. You seem surprised.' Cat tried to keep her tone neutral. But she thought of Brigitte's holiday photos with Digby, and how they had looked being passed through the shredder.

'I'm not surprised it didn't work out between them,' Cat said. 'I'm surprised you're taking him back. After what he Jul to you.'

But Brigitte was upbeat, as if this was a practical decision, and not the stuff of humiliation.

'Well. He doesn't crowd me. He makes me laugh. We get on. To be honest, I'm not sure you can hope for much more than that. It's what growing up is all about, isn't it?' Cat hoped she would never be that grown up.

So she went to Ratarsi alone and walked through its sticky streets, appalled at the sight of her countrymen on holiday, and wondering why she hadn't chosen to go hiking in the Lake District with all the well-behaved German and Japanese tourists. And then she saw him. Propped up against a wall, his Hawaiian shirt ripped, an Alcopop in each hand. Rory's son. Jake.

Some mocking, mini-skirted girls were standing in front of him, impersonating his legless state.

Cat got him to his feet and led him away from the jeering girls. She waited at the end of an alley while he emptied his guts into an overflowing dustbin.

Then she took him to the last good hotel in Ratarsi and guided him on his rubber legs into the dining room. It was almost empty. Ratarsi was no longer the place to come for fine dining and delicate wines. 'Can we just get some coffee?' Cat asked a waiter.

The waiter visibly shivered. Must think I'm some game old bird with her toy boy, thought Cat. 'Coffee only with meal,' said the waiter.

'Then we will have a meal,' Cat said, the hint of steel in her voice that she used on bolshy kitchen staff. 'Think you could hold down some food, Jake?'

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The boy nodded uncertainly. When the waiter had reluctantly escorted them to a table, Jake seemed to recognise her for the first time. 'I think I got a bad kebab,' he said. Cat laughed. 'Yes, we all get a lot of bad kebabs at fifteen.'

'Sixteen,' he said. 'Last week. This is my birthday present from my dad. Ten days in Ratarsi with my friend Jude.' He looked around the restaurant at the thin scattering of sunburned middle-aged tourists. 'Don't know what happened to old Jude.'

'Wow, a holiday in Ratarsi as a birthday present. Whatever happened to a nice bicycle and an Action Man?' Jake shrugged. 'I dunno.' 'How's your family?'

'My mum's not so good. She lost a baby. You know. What do you call it? A miscarriage.'

Cat wondered how old Ali must be by now. Forty-five? Forty-six? And she already had a boy and a girl. But some women couldn't get enough of it. They couldn't see that it was time to stop giving birth to children, and start bringing them up. The waiter returned. 'Ready to order?'

Jake examined the menu with wary respect, as if he had never seen one before. 'I'll have, er, some vinaigrette.'

The waiter stared at the ceiling. He sighed audibly. Then he was silent. 'Me too,' Cat said into the silence. 'Vinaigrette,' spat the waiter, 'is a salad dressing.' 'We know,' said Cat. 'We're on the Atkins diet.'

The waiter left. Cat and Jake smiled at each other. It had been a long time since that had happened.

The waiter returned with coffee and two silver bowls of vinaigrette.

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'Spoons?' he said. 'Please,' Cat said. Together they sipped their salad dressing and pulled a face. 'Horrible,' Jake said. 'Yes, but you'll know next time,' Cat said. He stared into his coffee. 'Thanks for - you know. Getting llll'.' 'That's okay, Jake.' 'You've been so nice to me.' 'Yes,' Cat said. 'You're lucky I'm not your stepmother.'

He guffawed, uncertain how to respond. She saw that he was still just a child. 'And what about your dad?' 'My dad's fine,' Jake said.

'That's good. Give him my - you know. Tell him I said hello.' 'I'll do that.'

Cat tried to imagine Rory's life, but it was beyond her imagination. Was he settled down in some cosy, long-term relationship? Was he screwing around? Either possibility made her heart go pang. It must be strange being a man who could no longer have children. Did every turning feel like a dead end? Cat was suddenly furious with herself.

She refused to accept that a relationship could only be serious if it included children. Because if that was true, then what did that make what she had had with Rory? That made it just a joke. And it wasn't a joke.

She stared across the table at Jake, and for the first time saw the shadow of his father's craggy face in those abashed teenage features. She missed him. She had never realised she would miss him this much. It was more than breaking up with the latest man. Cat felt like she had lost one of her family.

** «-

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Paulo and Jessica followed the estate agent into the enormous garden.

The suburban night was still and peaceful. In the darkness the lights of the swimming pool made the water sparkle and shine, the perfect blue flecked with shimmering gold. 'It's large for a private pool,' the estate agent said.

'It's beautiful,' Jessica said. 'The lights under the water. I love it.'

'Not everybody wants one,' the estate agent said, with one of those flashes of honesty that she used to temper her sales pitch. 'There's a certain amount of maintenance -although, that said, I think there are some excellent pool guys around here. And then there's the safety issue, of course. You don't have children yet, do you?'

'Not yet,' said Paulo, turning in time to see his wife flinch. He felt a wave of despair. Why can't the world just leave her alone? 'Can we see the rest of the house?' Jessica said.

After the doctor told them that Jessica was over her miscarriage, they had gone ahead with the cycle of IVF. But Jessica would never be over her miscarriage, and the IVF hadn't worked.

Jessica had dutifully injected herself with fertility drugs every night, her tummy slowly becoming covered with a patchwork of bruises, as her egg production went into overdrive. There were countless scans, becoming more and more frequent as the great egg harvest day approached.

Paulo thought his contribution seemed pathetically trivial - a quick wank into a plastic tube on the day that they took the eggs from Jessica. His wife did all the work.

They removed twelve good eggs and they were all successfully fertilised. Two of them were placed inside Jessica but when she took a pregnancy test two weeks later, it was negative. A scan showed that the two fertilised eggs had imply melted away, like teardrops in the rain. And that was it.

It wasn't like the miscarriage. There was a crushing disappointment, and the depressing knowledge that all those injections and trips to the doctor and hours with her legs in the? had been in vain.

But it wasn't like losing a baby. There wasn't the blood and the unused milk to deal with. The IVF cycle was more like an endurance test followed by a beautiful dream, a dream that she eventually had to wake from.

For an unknown number of days, or maybe only hours, or even minutes, or seconds - who would ever know? - there had been two fertilised eggs inside her. Potential babies? No - babies. Her babies.

Then they were gone, as if they had never existed, and after a low-key commiseration with the obstetrician, suddenly Jessica and Paulo were back on Harley Street, just the pair of them, a childless married couple, watching a woman and a man load a newborn baby into a car seat. 'Never again,' Jessica had said. 'You'll change your mind.'

'Watch me. IVF? It doesn't work, and when it does, they don't know what it does to the baby.'

'Come on, Jess. That's not you talking. That's some tabloid scare story.'

'They don't know what it does to the baby. How can they? They've only been doing it for a blink of an eye. I've read all this stuff that says IVF is a genetic time bomb.'

'There are plenty of kids who were conceived naturally that get sick. Nobody can ever guarantee that a baby wouldn't have problems. Is that honestly what you're afraid of? Or are you afraid of failing again?' Jessica turned her head away. 'Leave me alone. You're horrible to me.'

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'You did brilliantly. You did everything you could. But we can't give up after one try. There are other places, better places.'

'And what are the odds at these better places, Paulo? A twenty-five per cent success rate? A thirty per cent success rate? And that's at the very best places. What kind of odds are they?'

'But that's counting everybody. Older women. Women that have had serious illness. That's not you, Jess. Your odds are a lot better than that if we have another go.' 'We?' She almost laughed. 'What's this we business?'

'I'd go through it with you, if I could. Have some of those injections. Fill myself with some of those drugs. I wish I could.' She stared at the pavement. 'I know you do.' 'One more try?' She shook her head. 'No more tries.' 'Oh, come on, Jess.'

Already he could tell it wasn't going to happen. He could see it in that face he loved so much. This thing had beaten her, and it broke his heart.

'Because whatever odds they give you, the chances are that it's not going to work. Failure is what happens, and what you should expect. And I just can't take any more failure, Paulo. I'm sorry. But I already feel like the best part of me is missing.'

So now they spent all their spare time looking at houses on the edge of the countryside, the part of the countryside that was full of people who wanted to escape London but couldn't afford to escape too far. The city in the country, the estate agent called it. Apparently it was the hot new thing.

Jessica said it was because their greenish little bit of London was going downhill. Even there, you now got gangs and drugs, as the city got meaner, and harder to keep at bay. Hut Paulo knew it had nothing to do with the crime outside i heir front door.

It was because of the room at the back of the house, the room with the new carpet and the yellow walls and the cot Irom the fifth floor of John Lewis. They had to escape because before Jessica's miscarriage they had prepared a room for the baby, and now they could never change that room. They didn't have a reason to use it, and they didn't have the heart to redecorate it. They could only run away from it.

Paulo turned away from the heavenly light of the swimming pool and went inside the house. It was a beautiful place - one of those substantial homes built just before the war for affluent city dwellers in search of somewhere cleaner and greener. But what would they do in all this space? Just the two of them?

He followed the voices of Jessica and the estate agent to a room on the first floor. He froze when he entered the room. It was a nursery.

There were baby toys all over the floor. A child-sized frog. Some sort of musical teddy bear. And lots of these half-destroyed my-first-books where you pulled a tab and a grinning cardboard animal appeared. A white cot sat at the end of the room like an altar.

'Nice high ceilings,' said the estate agent, crushing a clockwork pig under her heel. Paulo was at his wife's side. 'Jess?'

He realised he didn't give a damn where they lived. He just wanted to be with his wife. To shut their front door and make everybody go away. She was staring at the cot.

'It's perfect for when you hear the patter of tiny feet,' said the estate agent. 'And there are some terrific schools around here.'

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Jessica nodded thoughtfully, as if agreeing with some internal voice rather than the estate agent. 'I am tearing all this out,' she said. 'Gutting it.'

Her voice was calm and businesslike. But her husband saw her eyes, and knew her heart, and was in no doubt that his wife was choked with a grief that he could never imagine.

Paulo thought that maybe his brother was right. Maybe women changed after they had a baby. Maybe they changed in ways that you would never believe possible.

Paulo didn't know about that. All he knew was that his brother should come round to his place sometime.

And see what happens to a woman if she never has a baby. twelve Dr Lawford had never been to her flat before. Megan was embarrassed by the shabby pokiness of the place, and her pants drying on the radiator, and the medical books she had casually left on the floor.

But as his strong, bony fingers lightly examined her face, most of all Megan was embarrassed to need his attention.

Embarrassment, Megan thought. What bloody good is embarrassment to a doctor?

She was scratched down one side of her face, but apart from a throbbing lump on her forehead, the pain was mainly in her arms, where she had taken most of the blows. She knew that much, at least. So perhaps the lessons with Rory were not completely wasted.

Lawford started to take her blood pressure when someone buzzed up from the street. She saw Jessica and Cat in the grimy little monitor and let them inside. 'My sisters,' she told Lawford. They clumped up the stairs. Jessica took one look at Megan and burst into tears. 'It's okay, Jess.' 'Those bastards,' Cat said. 'Don't they respect anything?' 'Not a lot,' said Megan. 'Not on the Sunny View Estate.'

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'What about the baby?' Jessica said. 'The baby's fine,' Megan said. 'I'm fine.' 'The baby's okay? Poppy's okay?'

'She's good. I had a scan. At the hospital. Everything's normal.'

'You can't work in that place, Megan,' Cat said. 'It's too dangerous.'

'That's exactly what I keep telling her,' said Lawford. The three sisters looked at him. 'These animals don't deserve our Megan,' he went on. 'She should get out and find herself a nice little private practice on Harley Street.' Megan didn't know if he was joking or not. 'Come on,' he said. 'Let me take your blood pressure.'

Megan made the introductions and settled herself on her single bed, rolling up her sleeve. Cat put her arm around Jessica and they all watched in silence as Lawford took the reading. 'We're going to have to watch this,' he said. 'What is it?' 'A hundred and eighty over ninety-five.'

'That's the same as at the hospital. It should be down by now.' 'Yes.'

'Well,' Megan said, taking it in. 'Someone tried to beat me up. That's not going to relax you, is it?'

'In which case we would expect the reading to be temporary,' Lawford said. 'But if it doesn't come down - well. Let's wait and see, shall we?' Megan nodded. 'Let's wait and see.'

Jessica wiped her eyes. 'What's happening? What's wrong with your blood pressure?'

'We'll keep an eye on it,' Lawford said. 'Excuse me, I have to talk to the police. After that young man had finished with you, they delivered him to the nearest casualty ward so he could get his prescription filled. When they were a bit R»0 slow with the methadone, he assaulted a nurse. Nice meeting you, ladies. I'll see you back at the surgery, Megan.' He left them alone. Cat went to put the kettle on.

'Megan?' Jessica said. 'What's wrong? What's all this with your blood pressure?' 'Do you know what pre-eclampsia is, Jess?'

Jessica shook her head, and Megan thought, of course not. Jessica had read thousands of words about endometriosis. She was an expert on what it was like to go through a miscarriage and an IVF cycle. She could tell you all about sperm motility and fertility drugs. She knew everything there was to know about trying to have a baby. But Jessica knew nothing about all the things that could go wrong when you were about to have a baby. And why should she?

'Pre-eclampsia is prenatal hypertension,' Megan said. 'High blood pressure, when you're pregnant. In many ways it's indistinguishable from what your average, stressed-out, overweight executive gets - except pre-eclampsia has nothing to do with being fat or the pressures of modern life. It's the kind of high blood pressure that you only get in pregnancy.'

'This milk is a week old,' Cat said, coming back into the room with a battered carton. 'Do you want me to run down the shops for you?'

'I don't really want any more tea,' Megan said. 'Are you really interested in any of this, Jess?' 'Of course I am! You're my sister! Poppy's my niece!'

'Okay. It's to do with the blood supply to the placenta -essentially how the mother sustains the baby in the uterus.'

'But - this moron attacked you,' Jessica said. 'Your blood pressure - it's bound to be up, isn't it?'

'Sure. But it shouldn't stay up like this. Nobody really knows what causes pre-eclampsia. If there's a trigger. If

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something like this could be a trigger. So now we're hoping it doesn't stay up.' 'And what if it does?' Cat said.

