The Family way

Another blow to her self-esteem was the breast-feeding fiasco. Poppy had been too small to breast-feed at first, her tiny, bud-like mouth not strong enough to make that sucking motion, but the jolly fat health visitor had told Megan - she had told Megan, this health visitor lording it over a future doctor - that 'baby' (the horrible familiarity of the bloody woman, thought Megan, the infuriating unearned intimacy) was ready to feed directly from 'mother' (oh fuck off, you old cow!).

But Megan - who shamefully remembered all the pious speeches she had made about the glories of breast-feeding to the mothers from the Sunny View Estate who flocked to her surgery ('Full of nourishment and antibodies and completely free, ha ha ha!') - just couldn't get the hang of it. It was supposed to be the most natural thing in the world to a nursing mother, but Megan felt like she had been commanded to sprout wings and fly.

She knew the theory, of course. Knew it inside out, from tit to tonsils. You were meant to get the whole shebang -areola as well as nipple - into the back of the baby's mouth. But whenever Megan attempted it, Poppy acted as though her mother was trying to choke her. Then she screamed blue bloody murder. Megan begged, pleaded and swung her rock-hard breast back into place, catching Poppy in the side of the face and knocking off her little woolly hat. Mother and baby sobbed in perfect harmony. The baby acted as though she would have called the NSPCC, if only she had been big enough to crawl to the phone, and Megan reached for the bottle, fearing that her daughter would starve to death if she didn't.

It was a different kind of life from the one she had known before. There was no sleep now. When she was a child, Megan remembered how her father had gently admonished his daughters when they were weepy and fretful. Overtired, he had called it. That's what I am, Megan thought. Overtired. Too knackered to sleep, and never knowing when the next noisy demand for bottle, cuddle or clean nappy would come.

She had gone back to work two months after the birth. As a doctor, she would have insisted on at least a three-month break before a new mother went back into the working world. But as a new mother herself, she found that all the rules were changed. Beyond the demands of what remained of her year as a GP registrar, Megan discovered she needed work, she needed to remind herself who she had been before her daughter was born.

Her sisters had been great. Cat took Poppy when she was in morning surgery, because Mamma-san didn't open until lunch time, and Jessica was there in the afternoons. Kirk came round with nappies and various pieces of baby equipment - covers for electrical sockets, dummies galore - but sooner or later they all went back to their lives, leaving her alone with her baby and the night, and the overwhelming feelings of disappointment in herself. This mother business - she just wasn't any good at it. It couldn't go on like this for ever, could it? Her sisters standing in for her, the tears when the baby wouldn't stop crying, the crappy little flat and the records played too loud downstairs. Megan was going to have to find a more permanent way of living.

She loved her daughter - there was no question about that. But she couldn't do this thing, it was not in her nature,

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she was more like her own mother Olivia than she had realised, and the baby deserved someone better. Megan felt like she was giving her all, and her all was pathetically inadequate.

She knew that plenty of women went through pregnancy and motherhood without help. She saw them every day in her surgery. Maternity for one was becoming the industry standard. So why was it so hard for her? Or maybe they all felt this way, all the poor cows going solo. So now she knew what life felt like on the Sunny View Estate.

The end of her GP registrar year was approaching. She had to sit a three-hour exam, which was widely considered to be the easiest part of the summative assessment. 'But what if I fail?' Megan asked Lawford.

'Nobody fails,' he said. 'Only the people who have really screwed up their lives.' 'How do you feel?' Cat said.

Rory arched his back and closed his eyes, his face the same colour as yesterday's bandages. He groaned softly. The painkillers were not working, or there were not enough of them for a man who had just had invasive surgery on his testicles.

He felt like throwing up, but his stomach was empty. Something was ominously wet down there. He could feel the blood seeping through the dressing on his poor, swollen balls. My God, he thought. Those poor bastards have had a few adventures.

'How do I feel?' he reflected. 'Like somebody just sliced open my bollocks and then stapled them back together. As you're asking.'

'But it's worth it, isn't it?' Cat said, taking his hand. 'It's all worth it?' He nodded. 'Yes, all worth it.' She placed a soft kiss on his parched lips.

Despite feeling like a freshly neutered torn - ironic really, as the aim of the operation was to make him once more a torn with fully working reproductive torn