Megan thought of the premature babies she had seen during her training at the Homerton. Tiny, wrinkled little creatures huddled up in woolly hats because they were too small to keep their own body warmth. And their parents, watching them through the plastic of their incubators. She thought about the ones that lived - that went on to be perfectly normal healthy babies. And she remembered the ones that didn't.

Megan took a breath. She was suddenly very tired. And tired of explaining it all.

'If my blood pressure remains high, then it's pre-eclampsia. And the baby will have to be born early. I'll have an emergency Caesarean because the baby will be too small for anything else.' 'But she'll be all right?' Jessica said anxiously.

Twenty-nine weeks, Megan thought. Her daughter wasn't ready for the world. Nowhere near it. The baby's lungs weren't strong enough to breathe yet - they wouldn't be for weeks. If she was born any time over the next two months, she would still be considered premature. If she was born over the next seven days, she would be fighting for her life. Megan and Poppy would have to hold on for as long as they could.

'I hope so. She could be a little undercooked. We have to prepare ourselves for that.' 'A bit small, you mean?'

Twenty-nine weeks. And the scan showed that the baby was light for twenty-nine weeks. Megan's obstetrician had told her at the hospital that the baby was currently just under a kilo. A little human life that weighed less than a bag of sugar. Megan's daughter. 'Yes. Poppy might be a bit small.'

Megan tried to sound reassuring. She didn't tell her sisters about eclampsia. She didn't tell them that when women and their babies died during childbirth in the good old days, eclampsia was usually what killed them.

Toxaemia of pregnancy, they called it back then - literally, poisoned blood, poisoned pregnancy. Convulsions during childbirth, the placenta tearing, and mother and baby bleeding to death within fifteen minutes. It was rare these days, because doctors did everything in their power to stop the pre-eclampsia ever advancing that far. But it could happen. For all their modern technology, the same cruel rules of life and death still applied.

But Megan didn't tell her sisters any of that. It was one of the unspoken tenets of her profession. You didn't have to tell them everything. 'I called Dad,' Cat said. 'He's really worried.'

'Oh Cat,' Megan said, suddenly the kid sister again. 'I really don't want him to come back for this. I'm fine. The baby's fine.'

'I'll call him again. Tell him you're okay. You and the baby.'

Their father was in Los Angeles for a couple of auditions. Jack Jewell hadn't been on a movie set since 1971, when he had a bit part in Not Without My Trousers ('Dreadful spinoff from the shockingly unfunny TV series' - the Daily Sketch). One was a very long shot - the part of an evil British terrorist, the British being the one nation who would never complain to Hollywood about racial stereotyping.

Megan began impressing on Cat that she didn't want her father to know what had happened, but that was when someone buzzed from the street. 'It's probably Mum,' Jessica said. Cat groaned with disbelief.

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'Well,' Jessica said. 'You called Dad. I called… her.'

She went to the door and let their mother into the flat, bringing with her the smell of Chanel and Marlboro. She was carrying a bottle of red wine, as if she were going to a dinner party.

'Do you know there's a horrible man with dreadlocks sleeping in the lobby?' Olivia said. 'I do believe he's some kind of tramp. Can't we get security to toss him out?' Olivia approached the bed. Cat and Jessica quickly stood up, and edged back to give her space. Handing Jessica the bottle of wine, Olivia kissed Megan on the cheek that wasn't scratched. 'What have they done to you, my baby?' 'I'll go and buy that milk,' said Cat.

She was on her way down the rickety staircase when her mother's voice called her name. Cat kept going. Moving surprisingly fast for someone of her age on heels, Olivia caught her at the bottom of the stairs, repeating her name but not touching her. Cat turned and stared at her mother.

Olivia looked a lot older than she remembered. The war paint was being laid on with a trowel these days. How long had it been? Five years. Since Jessica's wedding. And it was easy to avoid someone at a wedding. 'You've got some nerve, my girl,' Olivia said. 'And why's that?'

'Do you honestly believe I don't have the right to see my own child?'

'Do what you want. That's Megan's choice. But I don't have to sit there and watch you play the concerned parent.' 'You don't stop caring.' 'Then go and show Megan how much you care.' 'One day you'll thank me. You and your sisters.' Cat had to smile. 'And why's that?' 'Do you have any idea what other women are like with their daughters?' Her voice became a mocking, working-class singsong. 'Why aren't you pregnant yetf When are you going to become a mum? Where's the lickle bay-be? I spared you all of that. Gave you room to grow.' 'Is that what you gave us?' 'I was never that kind of stultifying, brat-obsessed mother.'

'Perhaps you shouldn't talk about brats when Megan is in there fighting for her baby's life.'

Suddenly her mother changed gear. The painted lips parted to reveal a dazzling smile, the voice was soft as a sigh.

'Look at it this way. I allowed you - and your sisters -to be yourself. You must be able to see that. Not some dull, dreary mother whose self-esteem is tied up in the kids she dropped.'

Cat could smell her mother's perfume and cigarettes. It felt like it was suffocating her. 'Excuse me. I've got to get some milk.'

Cat turned away, stepping over a man in dreadlocks who was asleep in the doorway.

'What did your father expect?' Olivia said. 'These men. They get a beautiful girl who is full of life and then expect her to change into some little housewife as soon as she has children. You'll see one day, Cat.'

Cat bought a pint of semi-skimmed milk from a 24-hour shop with wire-mesh guards on all the windows. Then she waited on the corner until a minicab collected Olivia, and she knew there was no one in the flat except her family. 'Isn't she gorgeous?' Michael said, leaning against a Maserati and watching Ginger through the glass of the front office. 'AH that pale flesh. All those freckles. Do you know what I did once? I tried to count them. Is that crazy or what?'

'You shouldn't have asked her to come back to work here,' Paulo said. 'It's all wrong.'

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'Which one of her replacements would you like back? The fat one who forgot to post the VAT form? Or the one with glasses who couldn't take messages from Italy because they "talk all funny"?'

Paulo shook his head. It was true that the receptionists who had attempted to take Ginger's place were disastrous for business. But having her back felt like it would end up in a far bigger disaster.

'What if Naoko finds out she's back? What if Jessica finds out?'

'They won't. My wife's too busy with Chloe to come to the showroom. And your wife is out on your country estate.'

'It's not a country estate. It's just a big house in the suburbs.'

'And even if they found out, it's perfectly innocent. I told you not to worry, Paulo. I'm not having sex with her any more. She is back with her husband and his Saturday night specials. So what's the problem?'

Michael suddenly smiled, lowering his head, leaning his broad, well-muscled body in close and Paulo felt the raw physical presence of his brother, that old-school rugged charm, the way he had of making you feel that the two of you were separate from the rest of the human race. Paulo could understand why women liked his brother, why they let him get away with murder.

'It works with Ginger back, doesn't it?' Michael said. 'We get our messages, we get our post delivered.' 'Let's just hope she's back for business not pleasure.'

Michael frowned with irritation. Despite his usual cockiness, Paulo knew that his brother had been badly shaken by Naoko's discovery of Ginger. Michael had come very close to losing his family, and it had terrified him.

Paulo looked at his brother's tired face, saw clearly all the exhaustion from the running around and the lying and i IK- never-ending fear of getting caught, followed by the discovery, and the endless tears and the late-night talks and I he slamming of the bedroom door when Naoko made him sleep on the couch. Paulo had no trouble believing that his brother's affair with Ginger was truly behind him. Who had i In- heart or the stomach to go through all of that again?

Paulo believed that if only his brother could get on the right track, then he could be a good husband, and a great father, and what he had always been as a child. Michael could be loveable again.

'You can't have both, Mike,' Paulo said gently. 'You've got to see that. The family life and the playing around. They don't go together.'

'I told you - don't worry,' Michael said. 'I'm not fucking her any more.'

'If you do,' Paulo said, 'then we are all fucked. Have you got those customs forms for that Alfa Romeo? I need them now.' 'I think they're in the back office. I'll have a look.'

Paulo watched his brother's former girlfriend, if that wasn't the wrong word, answering the phones in the front office.

He thought that Ginger was still a good-looking woman, but there had probably never been anything momentous about her, nothing about her that made you understand how Michael would be prepared to play Russian roulette with his family. There was nothing about her to make you think that she had the power to turn a man's world inside out.

Paulo wondered how it could ever be worth it. To build a family - a wife, a child, a home - and then put it all at risk for the excitement of someone new. It was true that Paulo was a different man from his brother, that he had never been the cock artist that Michael had once been, and

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probably still was in his heart, despite his recent vow of celibacy, and perhaps always would be until his knob withered with the years.

But still - how could any new woman be worth that degree of heartache? How could any new woman make you put your family on the line? Nobody was that good in bed.

Paulo couldn't explain it, but he felt that more than his brother's family had been put at risk. Michael's reckless behaviour somehow seemed to endanger everything they had worked for. And he loved what they had built here. He loved their business. The smell of the cars when he arrived at work in the morning, that glorious scent of leather and oil. The trips to Turin and Milan, then the long drive back through the Alps, across France and then England and home. The clients who loved these beautiful objects as much as he did - and as much as his brother did.

They had no boss, they were making good money, they were living out their boyhood dreams - working for themselves, working with cars. Paulo knew that they were lucky men. But his brother couldn't see beyond his next erection. Michael returned with the customs forms.

'Don't lose Naoko and Chloe,' Paulo said to his brother. 'Ginger's not worth it. No new woman is worth it.'

T told you. I haven't laid a finger on her since she came back.'

'And I'm telling you. Love your family the way they deserve. Stop trying to be the little stud you were back in Essex.' 'You don't understand, do you?' 'Explain it to me.' 'You don't want to hear it.' 'Go ahead.'

'Okay - mothers are mothers first and women second,' Michael said. Ginger caught his eye and laughed, before returning to In? work with a little smile.

'What does it take to get you?' Michael said. 'What does? lake to get any man?'

'I don't know,' Paulo said. It wasn't the kind of thing he (bought about. 'It takes the legs, the breasts, the flesh.'

'Are you talking about choosing a woman here?' Paulo said. 'Or choosing a chicken? Because you sound like you're in the poultry department.'

'Come on. Why were you attracted to Jessica? Because lies a babe! Jessica's a babe!'

Paulo felt his heart swell with pride. It was true. Jessica was the babe of babes.

'Her car broke down,' Michael said. 'You were in your cab. You looked at her and you fancied her. Come on -admit it.' Michael lightly punched his brother's arm, and they both laughed. 'That's how it works. That's how it always works. If she had weighed a ton, you wouldn't have even slowed down.'

Paulo couldn't help himself. He was happy to hear that his brother thought Jessica was a babe. After all, Michael was so much more experienced with women.

'We agree what it takes to get you,' Michael said. 'But what does it take to keep you? The baby. And the love for the baby - this big love, the biggest, the love of your life. You can't imagine how big that love is, Paulo, you can't guess at the love inside you that pours out when you have a child. That's why you stay.' Michael shook his head. 'It's so easy to walk away when there's no baby. You just go. There's no anchor, no ball and chain. But then there's a baby, and it's impossible.'

'People do it. Plenty of men do it.' He thought of Jessica's mother, could see her smoking a cigarette in an expensive

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St John's Wood apartment where there were no children to spoil the carpet, or fill the silence, or remind you of the passing years. Jessica had only taken him there once, when they were just back from their honeymoon. It was enough. 'And women too.'

'I know they do,' Michael said quietly. 'But I don't know how. I'm never going to leave Naoko and the baby. They're going to have to leave me.'

Perhaps it would have been different if Ginger had had her baby. Then Naoko and Chloe would have had to compete for Michael's heart with Ginger and her baby. But Ginger didn't have her baby after all. A false alarm, Michael had said. No, thought Paulo. Not a false alarm. Wishful thinking. 'She's not as pretty as Naoko,' Paulo said. 'This is true,' Michael said. 'And she's not as smart. And she's a lot older.' 'Can't argue with that.'

'Then - why did it ever happen? How could it happen? I don't get it.' But his brother didn't have to think about it.

'She's dirtier. And isn't that what men really like? When you get right down to it. Isn't that what gets the pleasure trigger going?' 'The pleasure trigger?'

'We want women to be dirty - but we don't want the mother of our children to be dirty. Look - I don't make the rules, okay? Ginger - I take one look at her, and I want to make like Father Christmas.' Paulo looked confused. 'To empty my sacks,' said Michael.

'But it's not fair, is it? It's not fair on your wife. She deserves better. Look how much you hurt her, look at the pain you caused.' 'Yes,' Michael said, avoiding his brother's eyes. 'She ilisirves a lot better. And that's why I go home when we imisli work. That's why I don't go to the Hilton for a couple of hours. I walk the line, because I have a wife and child. Km home's not quite the same these days. Naoko still doesn't w.int to sleep with me. Not after - you know. We have separate bedrooms. I'm in the guest room. She's with the baby in our old room.' 'That's sad.'

'She'll come around eventually,' said Michael. 'When I've suffered enough. Look, I love Naoko - in my way. Oh, it's different from when I first met her. It's different from when she was a young student and I had never been out with an Asian girl and she was so different from all the rest of them and we couldn't get enough of each other. It's another kind of love now. And I am not sure it's any worse than millions of other marriages. I love her the way a lot of men love their wife, the way a lot of men love the mother of their children. I love her like a sister.' Michael looked at his brother. 'And maybe that is a bit sad. Because who wants to fuck their sister?' 'Jessica's not like my sister.'

'Give it time. This is what we are all afraid to admit, even to ourselves. If you want to fuck them, then you don't want a baby with them. And if you want a baby with them, then you don't want to fuck them.'

Then maybe Jessica and I are better off alone, Paulo thought.

He never wanted to be like his brother and all those other unhappily married men - grimly serving out their life sentences like cynical old lags.

Paulo believed in romance. He believed that love could last a lifetime. He still believed that he could have it all with Jessica. He believed in Jessica and himself as a couple, despite

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all that aching longing for something they had never had, despite the sadness, and the secret tears behind closed doors, and the hurt that chewed them up alive when his mother yet again smiled and yet again asked them when they were going to start a family - as though the pair of them were currently just a cheap impersonation of a family.

But if we never have a child, he told himself, then maybe nothing will ever come between us. Maybe nothing will ever kill our love, or ever force us into separate bedrooms.

Yet he couldn't believe it. Because he knew that Jessica would never be happy without a child. Paulo suddenly realised he had to find Jessica her baby. Their baby. If he had to search the whole wide world. thirteen London. Bloody London. Christ, he had forgotten how cold this place could be. And wasn't this what the Poms called nimmer?

As Kirk walked through the West End in search of a job and a girl - any job would do, but only one particular girl - the wind whipped down Oxford Street and chilled him to the bone.

But the worst of it wasn't the cold or the clogged traffic or the psychotic cyclists or the kebab vomit or the urban foxes that howled outside the window of his tiny studio flat as they scavenged for discarded fast food.

It was those flat white London skies that sapped his spirit, it was that deathly light - like early closing day at the mortuary. It was the light that made Kirk feel like running back to Manila, or all the way back to Sydney.

Yet like many men who had treated commitment as their own private Kryptonite, he dreamed of an end to the running. That's why he had come back. To find the girl and to put an end to the running. It had to end sometime, didn't it? That life of fun and travel and fucking around? Because how could it go on for ever?

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Kirk had always had a cold dread of family life. Not because he was one of those sad bastards whose parents had split up. But because he was one of those sad bastards whose parents had stayed together.

He loved his mother and father, but only individually. Together, as a married couple, they were a disaster. He loved them - but separately. Under the same roof, he couldn't stand the sight of them, the sound of them, the smell of what his father called 'Scottish knockout drops'.

There had been times in his childhood when he felt he would never escape. From his father's drinking. From his mother's anger. The one endlessly feeding off the other, on and on, year after year, the drinking and the anger getting worse as the decades slipped by.

Why did his father drink? Because his mother was angry. Why was his mother angry? Because his father drank.

This is what he remembered, this is what he had always run from, this is why he had left the girl in Australia, why he had fled to the beaches and the bars of the Philippines. It was only during that brief period in London that he felt he had glimpsed the possibility of another life. A life so different from the married hell of his parents.

His father was this borderline alcoholic, a man who was actually a sweet enough guy when he wasn't in his cups, a sober taxi driver by trade, a kind and attentive father who only drank to sink some nagging, unnameable disappointment in his life. And his mother was this housewife on a hair-trigger, all fixed smiles and brittle charm at the supermarket or the school gates, but flying off the handle at the dinner table, screaming in the kitchen, throwing anything to hand. But Kirk couldn't help loving her - she could be affectionate and gentle when her husband was at work or comatose from the Scottish knockout drops. His mother could be a very loving person. Especially if you were a dog. I lis parents should have split up when Kirk was grown •iiul gone, teaching both locals and tourists how to scuba? live by the time he was sixteen. But his parents stayed together, and it made you believe in the sanctity of divorce.

Kirk looked at the restaurant matchbox in his hand, the pi.? e where he was told there might be work. Matnma-san.

That was a funny name for a restaurant. Maybe they (bought they were being authentically Asian - putting together the Anglo colloquialism with the Japanese honorific?,?, maybe they thought it meant respected mother. And I» ih.ips it did in this neighbourhood.

Hut in the bars of Asia, it meant something very differ-.-iii _ Over there, the mamma-san was the old woman who helped you to find your girl for the night. Or an hour or I wo. Or a quick fifteen minutes in some blacked-out VIP mom. The mamma-sans, who were mostly like a cross between your dear old granny and a hardened pimp, had taught Kirk that he wasn't paying the bar girls for sex. He was paying them to go away when it was all over.

Now he believed that he had had his fill of recreational sex, and commercial sex, and sex with scuba-diving tourists that you didn't want to talk to the moment you surfaced. Now he truly believed he might finally be ready to settle down with this incredible girl at the party - this Dr Megan Jewell.

It was true that he sometimes found it hard to remember her face. They had both been pretty drunk. But he remembered enough. Something about her - and how can you ever explain it? - had got deep in his bones, and even when he was on the other side of the world, even when he was in bed with other women, even when he was paying for sex, Megan just wouldn't go away. You could never explain that feeling, but you couldn't mistake it for anything else. He thought of it as love.

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He liked it that she was a doctor. Loved it, in fact. He found it impressive, and sexy. He knew that was dopey, but he couldn't help himself. This hot young woman who dealt in matters of life and death - it gave her an authority that the other women he had known just didn't have. And unlike everyone else at that party, she had not treated him like some dumb beach bum with sand for brains.

He really thought she might be the one. But in some secret chamber of his heart he suspected that he only felt that way because he had never had the chance to fuck her out of his system, and because he knew it would be almost impossible to find her again in a city of ten million souls.

Kirk asked himself the question that all men must ask when they have had lovers beyond the counting.

When he got what he wanted, would he ever want it again? The women Rory saw were younger than him.

A lot younger. He hadn't planned it that way, but that's what was on the market, that's what was available. All these women who were young enough to be his - well, girlfriend.

He couldn't imagine what the women his own age - forty-nine and three quarters - were doing with their evenings while he was out on a date. Following around their teenage children, maybe, telling them they couldn't go out dressed like that. Thinking about the rotten men who had fucked up their lives, possibly. Perhaps they were relieved to finally be beyond all the horrors and humiliations of the mating game. And maybe they were happy at last - happier than he could ever be. Whatever they were doing, it was a different world, a parallel universe that he could never be a part of.

Younger women were easier to meet. They were relaxed about their lives. It was only the older women - that is, omen around ten years younger than Rory himself - who IN? deafened by the sound of their biological clock. And nni |ust the ones who had never had a child. The single?. ithers were just as bad. The happily divorced women with i hildren were just the same.

I heir bodies were in extra time, their eggs were still hope-inl ill a penalty shoot-out. But even if they had a kid or two ilir.uly, they wanted one more baby, and one more chance ii.1 perfect family.

Kory couldn't blame them. He understood. His lonesome In.lit ached for exactly the same thing. A proper family at last.

Kory looked at the shattered fragments of his former l.iinily, and he yearned for the impossible - to somehow make it whole again. He had no trouble at all understanding the urge to build a family home. And yet so many of i In- women wanted too much, too soon. After one dinner,??? movie, and one trip to bed, he could sometimes feel them sizing him up as partner material, and it always made him feel like bailing out. There was something peculiarly old-fashioned about many of these modern women - the equation of sex with marriage and children. And of course because of the minor surgery on his testicles, Rory wasn't having children with anyone.

One of the older women - cresting thirty-nine, that fatal shore - actually cried when he told her about his vasectomy. 'That means I'll never have your baby!'

This after some Japanese fish, one German film, and a rather uninspiring fuck.

So he stuck to the younger women. Not for the reasons that were usually advanced - the firmness of their flesh, the springy youthfulness of their bodies - but because they didn't feel as though time was slipping away. He couldn't have kids? Fine. Because they didn't want

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kids with him. They didn't want kids with anyone. Not now. Not yet.

'A baby is something with a big mouth at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other,' asserted one Cambridge graduate who was currently organising minicabs at the BBC. She was twenty-nine. Rory knew that she would lose the smirk and change the tune somewhere over the next ten years. They all did. But he would be long gone by then.

Men of his own vintage - sixties and seventies kids, veterans of the divorce courts, sometimes more than once -assured Rory that it was perfectly natural to be seeing younger women.

One of them - a fifty-year-old lawyer who was seeing a thirty-two-year-old literary agent - declared that to find your perfect partner (always assuming you were a middle-aged male with a large disposable income) you had to halve your age, and then add seven years.

So a trim thirty-year-old man should be seeing a twenty-two-year-old woman. And a well-preserved guy of forty should be involved with a twenty-seven-year-old. And a fifty-year-old groover should be seeing a woman of thirty-two.

It was perfectly natural for a man of his age to see younger women, Rory was told - however cliched it felt, and however reluctant he was to be typecast as a dirty old man. It was one of the cruel rules.

'As men get older, there are more and more women to choose from,' said the lawyer. 'For women, it is the other way round. And that's true no matter what toy boy Joan Collins or Demi Moore is going out with this week.'

The last woman Rory had been seeing was thirty-two -half his own age, plus seven - perfect. At first it was good. She treated his snip like a party trick, as if a vasectomy was rather like being double-jointed. She wasn't desperate to fulfil her biological destiny. Not right now. Not with him. She thought she had all the time in the world. And she was b.ippy to put away the condoms.

Rory let her down gently after a couple of months. There was nothing wrong with her. She was smart, funny, and great fun under the duvet. But in truth, the sex didn't feel so very different from getting a takeaway pizza. More and more, that's what modern sex reminded him of - like an American I lot with extra pepperoni. A moment of pleasure that dissolved in the memory, and soon enough you were tarnished again. Beyond satisfying that moment of animal hunger; what was the point? Perhaps there wasn't any. It wasn't always this way.

Back in the dark days of his marriage, before his operation, sex always carried with it the promise of something more. After his cut, as the marriage collapsed, sex and procreation were for ever separated - just as society separated them, he always thought. Sex for him would never again mean family, just as the sex you saw in glossy ads never meant family.

The sexual images we are bombarded with every day -what did they have to do with the possibility of a new human being, another life, building a family of your own? Nothing at all.

All sex was fast sex now, junk sex, quick and easy sustenance - for Rory, for the world - quickly consumed, and just as quickly forgotten. A feverish rut up against the refrigerator while you were slurping down your Haagen-Dazs ice cream. Instant gratification, disposable pleasure.

And once it had meant far more than that. Once upon a time it had been everything it was today - the hunger, the fever, losing yourself in the body of another human being -and yet infinitely more. Since his marriage had ended, Cat was the only woman

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who had made sex feel like something better than a takeaway pizza.

Oh, he wished he had met her first, he wished she was the mother of his son. He ached with all of that empty, pointless wishing. And he missed her. In the end, it was that simple. He missed her so much. Her fierce spirit, her goofy smile, her strength and her kindness. The length of her limbs, her soft breathing when she slept, and the way she looked on a Sunday morning when they were reading the papers and they didn't need to say a word. He missed it all.

Since it had ended, he had been out with women who were younger, prettier, and wilder in bed, and yet none of them were in the same league as her. That was the mystery that we would never understand, he thought. You couldn't rationalise it. You could never explain why the heart chose to love who it loved.

He had been truly in love with her - he saw that now -but as much as he missed her, he knew that he could live without her. That was the worst thing about growing older. That was the worst thing of all. Realising that you could keep living without anyone, when it came to the crunch, when it came to goodbye and good luck, take care of yourself and let's be friends, realising that we are all ultimately alone, taking our pleasures where we can.

When you finally know that you can't die of a broken heart, he thought, then you know you are truly middle-aged.

So Rory stuck with his younger women. And the irony was that he had never had this much success with women when he was a virile young man.

They liked his body, the way it looked after all the years of constant exercise. They liked his gentle manner. And most of all they liked the sad fact that he could live without any of them. «»nce you have used up your store of love, he knew now, (•HI can live without anyone. I li.it was one of the cruel rules, too. ? mlii swung the Ferrari into the drive and immediately Jammed on his brakes.

I [e slowly reversed back out, the gravel crunching under Ins wheels, noting the presence of the gardener, the swimming pool guy, a telephone engineer, two unidentified white*.ins - plumbing? - a couple of cars he didn't recognise, the builder's big black BMW X5 and an overflowing skip that h.uln't been there this morning. It was like trying to park mi Piccadilly Circus.

There was an empty double garage on the far side of the drive but negotiating a path to it would have been like organising the evacuation of Dunkirk. So Paulo parked out on the road again. As he opened his door a car whistled past him, angrily sounding its horn. After a lifetime in the crawl of city traffic, the speed of these suburban roads appalled him. The door to their new home was open.

Paulo stepped inside and was assaulted by noises and smells. Banging, welding, something heavy being dropped. Raised voices and laughter. Fresh paint and wet plaster. Chewing gum and cigarettes. Feeling like a stranger in his own home, Paulo leaned against the banister, his hand instantly recoiling from its stickiness, his palm covered in a coat of magnolia emulsion.

'They say moving is as stressful as bereavement and divorce,' mused their builder, lighting up a hand-rolled snout. 'Give me bereavement and divorce any day of the week. Looking for the little lady, Paul, mate?'

Jessica was in the back garden, under the parasol of the Indian Ocean garden furniture, considering what looked like architectural drawings with a man Paulo didn't recognise.

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The man was naming a price for a kitchen. At first Paulo thought he had misheard - the price seemed far too high, more like the price of a car. But then the man said that it actually wasn't that expensive for a kitchen of this quality. And Paulo wondered when the world had changed, and what his mother would say about a kitchen that cost as much as a car.

The man was having to raise his voice because there was a bevy of shirtless young gardeners wielding what looked like hand-held vacuum cleaners, skirting the fringes of the huge garden, blasting stray leaves and twigs into submission. Beyond them the swimming pool guy was dragging the water with a giant fishing net, removing scraps of debris that were being blown into the water by the gardeners. The messy striving for perfection was everywhere.

Paulo looked at his wife. Her perfect features were arranged in a mask of concentration as she studied the drawings. He loved watching her when she didn't know he was there - he could never believe his luck, really, that this was the woman he got to share his home, his bed, his life with. He always declared that he could watch her for ever, although Jessica always insisted with a smile that fifteen minutes would be closer to the mark.

No, Paulo thought, watching her now with the kitchen man. For ever is much more like it.

Then she suddenly looked up at him and smiled. Always happy to see him again, even after all this time. 'Jess? Can I have a word?'

But Jessica wanted to introduce Paulo to the kitchen man and, for quite a while, the three of them sat there pondering the virtues of different kinds of wood, granite, tile and kitchen appliance, until the man finally had to rush off to his next appointment. There was a little shed at the end of the garden, part iiminirhouse, part storage space. Overriding her protests -In wanted to talk to the chief plumber about taps - Paulo Iteered his wife to the shed. 'It will be a beautiful kitchen,' Jessica said, her eyes shin-kflg with excitement. I know, Jess.' She frowned with concern. 'Are we all right for money?' 'If this is what you want, we can always find the money.' She threw her arms around his neck. A builder whistled. 'You're so sweet.' He lightly kissed her mouth. 'I just want you to be happy.'

11c meant it. If this new place would make her happy, then he would find the money somewhere. If this new kitchen, which would cost more than the home his mother and father lived in, the house they had raised two boys in, was what it took, then show him where to sign. He would give his wife all the things she wanted. But deep in his heart, he wondered if that wasn't part of the problem.

We are so used to getting the things we want, he thought. All of us. So how do we cope when there's something we can't have? Something we want more than anything?

'Watch out for the staircase,' she said. 'The paint's still wet.' 'I'll be careful.'

He realised they were still having to raise their voices because of the gardeners and their leaf machines. But he could not wait until they were really alone. This had to be done now. There was no time to waste. So down in the little summerhouse he showed her the brochure that he had brought home.

There was a colour picture of an Asian baby on the cover, wrapped up in someone's arms. A woman's arms. In the background, in black and white, was a generic Asian

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image, the curved roof of a Buddhist temple, misty green mountains.

Adopting in China, it said on the cover. Yellow words on a red background. Chinese colours, Paulo thought. Jessica looked baffled, and then concerned. As if a perfect day was being taken away from her.

'What's this?' Jessica said, shaking her head. 'What is this?'

He had seen his wife looking at so many glossy brochures. For kitchens, bathrooms, bedrooms and every item in them. Beds, sinks, carpets, curtains, tables and chairs. But Paulo knew that these were not the things they needed to turn this house into a home. There was only one thing that could do that. 'You don't want to try IVF again,' Paulo said.

'IVF is a medical time bomb,' Jessica said, flicking through the Adopting in China brochure.

The text was full of black-and-white photographs of frightened-looking Chinese babies, sleeping Chinese babies, smiling Chinese babies. Beautiful babies. Jessica stared at them as if babies were a species she had never encountered before. 'As you know,' Paulo said, 'I think that's all bollocks.'

She turned on him. 'Oh, you're the big expert, are you? You think I'm just afraid to try again, and you're wrong. This stuff is dangerous, Paulo. There's research that says IVF causes a greater risk of tumours. That IVF babies are more likely to have low birth weight. Never mind the effects it has on the poor bloody women. Do you know anything at all about the links of IVF to breast cancer?'

Her voice was angry, but there was something else in her, and it felt like fear. He didn't want her to be afraid. He wanted them to get through this thing together. 'I read all those articles too,' Paulo said, as gently as he • i?iId. 'And I'm sorry, Jess, but I still think that's not the reason you don't want to try it again. You think babies born?01 m.illy don't have problems? Jesus, everybody wants cast-ii«HI guarantees these days. Everybody wants a lifetime irranty. And the world's not like that.' slu- hung her head, and the sadness in her felt like it would 0\ i i whelm them both. I low pathetic you must think I am.'

'Come on, Jess, you know that's not true. You're the best thing that's ever happened to me.'

'You think - oh, the poor cow has got a Mrs degree. What good is she without her baby? Give her a baby and IBUt her up. And any baby will do.'

'That's not fair. I'm just saying -1 think there are millions? il healthy babies born by IVF.'

She lifted her chin defiantly, that patented Jessica gesture whenever she found herself in a fight, and he felt a surge of feeling for her. 'It's my body.'

'Yes, it is - and that's why I want you to at least think about adopting.'

She laughed bitterly. 'Is that what you think I want? A baby that I picked out on the Internet? A little exotic baby from cute-orphan-dot-com that nobody wants in its own country?'

He placed his hands on the brochure she held, as if it might save them.

'Just read about it, Jess. That's all I ask. You know what they say in China? About an adopted baby? Born wrong stomach - find right door.' 'Everybody would know it's not my baby.'

Her voice pleading with him, trying to get him to stop, almost frantic with the need to stop talking about trying to love somebody else's child, and the terrible implication of

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that love - that they would never have their own child.

'Who cares what people know, Jessie? Who cares what people think? Who cares?' Her eyes shone with fury. 'I bloody care!'

'Jess - there's a baby out there somewhere for us. A baby who needs loving parents just as badly as we want a baby. What's wrong with adopting? I'm just saying - think about it. That's all. It's an option.'

Her words were flat and hard, with no hope left, and nothing more to discuss.

'Not for me. It's not an option for me. I want my baby. Not a baby that comes from somebody else. Not a baby that doesn't look like me. My baby. I don't want some substitute. I don't want second best. I don't want to adopt.'

She handed him back his Adopting in China brochure. The cover and the back page had been crumpled and torn in her hands. 'I would rather get a fucking cat,' she said. fourteen ' fable four,' the chef said, slamming down a plate of tiger prawns. 'Cat's table.' Kirk looked blank.

'The old guy and the three women. Let's move it, surfer boy!'

Kirk came out of the steaming kitchen and into the crowded, Saturday-night restaurant. There was something oddly familiar about table four. He thought he recognised the old boy - this erect, silvery David Niven type, a real old-school Brit - and - oh, of course - he had definitely met the tall, good-looking woman next to him. Cat, the manager of the place, who he had been briefly introduced to after the chef gave him a job. There were two more women at the table, but he didn't see their faces.

'Your tiger prawns,' he said, making to place the plate on their overcrowded table. 'Careful, they're very -' Then he was staring into Megan's eyes. 'Hot,' he croaked, the tiger prawns hovering in mid-air. 'Do you mean spicy-hot or cooking-hot?' said Jessica.

He had rehearsed their reunion so many times that he was undone by the reality of the moment. For some reason

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he had imagined that she would have nursed the same feelings, and that she would be glad to see him.

But there was nothing in her eyes that indicated she even recognised him. 'Sorry, what kind of hot is it?' said Jessica. He stared at her. 'What?'

'It's okay, we'll be careful,' Megan said, more calmly than she felt, easing the prawns from his grip. What was be doing here?

'It's you,' he said, with a weak smile. He had looked for her everywhere. And now she had come to him. But it wasn't meant to be quite like this.

'How are you?' She smiled, as if he were an old acquaintance she couldn't quite place.

Then she did something incredible - she turned away, dismissing him, tucking into the prawns, and he felt his spirits sink. But still he stood there, paralysed by the sight of Megan Jewell. The one-night stand that he would be thinking of on the day he died.

Cat cleared her throat. 'We'll have another bottle of the Bollinger. When you're ready.' 'Right away,' Kirk said. 'Who's that?' he heard the old boy say as he walked away. 'Oh, that's nobody,' said Megan. They were celebrating.

At sixty-two, Jack Jewell had landed his first Hollywood role. At an age when his contemporaries were scrambling for bit parts as pub fodder in the soaps, Jack was looking forward to three weeks in LA, playing the father in a Vietnam War-era remake of Little Women.

'The devoted dad of a difficult, demanding brood of daughters,' he smiled. 'That's going to be a real stretch,' Jessica said. 'Talk about typecasting,' Cat said.

They all laughed, but Megan wondered how close to life it would really be. As much as she loved him, she knew their father had always been quietly bewildered by what he called 'girls' stuff. As much as he loved them, Jack's daughters had always been a mystery to him.

It had been Cat who had guided first Jessica and then Megan through their debut periods. She guessed that their father had no idea that Jessica had had an abortion at sixteen, or that Megan was on the pill when she reached the same age. Even now there was a look of quiet panic in his eyes when Jessica's endometriosis or Megan's pre-eclampsia came up. Megan had always felt sorry for their dad. A father couldn't become a mother simply because the mother had done a runner.

'Little Women,' Jessica said, and they raised their champagne flutes, although Megan's contained only peach juice. 'It's going to be good.' 'It's going to be great,' Cat said. 'Go get 'em, Dad,' Megan said.

It was just the four of them. No boyfriends, no husbands - which really just meant no Paulo, as Jessica was the only one of them with anything resembling a partner. But Paulo was happy to sit it out. When the sisters and their father got together, he always felt like he was gate-crashing some club where he wasn't a member. 'How's the new place, Jessie?' their father asked.

'Five bathrooms,' she said, and they all made impressed noises. It was always the absurd number of bathrooms that she felt compelled to draw attention to. 'It's just so good to get out of the city. It's cleaner, greener, safer.'

'And the people are friendlier, I bet,' their father said. 'More time for you.' Jessica quickly agreed, even though it wasn't true at all.

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She had found that the suburbs were bursting at the seams with smug mums - all these women with Mrs degrees (Hons), fulfilled biological destinies, who saw the world in their little charges. The truth was that she missed her sisters, Naoko, Chloe and the city.

If you smiled at the children in the suburban parks and streets, the self-satisfied mums acted as though you were going to steal their child away. Jessica secretly wished that she had never left their old house, their old life, Naoko and little Chloe. Naoko understood that she would never do anything to hurt a child. Naoko knew she loved children. Naoko knew that she was only smiling. T have to pee immediately,' Megan said. T mean - now.'

She eased herself out of her chair, and almost immediately heard the explosion of a bottle of champagne hitting the ground. She stared across the restaurant at Kirk. And Kirk stared back at her belly. When they left the restaurant, he was waiting on the street.

'Do you want me to deal with this guy?' Cat said to Megan. 'Jesus Christ, he works for me. I'll kick his butt all the way back to the bush.'

'I'll deal with him,' Megan said. 'It wasn't true. What I said about him being nobody.' They stared at her, and then at the young Australian.

'He's not - the one, is he?' Jessica said. 'He is, isn't he? He's the one.' Cat took her arm, suddenly seeing it all. 'Come on, Jess.'

Their father stood on the kerb, hailing a black cab with a yellow light, blissfully unaware of all this girls' stuff. A cab pulled up and Megan kissed her sisters and their father goodbye. They reluctantly left her, Cat promising to call tomorrow, Jessica still staring at Kirk, and reminding Megan that she was coming with her for the next round of tests. When the cab had gone, Megan felt him by her side. 'Where do I know that old boy from?' Kirk said.

'My father's an actor,' Megan said coldly, bridling at his mildly insulting small talk. What did he think this was - a date? 'Where do I know you from?' He grinned, as if she was attempting to charm him.

'That's funny. You want to get a drink or something? There's a bar on the next block.'

'No bars,' Megan said, giving her abdomen that protective stroke. 'No crowds, no cigarette smoke and no alcohol.' He nodded. 'Stupid of me. Sorry. What then?' She shrugged. 'You can walk me to my car.' He looked crushed. 'Sure.'

They made their way to Megan's car, and he awkwardly kept his distance, as if afraid of what might happen if he touched her. 'Is it -?' She laughed, genuinely amused. Then sighed. 'Yours?' He looked embarrassed. 'Sorry.'

'Hey - you've got every right to ask.' Megan smiled. 'It's okay. Yes, it is your baby - Kirk, right?'

Was she kidding? She hadn't really come close to forgetting his name, had she? He could never quite tell when she was joking and when she was deadly serious. 'Kirk. Right. But why didn't you tell me?' She avoided his eyes. 'No forwarding address. No phone number.' T gave you my phone number!' She looked up at him, a hint of defiance there now.

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'Yeah, but I chucked it away.'

He thought about this for a while. 'God almighty - you're having a baby. What are you - six months gone?'

It wasn't a bad guess. She was impressed. He must have spent some time around women. Married, possibly, or once married. Or maybe he had sisters. Or maybe this had happened to him before. 'Thirty-one weeks. So - a bit more than six months.'

He stared at her bump, his brow furrowed with concern. No, on reflection she didn't think that this had happened to him before. He was too awed by it all. And she could understand that. If you didn't feel awe in the face of this everyday miracle, then you never would. 'Everything okay?' he said. Megan shot him a sideways look. 'Why should you care?' He bristled at that. 'Because that's my son you're carrying,' he said quietly.

She smiled. He was a good-looking bastard. And he had a kind enough heart. She could understand why she would want to have sex with him once in a lifetime. 'It's a girl.'

'A girl? A girl.' Somehow he had never imagined that his first child would be a baby girl. But he smiled and nodded, realising that he loved the idea. A girl! 'Then that's my daughter.'

Megan stopped and stared at him. She wasn't quite sure how she should feel about this man. But right now a kind of intolerable impatience seemed just about right. 'But so what?' she said. He flinched. 'So what?' ?I mean - really, so what? You going to marry me? Make an honest woman of me?' He looked at her, as if seriously considering it. For a second Megan was afraid he was going to get down on one knee. 'Is that what you want?'

'No! Jesus!' She took two steps away from him. 'Not exactly perfect husband material, are you?' 'You don't know anything about me.'

'That's true. I don't know anything about you. Apart from the fact that you're this guy who has one-night stands at parties.' Kirk raised a wry eyebrow.

'Maybe now's the time to get to know me. Now that you're having our baby.'

'No offence, Kirk. But there's no need. You're this - what? This Aussie skateboarder type.' T never owned a skateboard in my life.'

'Athletic. Good with the ladies. Getting on a bit now, but still getting plenty of sex. Feeling that there should be a bit more to life than teaching overweight tourists how to dive.' He seemed pleased. 'So you do remember me.'

'What's to remember? It was one night. Not even that. A quick tumble on top of the coats in a spare bedroom, as I recall.'

'Don't be like that. I thought about you all the time. In Sydney. In the Philippines. I kept thinking about you. I don't know why. You just got under my skin. There's something different about you.'

'That's very flattering.' Megan's voice was brisk. 'But you really don't know me. And I don't know you. I appreciate that you want to do the decent thing. I honestly do. It's kind of nice that you're not heading for the hills and demanding DNA tests and all that. But I can handle this thing alone. With my sisters. I don't need some man who is looking to fill a hole in his life. This is my car.' She pressed the key and the lights flashed twice.

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'I just want to be a part of this.'

How could she explain it to him? He wanted to play happy families. And she didn't even know if there was going to be any sort of family. She might be all alone soon.

'Listen, Kirk - to be honest, I don't know if this baby is going to make it.'

She had one hand on the car door handle. But she wasn't leaving. She watched all those emotions she lived with every day - fear, uncertainty, a horrified disbelief - pass across his handsome face. 'Not going to make it? What does that mean?'

'I don't know if this baby is going to live. I could give birth any day. I could give birth tonight. And if the baby comes this early, she would be fighting for her life. Literally fighting for her little life.' The tears came then, she couldn't stop them, but with the back of her hand she angrily wiped them away. 'Do you know what pre-eclampsia is?' Then he surprised her.

'My sister had it. It's to do with blood pressure, isn't it? My nephew had to be born early. Emergency Caesarean. He was in an incubator. With a woolly hat on. All wrapped up to keep warm.' He shook his head at the memory. 'Poor little bloke.' 'How far gone was she? Your sister?' 'I don't know.'

'See - that's what counts. The number of weeks. That's everything. If it's born at twenty-eight weeks, a baby only has a fifty-fifty chance of survival. Did you know that? Of course you didn't. Where I am, thirty-one weeks, the odds are better. There's a ninety per cent survival rate. But there's still the other ten per cent who don't make it. The babies who die.'

He nodded. For a moment she thought that there were tears in his eyes too. But it was probably just a trick of the streetlights. 'I'm two months away from full term. That's a long time. I'm never going to hold out for two more months.' 'You might do.'

This she didn't need. Mindless, unfounded reassurance. Megan already had her profession's exasperation with the layman's opinion.

'Are you a doctor? No - you're a waiter. I'm the doctor. So listen to me. This pregnancy is never going to term. If my baby was born tonight, it couldn't survive outside of an incubator. That's a given. The longer I can hold on, the better for both of us. And I am not talking about you and me, Kirk.' 'I understand.'

Now she wanted him to understand. Now she wanted him to know. This was the most important thing in her world, and she needed him to truly get it.

'Even if I hang on for a few more weeks, pre-term babies have all sorts of problems. Breathing. Feeding.' She ran her fingers through her hair, and quietly cursed. 'Look - the thing about premature babies is that their lungs aren't developed. They can't fucking breathe. You appreciate that's a problem. Not breathing. Frankly, Kirk, I've got enough on my plate without you hanging around trying to play daddy.' He spread his hands helplessly.

'I just want to help you. Any way I can. That's all, Megan. Is that such a bad thing?'

She felt so tired now, from putting on a brave face at dinner, from the walk to the car, her back aching from the muscles at the base of her spine loosening in preparation for birth. Who was this strange boy? Why didn't he just leave her alone? Leave them alone? 'Listen, Kirk, why don't you just go and -'

Suddenly the baby seemed to irritably lash out with her tiny foot.

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All right, all right, Megan thought. Keep your shirt on.

So Megan gave Kirk her number. And she told him when and where the next round of tests would be. No, she didn't want him to come - her sisters would be with her. But she would let him know how they went. And she even let him place a chaste little kiss on her cheek.

There are none so chaste, she thought, as those we once fucked.

'Megan,' he said, patting her arm. 'The baby is going to make it. The baby is going to be fine.'

Her eyes filled with hot, grateful tears, and this time she didn't try to wipe them away. She so desperately needed to hear that her baby would live. But in her heart she thought - no good. Oh, no good at all. You can't have the pregnancy and then decide to have the relationship. It doesn't work like that. It's all the wrong way round. Megan was leaving the hospital with Cat and Jessica when they saw her obstetrician in the lobby. As always when Mr Stewart appeared in public places, there was a buzz of scarcely contained excitement around him. It was more like the personal appearance of a pop star than an obstetrician picking up his mail.

The girl on the reception desk was gazing at him with naked adoration. A couple of midwives were loitering beside him, blushing and giggling, hoping he would notice them. Mr Stewart smiled at Megan, revealing even white teeth, little crinkly lines forming by his blue eyes. His wheat-coloured hair was adorably tousled, as if he had been too busy taking care of women to comb it.

Jessica and Cat stared at him, and then at Megan. She knew what her sisters were thinking. This guy is your obstetrician? This younger Robert Redford? He's a fanny doctor? 'There's something I would like you to see,' Mr Stewart said to Megan. 'If you've got five minutes.'

He made the suggestion sound almost casual, but as he led them to the Intensive Care Unit, Megan realised that he had planned it this way. That he must do this with all of them. The women like her.

The Intensive Care Unit seemed deserted. There were no nurses, and apparently no babies. Just a collection of empty incubators. But they all dutifully washed their hands in a big, industrial-looking sink, and as the three sisters followed Mr Stewart across the room, they slowly realised that it was not empty. The baby, so small that he hardly looked like a baby at all, was all alone on the far side of the ICU. 'This is Henry,' said the obstetrician.

Megan thought it seemed a strange name for a baby that weighed less than two bags of sugar. A big, fat, swinging cock name - the name of kings, a name for a man.

Not a heartbreaking little sliver of life, panting inside an incubator.

It was warm in the hospital's Intensive Care Unit, and yet Henry was dressed for deep midwinter. Wrapped in a blanket, tiny mittens on his hands and feet, and a sort of bobble hat, ridiculously huge on his head the size of a small apple, slipping down over his poor little wrinkled face.

'My God,' Jessica said, hands to her mouth. 'He looks like the loneliest little thing in the world.' She looked around desperately. 'Where is everyone?'

'They're taking good care of him,' Mr Stewart said. 'Don't worry.'

Cat was speechless. I had no idea, she thought. This happens every day, and I had no idea. Jessica clung to her, and couldn't take her eyes from the incubator, and Cat didn't need to look to know that her sister was crying.

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Megan looked at Henry and felt the panic rise in her. This is where my baby will come. This is where my baby will live or die. This thing will happen. But she fought to remain the calm, cool professional with ice in her veins. As if all her questions were purely academic. 'When was he born?' she said.

'Two days ago, at thirty-five weeks,' Mr Stewart said. 'He's doing really well. He's a bit of a tiddler, obviously, but the mother had steroids in plenty of time and his lungs are strong.' He smiled sympathetically at Jessica's tears. 'No need to be upset. Look at him - he's breathing unaided.' He turned to Megan. 'The mother had pre-eclampsia too.'

Megan looked at Mr Stewart with new eyes. What a clever thing to do, gently insisting that she came to the Intensive Care Unit to see Henry. What a good obstetrician. What a wise man.

Gently preparing her for life as a mother whose baby was born too soon. fifteen And then everything was the baby.

Megan, who had planned to work up until the moment her waters broke, who had imagined that she would still be seeing patients and prescribing antibiotics until the baby poked out her head, found there was no time for anything but preparing for the birth, and delaying it for as long as possible.

Dr Lawford couldn't have been more understanding. He let Megan take her holiday allowance all at once, and told her they would worry about it later if she needed more time. He smiled shyly and said he could always write her a sick note, and Megan thought that it was his first recorded joke.

They didn't discuss maternity leave, or how the baby would affect Megan's summative assessment, or how her new life could possibly work. Could she really become a doctor and a mother in the same year? Nobody knew. But with the baby on the way, Megan didn't see how she could afford to not become a doctor.

She was sick of being a glorified student, and she would never ask her father or her sisters for money. Megan had been the brilliant youngest child for so long, a role that she

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loved, and she refused to admit that life had beaten her down now.

So this was Megan's holiday, these daily visits to the hospital for blood tests, urine samples, and constant monitoring of the baby's heartbeat and Megan's boiling, pre-eclamptic blood.

She tried but she couldn't imagine what her working life would look like after the baby had come. How long after the birth could she go back to the surgery? Would she really be writing submissions of practical work while the baby slept peacefully in her cot? Would she be breast-feeding during her multiple choice question paper? Would it all be too much, and would she fall at the final hurdle? Megan couldn't imagine any of these things. She couldn't even imagine her baby.

There were the same questions from midwives and Mr Stewart to be answered again and again. How was her vision? Was it blurred? Did she see flashing lights? Any blinding headaches? Which were all really the same question - is this thing, your pre-eclampsia, turning into something far worse?

She had not cared much for Mr Stewart at first. She had found him too much the showman, too happy to have smitten nurses and midwives gazing longingly at his grinning, golden head. But now she saw that she was lucky to have Stewart as her obstetrician, and behind that Robert Redford demeanour was a brilliant doctor with a profound conscience. As the birth came closer, Megan saw that the humour and charm were merely the bedside manner, and not the man.

As Stewart examined every ultrasound, blood test and urine sample, as he assessed the readings for Megan's blood pressure and the monitoring of Poppy's tiny heartbeat, he was buying as much time as he could for mother and child, fighting for every extra day, giving the baby's lungs time to grow, and all the while dealing with the knowledge that Megan's blood could boil over at any moment and then mother and baby would both be fighting for their lives. He would not let it get that far. Megan was worried about her baby's life. It was left to Stewart to worry about both of them.

Her blood pressure was still high, 150 over 95, chubby-arsed middle-aged executive level, but remaining steady. Every scan showed that the baby appeared happy, although she only weighed a shade under four pounds. She - Poppy - had this habit of crossing her little legs, as if patiently waiting for the big day, like a commuter waiting for the 8.15 to town, and that simple gesture unlocked a love inside Megan that she had never known existed.

There was nothing wrong with Poppy. Megan was acutely aware that she, Megan, the mother, was the problem. She lay on the hospital bed, Jessica by her side, listening to Poppy's amplified heartbeat on the Sonicaid. The little life growing inside her.

'Sure and steady,' smiled the midwife. 'I'll leave you together for a while.' She squeezed Megan's arm. 'Don't worry. She's a beautiful baby.' When the midwife was gone, Megan turned to her sister.

'Sometimes I feel like I've let her down before she's even been born,' she said. 'That's just silly,' Jessica said. 'You're both doing fine.' There was a polite knock on the door. 'It's him again,' Megan said. 'Nobody else bothers knocking.' 'Come in,' Jessica called.

'Anything happen yet?' Kirk said, shyly sticking his head around the door.

'It's not going to be cinematic,' Megan said. 'I'm not going to clutch my stomach and scream, "It's time!"'

Kirk grinned with embarrassment. Jessica smiled at him with sympathy. This was a good guy, wasn't it? Wasn't this

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how we wanted a man to be? Attentive, concerned, there by your side? Why was her sister so hard on him?

'Mr Stewart will look at my tests and decide that my blood pressure is too high,' Megan continued. 'Then he will ask the anaesthetist to look for a window in his diary between his golf game and the next poor cow on the assembly line. So don't expect hospital drama, okay? Don't expect George Clooney and white coats.'

He hovered in the doorway, still smiling uncertainly. 'Okay,' he said. 'She's fine,' said Jessica. 'And the baby's fine.' 'I'll get some coffee then for us, shall I?' 'That would be lovely,' beamed Jessica.

'Or if you give me the keys,' Kirk said, T could go to your flat and start painting that wardrobe?'

She thought about her little home, and how the baby had already changed it. Megan and her sisters had cleared most of the solitary bedroom for the baby. They had brought in a beautiful Mamas and Papas cot (a gift from Jessica and Paulo) with a Jenny Giraffe mobile (Kirk's contribution), a herd of stuffed toys (from sentimental old women on the reception desk at the surgery), all these stupendously useless bears, dogs and frogs, although they did make the room seem more welcoming, more like a nursery and less like a miserable little rented flat, and a new chest of drawers (from her father) full of clothes (from Cat).

It was the clothes that tugged at Megan's heart. They would be perfect for a newborn baby, but far too big for premature Poppy. 'Megan?' Kirk said. 'Coffee and keys?'

'Just the coffee,' Megan said. 'To be honest, I don't really want you in my flat when I'm not there.'

'That's cool. That's absolutely cool. I'll just get the coffee then.' She had allowed him in there once - when he had turned up on the doorstep with the Jenny Giraffe mobile - and didn't like the way his eyes wandered all over her home. As though he was disappointed that his daughter was starting her life in this poky flat. As though she was an unfit mother. What was he expecting? Kensington Palace? She was going to be a single mother.

'Why are you so nasty to him?' Jessica said. 'When this baby comes along, you're going to be joined for life.'

Megan stared at her sister. 'Perhaps that's why I'm nasty to him.'

The door opened and Mr Stewart came in with a sheaf of papers. He gave Jessica the full blast of his smile and then sat on the bed, taking Megan's hand. 'Where are we now?' he said.

'Thirty-four weeks,' Megan said. 'That's still too early. She's still too small. Just four pounds. I want to try to make it to thirty-six weeks. Please. Can't we try for thirty-six weeks?' He nodded thoughtfully. 'Look at this,' he said.

It was just a line on a chart. The line ascended swiftly, then slowly evened off and finally seemed ready to fall. It looked like the flight of an arrow that was just about to drift back to earth. 'The baby's growth rate,' Megan said. 'It's slowing down.'

'Had to happen. Pre-eclampsia affects the blood supply to the placenta. Sooner or later, the baby stops growing. But of course you know that already.'

Jessica anxiously peered at the chart over the obstetrician's shoulder. 'But what does it mean?'

For a few seconds the only sound in the room was the baby's amplified heartbeat. And then Megan spoke. 'It means it's time,' she said.

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Then there was the waiting. And it went on and on, as the anaesthetist's busy schedule and London traffic combined to delay the birth of Megan's daughter. Midwives and nurses came and went, taking blood pressure and murmuring small talk, as if Megan was waiting for a bus, not a baby.

All this waiting. How could anyone be bored on the edge of something so momentous? Megan felt that her life had stopped. That all time was dead time until the anaesthetist had struggled past the Angel in Islington. Cat arrived with premature flowers. Jessica stroked Megan's feet. Jack called and didn't know what to say. Kirk hovered by the window, trying not to get in the way.

Then they were ready for her, and to Jessica it seemed that things moved alarmingly fast. Like those movies you see about death row - the sudden mad rush to get the act done and behind them.

With Cat and Jessica on either side of Megan, holding her hand, two hefty young porters lifted her onto a trolley and wheeled her out of the room and into harshly lit corridors smelling of hospital food and flowers. Into a huge lift and down into the basement of the building, where Mr Stewart was waiting, as beautiful in his blue hospital smock as Robert Redford in his Navy whites in The Way We Were.

And then into the holding room, where the anaesthetist was waiting, his voice as soothing as a lover's as he slipped in the needle.

There was a room beyond the holding room, full of happy, chatting people, all wearing the blue uniforms and shower caps. They surrounded a flat table. Under the lights of the operating theatre, it shone like an altar. All the while, her sisters never stopped holding Megan's hand.

The expectant father followed in their wake. They gave him a blue coat, a plastic shower cap for his hair, and a surgical mask. His heart raced. A girl, a girl, it was going to be a girl. This unimaginable child. Soon she would be here. There was nothing he could do. Except prepare to be a good father. And he wondered, what would he tell his daughter about men?

How could he prepare her for their lies, their tricks, and their black hearts? Our black hearts? Her childhood years would fly by, and soon the boys would look at her, his precious baby, in that same calculating way that he had looked at a million girls in thirty countries.

He loved her so much, and yet already this was his greatest fear - that she would one day meet someone just like him. This was the womaniser's bitterly ironic fate - to be the father of an adored, beautiful baby girl.

They wheeled Megan into the brightly lit operating room where there were more people than he had expected. They were young, smiling, all wearing the same blue coats as him.

'Any requests?' one of them said, as if this was a radio show rather than an emergency Caesarean. Kirk remembered the CD in his pocket. He handed it over and someone stuffed it in the operating theatre's ghetto blaster. They busied themselves around Megan - pulling some strangely sexy stockings onto her thin, pale legs, putting an IV drip into her arm, murmuring sweet nothings.

As the anaesthetist leant over Megan, a tiny screen was put across her belly. Kirk stared at it in amazement. He had heard that it was a tent. They put a tent on the woman's belly for a Caesarean. That's what he had heard, that's what he was expecting. Some huge expanse of canvas that could house a family of Bedouin tribesmen. This was more of a handkerchief. If he lifted his head, he would be able to see everything.

Megan's bulging belly was swabbed with antiseptic and then Mr Stewart bent over her, a thin blade in his hands. Kirk pressed his face close to Megan's face, fighting for

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breath. It was meant to be a tent. What happened to the fucking tent?

What would happen if he caught a glimpse of Megan's sliced open belly and he couldn't take it? What if the first thing his daughter ever saw was her daddy, flat out on the floor, fainted clean away? How would that look? Megan took his hand.

'Don't worry,' she said, mumbling a little through the mist of drugs. 'You'll be fine.'

She heard a song begin to play. That seemed strange, that there was music in here. And the faces swam around her -the faces she knew, and the faces she had never seen in her life - all of them strangely interchangeable, not because they all wore that blue nylon uniform with the mask and the little hat, but because they all looked at her with the same expression. A kind of concerned love, as though she was a virgin bride on her wedding night. It was as if she had suddenly become the most important person on the planet. Or maybe it was the baby. Maybe the baby was the most important person on the planet. Yes, that seemed right. 'Well, I never met a girl like you before.'

Like someone doing the washing up in her stomach. That's what it felt like. Intimate - more intimate than anything she had ever felt - and yet strangely, mercifully distant. The guy - Kirk, his name was definitely Kirk - had his face pressed close to her. Bracing himself for something. He was holding her hand. She suddenly wanted to tell him, better start paint ing that wardrobe. But they were inside her now, the song not even half over - 'This old town's changed so much' - and even through the sweet fog of anaesthetic she was aware of something being pulled from her, something that was her and yet inde pendent of her, and all attention was suddenly elsewhere, on this thing that was her and yet not her. 'Is everything all right?' she said, or maybe she only thought it - but the focus was on this little thing now, and for a few seconds she felt ignored, forgotten, like a bride abandoned at the altar.

Then there was laughter - shocked, delighted laughter -and movement, and her sisters and Kirk were smiling down at her, their heads batting back and forth between her and the little living thing that was being fished from her body -their heads torn between the two of them, back and forth, back and forth, like a cartoon tennis crowd following the action and - how can it be so fast? - then it - she - was finally free, the song still not over, as it - she - was immediately whisked away from Megan by the midwives to be cleaned and tested and wrapped in swaddling clothes. But the weak little cries reached Megan.

And then there she was, not being held by Jessica or Cat, which Megan would really have preferred but, in accordance with some tribal ritual, by the father.

The baby was tiny - heartbreakingly tiny. More like a sleepy foetus than a bouncing baby. Megan stared at her, too stoned and exhausted to do what she wanted to do, which was take her baby and hold her and love her.

It - she - had a little bashed-in face, like an apple that had fallen too soon, and even after being washed her face was still covered in a sticky film of yellow goo. She looked like the oldest thing in the world, and also the youngest.

'She's beautiful,' Kirk said, laughing and crying all at once. 'She's the most beautiful thing in the world.' And he was right. Poppy Jewell's life had begun.

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sixteen It wasn't meant to be this way, thought Jessica.

In all her images of new motherhood, the mother and baby were inseparable - the sleeping tot at rest on her mother's breast, the mother exhausted but quietly ecstatic. An almost Biblical union of mother and child - that's what Jessica was expecting, a bond so close that you could hardly tell where the mother ended and the baby began, as indivisible as they had been when the child was in the womb.

But little Poppy was in the Intensive Care Unit, lying on her belly in an incubator, wrapped up for a winter that only she could feel, and Megan was three floors below - sliced up and spent, inexplicably silent.

One of the nurses had placed a stuffed monkey in the incubator, and it smiled down on Poppy, twice her size. Jessica thought her niece looked like the most vulnerable thing she had ever seen - not yet ready for the world.

'She's about the size of a roast chicken,' said Jessica. 'Poor little mite.'

'Don't worry about our Poppy,' said a cheerful Jamaican nurse. 'She might be a little uncooked, but she's doing fine. Babies with pre-eclamptic mums tend to be tough little buggers.' 'She doesn't look like a tough little bugger,' said Jessica. But she was grateful for the reassurance.

It was true that little Poppy had done well in her first three days of life. She was breathing unaided, drinking tiny quantities of milk - expressed by Megan, but administered by one of the ICU's nurses - and she was putting on some weight.

And there was something else. Even after just a few days, it was clear that there were far harder luck stories than a baby born at thirty-four weeks and weighing just under four pounds.

Jessica hadn't seen any babies smaller than Poppy in the Intensive Care Unit - although she was assured they arrived all the time. But on her first day in the ICU there was also, briefly, a baby boy born with a hole in his heart. And on the second day there had been another baby boy - a fat, healthy eight-pounder - who was born with Down's syndrome.

As the nurses and doctors did what they could for these babies - and Jessica wondered what could they do? - the parents stood stunned or quietly sobbing by their newborn. The mother and father of the baby boy with Down's syndrome had a girl of about five years old with them. When you have done it once, Jessica thought, you must relax. You must believe the bad things all happen to other families. And then your world falls apart. And then it happens to you.

Jessica thought she could say a few supportive words to other families with premature babies. She could tell them that their tiny baby boy was a handsome fellow - even as he lay there with his woolly hat falling over his eyes - or that their undersized baby girl was a beauty - even as she lay there like a little pale fillet in the frozen meat department.

But Jessica didn't have any words for the families who had harder things to deal with.

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She could not tell the mothers and fathers of the Down's syndrome baby, or the boy with a hole in his heart, that everything was going to be all right. She had no right to say those words, she had no right to offer them cheap, unearned comfort.

Because that's what you learned in the Intensive Care Unit - not everybody who has a baby gets a happy ending.

Jessica watched her niece sleeping. She was getting used to it now - that fretful panting, desperate for life. Like a puppy, or a kitten, the face all mashed up yet somehow heartbreakingly beautiful. Poppy was going to be fine. It was Megan that Jessica worried about. Like a little bird, Cat thought.

Jessica cradled the baby in one arm, and with the other fed her with a small bottle containing a mere drizzle of milk. With her eyes closed, and her surprisingly large mouth wide open - Poppy's mouth was the only big thing about her -Cat thought she looked like a newborn bird in the nest, waiting for its worm.

'There's nothing of her, is there?' Cat said. 'She's hardly here at all.'

'Don't worry about Poppy,' Jessica said. 'She's a tough little bugger.'

'Shouldn't Megan be breast-feeding her? Isn't that better for them?'

'Poppy's too small to breast-feed. She can't do that sucking thing. Can you, darling?'

The baby had fallen asleep, her mouth still attached to the teat of the bottle, her miniature tummy already full. Jessica gently pulled the bottle, and it came away from the baby's fleshy mouth with a quiet plop. Cat stroked the soft down on Poppy's face, as if afraid to wake her, or perhaps break her. And again she felt it - a sense of complete wonder at this everyday miracle. 'How's Megan doing?' Jessica said.

Cat shook her head. 'She looks like she's been through the mill. I thought that a Caesarean was meant to be the easy option - too posh to push, and all of that. They really sliced her open, didn't they?'

'A Caesarean is major abdominal surgery,' Jessica said, repeating one of Mr Stewart's favourite lines.

'It was a lot more like a scene from Alien than I had been expecting.'

The two sisters watched the sleeping baby in silence. Then Jessica quietly said, 'I thought I would feel terrible when I held her. I thought I would come undone. Because Megan had a baby, and I didn't. But look at her - how could you feel anything bad when you hold her in your arms? How could this baby make you feel anything negative? And she's not an idea of a baby any more, is she? There's nothing, you know, theoretical about her. She's undeniably Poppy. She's not some abstract notion. She's Poppy Jewell and she's here to stay. Here, take her for a while.' i Cat awkwardly took the baby.

She wasn't as comfortable holding her niece as Jessica. Not because she was afraid of dropping Poppy on her head - although that was a part of it - but because, unlike Jessica, the feelings the baby stirred threatened to overwhelm her. Who would have believed that was possible? That Jessica would take the birth in her stride, and Cat would be the one who felt the world change?

When Cat held the baby she felt a physical yearning more powerful than any craving she had ever known. It was stronger than any desire she had ever felt for any lover, or job, or possession. She held a baby so small that it was hardly there at all,

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and she wanted one of her own. It was mad - what would she do with it? Where would she stick it? Where would it sleep?

But she couldn't help herself. It felt like she had wasted so many years on things that didn't matter. The pursuit of pleasure and money, the endless, ridiculous yearnings for a better car and a bigger flat, all that time devoted to her latest wants and needs.

I am thirty-six years old, she thought, with her niece in her arms, feeling like she weighed not four pounds, but nothing. I am nearer to forty than thirty, and I am not going to die without one day holding a baby of my own. All she needed now was - what was it again? Oh, yes. A man. Outside the Intensive Care Unit, Olivia Jewell stood in the twilight of the corridor, watching them through the glass. Her two oldest daughters, passing her youngest daughter's baby - Olivia's first grandchild - between them as if they might break her.

The baby was wrapped up like an Eskimo. But as far as Olivia could tell, it was an ugly little bastard. In her experience, all babies were repulsive. But the squashed little puss on this one could curdle milk.

It was different when they were bigger. She had no doubt that she had produced the three most beautiful little girls of all time. But even then they were still a 24-hour job. That was the trouble with children - you couldn't just dress them up and look at them. They kept wanting things from you.

But, oh, she thought of how her daughters looked just before she left - the long-limbed eleven-year-old, the impossibly cute seven-year-old, the pot-bellied three-year-old - and something inside Olivia, something she had long believed dead, began to ache. Then somebody spoke and it was gone. 'Can I help you, dear?' said the nurse on the desk. 'Just looking,' said Olivia Jewell. 'He's got a baby girl,' Paulo said to the barmaid, at that point in the evening where a man starts freely addressing barmaids. 'Poppy. She's called Poppy. She's a little cracker.'

Kirk grinned with pride, reaching for his glass. But it was already empty. 'She is, isn't she?' he said. 'She's a little cracker!'

'Congratulations,' smiled the barmaid. Tall, blonde, early thirties. She wiped a wet cloth across the bar. 'Wait until she starts screaming at three in the morning. And again at four. And again at five. See if she's a little cracker then.' They watched her walk away. 'You wouldn't think she had children,' Kirk said.

'You can't always tell if they've got children,' Paulo said. 'That's what I noticed.'

T want her to have a good life. I want her to be the healthy, outdoor type. Not like most of these kids today. Fat. Drugs. I want her to learn to dive! Do you know what we're going to do when she's old enough? We're going to swim with dolphins. She'll love that. Poppy will love that.' 'Here's to you, mate. The three of you.'

'The three of us,' Kirk said, contemplating his empty glass. 'Yes. I'm a father. I can't believe it. What do I know about being a dad?' 'You'll pick it up. How's Megan? How's the mum?'

'She's great. She's good. She's - well - quiet. Not saying very much.' 'Adjusting. Adjusting to the idea of being a mother.'

Kirk paused, and Paulo was aware that - beyond the euphoria, beyond the beer - this man considered him a stranger. But tonight he had nobody else to talk to. 'She's been through a lot. The pre-eclampsia. All those

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tests. Not knowing when the baby was going to come. The Caesarean. Jesus - they opened her up like a can of corned beef. Although he's supposed to be very good. Mr Stewart. Leaves a good scar, they say. You hardly know it's there, apparently. And now Poppy is in that incubator. Megan - I don't know. She looks like she's been knocked sideways. Knocked flat and can't get up. Between you and me, I sort of thought she might be a bit happier than this.'

'Still adjusting,' Paulo said. He could not comprehend that a woman could give birth and then not be the happiest woman alive. He waved to the barmaid. 'Can we get a couple of beers over here, please?'

'But what did I expect?' Kirk said. 'We're not like you and your wife. We're not close. Megan hardly knows me.'

The barmaid placed the beers in front of them. 'Wait until the baby gets colic,' she said. 'Give it time. Megan's young. The youngest sister.'

'Yeah, she's young. But she's not so young. I mean, our grandparents and our parents wouldn't have thought that twenty-eight was too young to have a baby, would they? They would have thought that was leaving it a bit late.'

Paulo thought about it. 'I guess my mum and dad were middle-aged when they were twenty-eight.'

'It's funny. These days people don't really have children in - what do you call it? - their child-bearing years.' 'True enough. Look at Kylie Minogue. Your countrywoman.' 'God bless her, mate.'

'Widely considered to be one of the most desirable women on the planet. But Kylie is - what? Middle thirties?' 'If she's a day.'

'Kylie looks fantastic. I'll grant you that. I bow to no man in my - you know. Anyway. A woman in the prime of her life. No one's disputing it. But you have to wonder about her eggs.' 'Kylie Minogue's eggs?'

Paulo nodded. 'Kylie Minogue's eggs are no spring chickens. In egg terms, they are well into middle age. Do you know what happens to a woman's eggs after the age of thirty-five? It's not good news. That's what all the bum wiggling is about. Kylie doesn't want a number one record. She wants a baby. But she can't find the right man.'

'That's the big dilemma for these modern girls, isn't it?' Kirk said, reaching for his beer. 'They spend their child-bearing years with guys they don't like very much.'

The barmaid collected their glasses, wiped a desultory cloth in front of them. 'Wait until she starts teething,' she said. After they had taken the baby away, they gave Megan a photograph. The picture was slotted into a white card with the words, My name is - and / weigh -, printed on it. Someone had written Poppy in the space for a name, but the weight was left blank. Nothing to boast about there, thought Megan.

In the photograph Poppy looked ancient - a wrinkled little old man wrapped up in winter clothes. And Megan thought, you poor little thing. Who are you?

There was a light rap on the door and her mother's heavily made-up face appeared. 'Anybody home?' said Olivia. 'Did you see the baby?'

'I looked in. Briefly. She's absolutely gorgeous.' She touched her daughter's arm, carefully avoiding the IV drip that was pumping her full of morphine. 'And how are you, Megan?' 'My scar itches.'

Olivia stared at Megan's midriff. 'I do hope it's well below your bikini line.'

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'I think it will be a while before I wear a bikini, Mother. Shuffling to the toilet feels like the long march.'

'What's the matter, darling? Feeling a bit down? Touch of the baby blues?'

Megan shook her head. That was the problem. She didn't really know what the matter was, although she knew it was something to do with failing. She wasn't used to failure.

T always imagined I would have a natural birth. A Caesarean - it's so hard. They take away your baby. They pump you full of drugs. They cut you open. And it hurts like fucking hell.'

'Don't get too sentimental about the other kind of birth. I had all three of you out of the standard route. There's nothing particularly magical about having stitches in your puss.' 'Do you really have to say "puss"?' 'Oh, all right then - fanny. Are you breast-feeding?'

'She's too small. And I'm not really producing enough milk.' Megan indicated a machine by the side of the bed, fitted with what looked like some kind of vacuum cleaner nozzle. 'I express milk.' 'You what?' 'Express milk.'

'What - you mean, pump it out of your tits and then they give it to her in a bottle?' 'Exactly.'

'Isn't science wonderful? I breast-fed Cat and the little cow almost chewed off my nipples. I swear all our problems start from the time she mistook my nipple for a Farley's Rusk.'

Megan laughed. Only her mother's brand of humour could make her smile in this place.

'It's not the pain I mind. Or the scar. Or even that they took Poppy away and put her in an incubator. It's that every- body expects me to suddenly be a different person. And I can't feel it.'

T know what you mean, dear. We're meant to turn into a breast-feeding, nappy-changing earth mother as soon as we drop our first brat. No offence to little Poppet, darling.' 'Poppy.'

'Poppy. Of course. Men are allowed to turn their paternal feelings on and off at will. But it's meant to come naturally to us. They expect you to become as selfless as Mother Teresa just because you got knocked up the duff.' Olivia leant close to her daughter, lowering her voice, as if they were sharing some blasphemy. 'Let me tell you, there's nothing remotely natural about giving your life up for another human being. But cheer up - the first eighteen years are the worst.' 'But that's you.' 'Yes, that's me.'

'And I don't want to see my child as some kind of inconvenience, or chore, or bore. I want to love her the way she deserves to be loved. But - I have a baby, and yet I don't feel like a mother.'

'Then you're like me,' said Olivia, with a note of triumph. 'And there's nothing you can do about it.' Suddenly Olivia's entire body seemed to squirm with pain. 'What's wrong?' Megan said.

Olivia rubbed her arm. 'Nothing, dear. I've been getting these flashes up and down my left arm. It's just old age. Well, middle age.' 'You should get a doctor to look at that.'

There was another knock on the door and Megan choked up when her father's familiar smiling face came into the room, partially obscured by flowers and a large, heart-shaped box of chocolates.

'My baby,' Jack said, hugging his daughter, and she moaned with pain. 'My God! Sorry!'

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'It's just my stitches, Dad. They're still a bit raw.'

Jack gave his ex-wife a smile that showed no hint of animosity, or history. Actors, thought Megan. 'Olivia, isn't this a wonderful day?'

'Hello, Jack. Can you believe it? We're grandparents. Doesn't that make you feel like going out and slashing your wrists?'

'No, it makes me feel bloody marvellous, actually.' He turned to Megan. 'And we saw her - Poppy. She's so beautiful! A bit small, of course, but she'll catch up.'

Megan hid in her father's arms, pressing her face against his chest. This was what she needed. Somebody to tell her that it would be all right in the end. Suddenly she realised that her father was not alone. He was accompanied by a tall, smiling redhead around her own age. Megan peeked out at the woman, not understanding, half expecting her to say she was going to take Megan's blood pressure and give her some painkillers.

'I'm Hannah,' said the redhead. 'Congratulations, Megan. She's a little princess. Don't worry - I was born two months early, and I'm just under six feet.'

Megan stared at this Hannah with gratitude. It was the best news she had heard all day. Olivia was contemplating the tall redhead. 'Hannah did hair on the movie,' Jack said.

'That's how you met?' Olivia said. 'You were touching up Jack's thinning rug? How romantic' 'Mother,' Megan said.

'You look so good together,' Olivia said. 'Even though you're young enough to be his - what's the word I'm looking for?'

'And you're old enough to keep a civil tongue in your surgically enhanced head,' Jack said. 'Stop it!' said Megan. 'My stomach's just been cut open, I'm up to my eyes with drugs, I only just stopped pissing through a tube - and all you can think about is this tired old shit that's been dragging on for years. Leave it alone, can't you? For one day at least.'

'You'll have to excuse my daughter,' Olivia said to Hannah, as she got up to go. 'She's not herself today. She's just had a baby.' Eventually they all went home, even Jessica and Cat, and there was only Megan, wide awake in her room, and Poppy, somewhere in the building high above her, sleeping in her incubator in the Intensive Care Unit, guarded by a stuffed monkey twice her size.

The ICU never closed. The nurses on the night shift were happy for Megan to shuffle up there, rolling her IV drip by her side, and to sit watching her baby sleep. In many ways, the ICU at night was a far more relaxed place than during the day, when it was full of consultants and doctors and friends and family. Megan certainly preferred it at night, because she didn't have to wear her brave and cheerful mask.

'Do you want to do her three o'clock feed?' a Chinese nurse asked Megan.

Megan shook her head, pulling her dressing gown tighter. 'You do it, you're better than me.'

The nurse contemplated Megan with her cat eyes. 'It's good for you to do it. Both of you.'

So Megan let the nurse fish Poppy from her plastic box, but then she cradled the baby in her arms and eased the bottle's teat between her lips. There seemed to be a pitiful amount of milk in the bottle. Her milk supply seemed to be running dry.

Megan, who had always been so capable, who had sailed through everything life had confronted her with - her parents' divorce, medical school, all those exams beyond

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counting - felt the tears spring to her eyes and thought to herself, can't I do anything right?

She held the baby, gently tilting the bottle, until Poppy moaned with exhaustion and her head lolled away, her woolly cap falling over her face. 'That's enough for now,' said the nurse. Megan pulled the bottle away. And then it happened. Poppy smiled.

The corners of her wide, little mouth turned up, and for a few shocking moments she bared her newly minted gums. A smile! A smile from her daughter! 'Did you see that?' Megan asked. 'See what?' said the nurse. 'She smiled at me!' The nurse frowned. 'Probably just the wind.'

The wind, thought Megan. A combination of gas and milk trapped in that stomach the size of a thimble. Or a physical coincidence - a grimace of discomfort or exhaustion that merely resembled a smile. No, Megan couldn't believe any of that. She would call it a smile. seventeen Rory saw Cat enter the karate dojo as quietly as she could and the thing he noticed immediately was that she had tried to make herself look more beautiful.

High heels, lipstick, a special dress. This wasn't the Cat he knew. This was someone who thought she had to make an extra effort tonight.

He was surprised to see her, in here of all places. He realised he was not particularly happy that she thought she could suddenly turn up at his place of work unannounced. But these efforts to make herself look more beautiful pulled at his heart, and filled him with an enormous tenderness.

Over the heads of the twenty children who were facing him, Rory watched her looking for somewhere to sit down. The students ranged in age from five to fifteen, all of them barefoot and in their pristine white uniforms and coloured belts, all of them standing to attention, even the little ones, hanging on his every word, waiting for him to talk a bit more about leg blocking techniques with the feet.

'The inside snapping block - nami-ashi in Japanese - is useful if your assailant is attempting to kick you in the groin.' Cat smiled shyly at him from the back of the room.

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Ah, but she doesn't need heels with those legs, Rory thought. And she doesn't need lipstick with that mouth. And a woman like that doesn't need a special dress. She's beautiful already. When the class was over, and he was showered and changed, Rory told Cat he knew a little sushi restaurant nearby. The place turned out to be crowded, with reserved signs placed on the two remaining tables, and they were asked if they minded eating at the bar. They conferred, decided they didn't mind at all, and settled themselves opposite the white-capped chef deftly working over slivers of raw fish.

'What I like about Japanese restaurants is that you can eat dinner alone,' he said. 'Because you can just sit at the bar. You can't do that in French or Italian restaurants. Or even Thai and Chinese places. Everybody thinks you're Johnny-no-mates. In a Japanese restaurant, you can eat by yourself and nobody looks twice.'

'But it's nicer if you have someone with you,' Cat said. 'Even here - sitting at the bar. It's nicer if you're with someone.' He smiled. 'I guess so.'

'I've missed that,' she said, and he could tell that it was not an easy thing for her to say. 'I've missed having someone.'

They sat in silence while the waitress placed miso soup, green tea and a lacquered bowl of sushi in front of them. 'Thanks for looking after my boy.' 'It was no problem.' T should have called you.'

The bulk of him seemed to be very close. Cat had forgotten how big he was, how solid. Nothing like all those skinny boys she had found in clubs.

'I've been pretty busy. With work. My sister and the new baby.' 'Megan? She's had her baby?' 'A little girl. Poppy. Poppy Jewell.'

His face lit up with real pleasure. 'That's fantastic. Give her my best.'

Of course, she thought. Megan was once one of his students. 'She must be very happy,' Rory said.

'Well - it's kind of more complicated than that. I wouldn't call it happy. Not exactly.'

'What's wrong?' He thought of his ex-wife, and all the inexplicable tears after their son was born. 'Postnatal depression or something? I'm sorry, it's none of my bloody business.'

'No, it's fine. I know you like Megan, and she's always been mad about you. I'm not sure I know where plain old exhaustion ends and postnatal depression starts. I am not sure anyone does.'

She was unguarded and open with him - all the things he loved about her. Flushed with feeling, full of life. Nothing like the stranger, all disappointed and cold, she had been at the end, at the end of them. This was the Cat he recognised, despite the lipstick and the heels and the special dress. He couldn't resist her.

'Me too,' he said, as he snapped open his wooden chopsticks. 'I've missed having someone too.' It takes time to learn to sleep with someone, he thought later.

Not just the sex - although there was that too - but the physical act of sharing a bed with someone, of actually spending the night together. The tugs on the duvet. The legs and the arms that could wrap you up or jab you in the ribs. It took months, years, to get it right. But sleeping with Cat was effortless, and he loved that.

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He felt physically closer to her than he ever had to any woman - he knew that long body so well, from the funny toes (the middle one all squished up where her shoes hadn't been changed quickly enough when she was a growing child), the long limbs, the small breasts, the goofy smile - all teeth and gums, a smile like the sun coming out of a cloudy sky - all the way up to the ears with their ancient, pinpoint scars of piercing (Jessica with a needle heated up over the stove, when Cat was fourteen and Jessie was ten - the blood was everywhere, apparently). He knew her body as well as he knew his own, and he still hadn't had enough of it. And he was happy and proud that the pair of them knew how to share a bed.

'I want my child to learn karate,' she said into his neck, easing herself into the curves of his body. 'If I ever have one.'

He smiled in the darkness. 'Your child, eh? Have you considered kung fu?' 'I like karate.' 'Why's that?'

'Because I want you to teach her. You only teach karate, don't you? You can't switch about, can you?'

'No, you can't really keep switching about. You choose a discipline and you stay with it for ever.' The voices were soft in the night. This was the terrible thing about breaking up with her, he realised. He had lost his best friend. 'It's a bit like - I was going to say it's a bit like choosing a partner. But how long does that usually last?'

'Ten years,' she said. 'Ten years is how long the average marriage lasts today. I read it in a paper. But that's when people get it wrong. If you get it right, I guess it must be longer.' He rolled over and faced her. 'What are we doing here, Cat?' She took a breath.

'I think maybe we should get back together again. And I think that maybe we should have a baby. At least, I think we should try.' 'Cat.' 'I know, I know.' 'Cat, I can't have children. You know that.' 'It's okay. I talked to Megan. She's a doctor, right?' 'Yes.'

'She said you could get it reversed. Get your vasectomy reversed.' 'Do it all again?'

'Not do it all again. Do it the other way round. Have the operation in reverse. A reverse vasectomy. That's what they call it. Instead of cutting your - what do you call them, the tubes?' 'Vases. I think that's it.' 'Instead of cutting them, they stitch them together.'

It was a mistake. A beautiful mistake. He was only going to get hurt again. Better to have made the break and not look back. Too late now.

'And do you know what the odds are of that working?' _ 'I know it's a long shot. Megan said. I know that when you have it done in the first place, they tell you to consider it irreversible.'

'Exactly. You think I never thought about this? You think I never contemplated getting it reversed? And trying for a kid?' Just to keep you happy, he thought. Just to keep you.

'But it happens, Rory. Men get this thing reversed and they have a baby. Just like someone always wins the lottery.' 'Do you know the odds against winning the lottery?'

'As I say, I know it's a long shot. But I also know that someone always wins. I think you would be a great dad. Strong, gentle, funny. I think you are a great dad.'

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'But I'm tired. Do you understand that? I've done it all. Even if it was possible - and I have my doubts - I have done it all before, years ago. I have been through the lot. From sleepless nights and dirty nappies to finding a piece of hash in the sock drawer.'

'But the baby will give you energy. The baby will make you young again. The baby will give you a reason to live.'

She meant it. She wanted it so badly. And really, truly, she wanted to go through it with him. No other man.

They were at the moment when he either had to get dressed and go home, or take her in his arms. So he took her in his arms, and she placed a kiss on his mouth.

'I have missed this,' he said, the heat rising in him again. 'I have missed this so much.'

'I always thought that you learned how to be a mother from your own mother,' she said. 'But that's not true. I see it with Megan and Poppy. It's your child. It's your child that teaches you how to be a mother.'

His mouth was on her, all over her, wanting to know those long limbs, to commit them to memory so he would have them for ever.

'You want it too, don't you?' she said. 'We want the same thing, don't we?'

But by then he was kissing her back, and he couldn't talk, and so Cat's question went unanswered. Poppy remained in her incubator for three weeks and then she was released into the world.

She had stayed in the Intensive Care Unit for so long that some of the nurses cried to see her go.

They almost feel like she's their baby, thought Megan. And maybe they are right.

The nurses had fed her, clothed her, fretted over her. They had monitored her breathing, and placed a stuffed monkey

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in her incubator, and come running when she cried in the night.

It was true that Megan had lain there while the baby was plucked from inside her, and it was Megan who squeezed a modest amount of milk from her breasts, but it was the nurses in ICU who had usually been the ones to place the bottle to Poppy's lips. It was the nurses in the ICU who had not been overwhelmed by Poppy's birth.

Megan had left hospital after a week, still feeling like she had been sliced in half and sewn together again, and she had visited Poppy on a daily basis. She felt more like a failure than ever. She wasn't back at work, and she wasn't taking care of her daughter. I'm not a doctor and a mother, she thought bitterly. I'm neither. Lawford and the others see my patients, and the nurses in the ICU take care of Poppy.

Now that time was ending. Now the cot in the bedroom of her little flat would be filled with a real live baby. Now she was on her own. They wrapped Poppy up in her oversized winter clothing, and went out into the world.

One of the nurses held the baby while Megan struggled to fit the car seat in the back of Jessica's Alfa Romeo. In the end the nurses did it for her. Poppy was placed in the car seat, and it dwarfed her. Megan shuddered. Was her baby really going to be driven through London traffic?

Jessica drove home as though she had a cargo of high explosives in the back. Megan sweated and fretted, silently cursing belligerent cyclists who jumped lights and all those Jeremy Clarkson groupies in their white vans and BMWs. Poppy slept through the entire journey. Kirk was waiting for them outside the flat.

'What's he doing here?' Megan said. 'Is it going to be like this every day? This guy just turning up unannounced and uninvited?' 'Megan,' Jessica said. 'He is her father.'

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Kirk looked through the car window and got this big foolish grin on his face as he looked at Poppy. 'Don't be too hard on him,' Jessica said. 'He's crazy about Poppy. Give him that.'

When Jessica and Megan were struggling with the straps to the car seat, Kirk stepped in and quickly released the baby.

Megan carried the sleeping baby in her giant throne up to the top floor, and all the noises of her building - Eminem cursing his mother on the ground floor, Sky Sports blasting from the second floor, a man and a woman screaming at each other on the third floor - suddenly appeared in a ghastly new light. Megan thought, how can I bring a baby into this place?

She felt a creeping sense of shame as she carried her daughter up to her new home, Kirk and Jessica following close behind. And, yet again, that crushing feeling of getting everything wrong. She had always felt that she was on top of her life. And now it seemed as if life was finally and permanently on top of her.

Megan laid the still sleeping Poppy in her cot. Jessica kissed her fingers, and placed them on the baby's tiny brow.

'Congratulations, you two,' she whispered, her voice thick with emotion. 'She's perfect. She's your precious little darling.' Then she left them.

They watched Poppy sleeping for a while, and Megan had to smile. The baby had made herself completely at home. Three weeks old and the weight of a small fish, yet she looked as though she owned the place. Megan and Kirk crept from the room.

'I hope you don't mind me coming round unannounced,' he said. 'I called the ICU. The nurses told me Poppy was coming home today.' 'It's fine. But maybe in future, you could give me a call?' 'Of course.' She attempted a fragile smile. 'I mean, it's not as though we're married or anything.' 'No.' He hesitated. 'But you have to understand.' 'What do I have to understand?'

'I want to be a part of this baby's life. I want to support you any way I can. And - I love her. That's all. I love our daughter. She's great, isn't she? She's brilliant! A real little fighter. She's done so well. You've both done so well.'

'It's funny, isn't it? You can love a baby without knowing her. But not an adult. You can't love an adult without knowing them, can you? You can't even like them very much.'

'You're talking about us, aren't you?' He smiled. 'You mean you don't know me.'

He watched her impassive face. How distant they all are, he thought. The women we had sex with in some other time and place. There are none so strange as our old lovers. But there's something Megan doesn't understand, he thought. It's not over between us yet.

'Well, maybe now's the time to start knowing me,' he said. 'Why's that?' 'Because we have a baby, and you're all alone.' She shot him a look.

'I'm not alone, pal. Don't you ever say that again. I don't need the pity of a part-time waiter. I have two sisters, and Poppy and I are not alone. And I know you well enough already - this ageing surfer boy who wants to play at happy families for a while, because he got bored and jaded with everything else.'

'I'm not a surfer. I'm a diver. And - what? You think you're not easy to read?'

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Megan snorted with disbelief. The bloody cheek of the man. 'Let's see you try.' Kirk folded his arms, sizing her up.

'The youngest child, indulged by everyone in the family. Clever at school, breezes through all her exams. Then the little princess gets her heart broken by her first serious boyfriend.'

'Meets some guy at a party,' she said. 'Has a few too many - as these trainee doctors always do. Gets knocked up.'

'Meets some guy at a party. Goes to bed with him. Because he's a good-looking bloke.'

'Don't kid yourself. He's just in the right place at the right time.'

'Whatever. But maybe he's got a bit more life in him than all the nerds she knows from medical school.' 'You don't know them at all.'

'Nine months later - no, it's only eight months, isn't it? - she's a single parent in Hackney. And - guess what? The little princess discovers she's bitten off more than she can chew.' 'Oh, fuck you.' 'Well, fuck you too.'

From the next room there came a strange, high-pitched mewing sound - small, but unbroken and insistent and feline, like a distant buzz saw. Megan and Kirk stared at each other. And then they realised that their baby was crying. 'It softens you, having a baby,' Michael said to Jessica, as they watched Chloe stagger across the floor like a little drunk. 'You realise - you can't die. You have to be here for this little thing you created. But at the same time, nothing puts you in touch with your mortality like having a kid. The future belongs to her, not you. And you know - really know for the first time - that your life only has a limited time to run. So life has you hostage. You can't die, but you know you will.'

Chloe was wearing a nappy and a T-shirt. She had a jam-stained DVD in her fist, which she inserted in a portable player that was sitting on the sofa. A big red bus called Beep came over shining green hills, batting its headlamps - its eyelids - and grinning its huge daffy grin. An old nursery rhyme - 'The Wheels on the Bus' - began to play. Chloe began to rock from side to side.

And Jessica thought, this is the world's great divide - not between rich and poor, or old and young, but between those who had children, and those who did not.

'They dance before they can walk,' Michael said, shaking his head with wonder, watching his daughter dance. 'Before they can crawl even. Isn't that strange? Dancing is a basic human impulse. As fundamental as eating, or sleeping. This will to dance.'

There was a time when Jessica couldn't stand to be around Michael. The knowledge that he had hurt Naoko, and put Chloe's happiness at risk, infuriated her. But in her secret heart Jessica forgave her brother-in-law, even though she knew it wasn't her place to forgive him.

She didn't forgive him because she knew he had always liked her, or because he seemed to be trying so hard to make it up with Naoko, or even because there was a rough charm about him, which he always seemed to turn up to ten when Jessica was around. No, Jessica forgave Michael's sins because he was so clearly in love with his daughter. A man who loved his child as much as Michael clearly loved Chloe couldn't be all bad, could he? Paolo and Naoko came into the room, carrying silver trays

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of tiny espresso cups and those hard little Italian biscuits that both the brothers were addicted to.

'What's that incredible smell?' Paulo grimaced, waving a hand in front of his face. They all looked at Chloe.

She was leaning against the sofa, oblivious to the foul stench emanating from her region, rocking back and forth to The Wheels on the Bus. She lifted her left leg off the ground as her nappy slowly began to fill, and continued her rocking dance.

Michael and Naoko and Jessica and Paulo laughed until their sides hurt.

'This is a highly amusing baby,' Michael said, snatching her up and placing a kiss on Chloe's impassive face. Her eyes never left The Wheels on the Bus. 'A highly amusing baby.'

When they were back in the car, about to go back to their big empty house, Jessica and Paulo sat in silence for a while. He waited for her to find the words. Finally she spoke. 'AH you get is me,' Jessica said. 'That's all I ever wanted,' Paulo said. eighteen He came into the surgery with a shy smile, a big man, with a slow, easy grace to his movements.

He looked different from the other men who came into Megan's surgery, and not merely because, in a neighbourhood where beer bellies and junk food pallor was the norm, he was physically fitter than the rest of them. What made him different was his old-fashioned courtesy, the gentleness of his manner, almost unknown in these streets. The boxer. 'Who are you fighting this time?' Megan said.

'Mexican kid. On his way up. I've seen his films.' Megan knew by now this meant he had watched his opponent on video. 'Good technical boxer more than a scrapper. Unusual in the Mexicans. They usually like to mix it up.' 'Sounds dangerous.' That shy smile. 'We'll see.' 'Is your daughter coming to watch - Charlotte?' 'Charlotte. No, she'll be with me mum.'

The boxer was a single father. His wife, also a patient at the surgery, had walked out on her husband and child. There was another man, and another baby on the way. Charlotte

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was cared for by the boxer and, while he was training, by his mother. Without the grandmothers - the nans - it would have been a neighbourhood of orphans.

The boxer had to see Megan for a full medical before every fight. The last time he had a bout, Megan had found traces of blood in his urine sample, signalling internal damage to the kidneys. She had no choice but to note it on his medical records, and prevent him from fighting. He had been bitterly disappointed, but accepted it silently, as one more hard blow from fate. Most of her patients were quick to rant and rave when they didn't get what they wanted. But not the boxer.

Now she took his blood pressure, tested him for HIV, examined his eyes for signs of damage. Listened for signs of slurring in his voice, or an erratic drum beat in his heart. Then she gave him a little plastic tube. 'No problem,' he said.

Megan felt for him. The only way he knew how to support his daughter was by fighting. But the years were taking their toll, the brutal training without end probably more so than the actual fights, and he was finding it increasingly difficult to pass his medical. What could she do? She had to test him. It was the law.

The boxer returned from the toilet with his urine sample in the little plastic tube. Megan picked it up to write his name and the date on, to prepare it for testing in the lab. And it was stone cold.

She looked at him, and under his coffee-coloured skin, he blushed.

This wasn't his urine sample. If it was, it would have been still warm. And this one felt as though it had been prepared a lot earlier. Megan knew that when the urine was examined, it would contain no traces of blood.

But Megan said nothing, and a few days later she confirmed to the boxer that he had passed his medical. Because Megan was starting to understand what you would do for your child. Anything. 'There's something I never told you,' Jessica said.

There was no reason why she should tell him now. No reason why she should tell him tonight. And no reason why she should tell him at all - except she felt that this thing that had gnawed at her for so long should not be a secret between them. There was no reason to tell him, apart from the fact that he had the right to know.

Paulo rolled over on his side, propped himself up on one elbow. 'What is it?' 'I had an abortion.'

Silence between them in the softly lit bedroom. That hard word, hanging between them. And, slowly and painfully, he started to understand.

'You mean - what? You had an abortion before we met? Before me?'

She nodded. 'It was long before us. When I was still at school. Sixteen.'

He tried to take it in. The fact of the thing, and the savage irony. This woman, the woman he loved, who wanted nothing more than she wanted to be a mother, terminating a pregnancy in another lifetime. No - in the same lifetime she had shared with her husband. 'Why are you telling me now, Jess?'

'Because I want you to understand - this is my punishment for the abortion.' 'Your punishment?'

'The reason I can't have our baby is because I killed that baby.' 'Jess, that's not true. This is not your punishment.'

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'I messed up my insides. I know I did.' Her voice was totally calm. She had thought about this thing for so long. There was no doubt in her mind, only a bleak acceptance. 'Nothing anybody can ever say will convince me otherwise. It's my punishment. And I deserve to be punished. But I am just sorry you have to be punished too.'

'Jessica - you are not being punished. It's just one of those things. What were you? Sixteen? You couldn't have a baby then - you were still a child yourself.'

'Cat took me. My dad never knew. I was meant to be on a school trip. And I just think - we screw around with our bodies. We kill babies. And there's a price to pay.' 'You didn't kill a baby, Jess.'

'And then we act all surprised when our bodies don't work. I don't know what it is with me, Paulo - whether my insides are messed up, or if God is teaching me a lesson.' 'God's not so cruel.'

'But I know all my problems - all our problems - date back to that day. It's a punishment. What else do you call it?' 'So - what? You loved this guy?'

He wanted to comfort her, he really did. But there was also this rage, this jealousy - someone else with the woman he loved. He wasn't a violent man, but he could have cheerfully hurt this man. No, not a man - a bloody boy.

'He was the school stud. Big football star. Every girl was mad about him - I don't know if you could call it love, although that's what it felt like at the time. God, yes. Sorry, sorry.' 'It's okay.'

He was touched. It didn't stop him loving her. Because nothing could stop him loving her. It wasn't that weak, conditional kind of love. 'We only went together the once. My first time. And then when I went back to school, he had told all his friends, and they were all laughing at me. Laughing about what a slag I was, although I'd been a virgin. Even when I was still bleeding, they were looking at me and laughing.'

He took her in his arms. 'I love you, and he was never good enough for you, and this is not your punishment.' As the weeks and months went by after her confession, Paulo felt something change between them. He had feared that the lack of a child would drive them apart. Instead, they felt closer than ever. They stayed close to their home and the people who knew them best. Because once they strayed beyond that orbit, even when they went to visit his parents out where the East End meets Essex, there were too many questions that infuriated them.

'So when are you two love birds going to start a family?' his mother would ask them with a grin, usually after she had told an anecdote about the wonder of her granddaughter Chloe.

'We're a family already, Ma,' Paulo told his mother, told her again and again until she finally got it. 'A family of two.' In the cot at the end of the bed, Poppy slept.

She looked tiny in there, as though she would never grow enough to fill it - her bald head sticking out of her Grobag and resting on one side, showing off her bulging baby forehead, her arms lifted level with her ears, like a little weightlifter flexing her muscles, her hands the size of matchboxes curled into miniature fists. No sheets on this modern baby's bed - the Grobag was like a sleeping bag with gaps for Poppy's head and arms, completely safe, and yet Megan couldn't escape the sheer terror of believing that her daughter could die at any moment. So she sat in the kitchen drinking camomile tea, sleepless

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for the third night in a row, as out in the early-hour streets of Hackney the residents laughed and bellowed and fought. And as the hopeless tears rolled down her face, Megan thought, postnatal depression. What man came up with that one?

She was exhausted, scared witless and feeling like a total failure. How was she meant to feel? Who wouldn't be depressed?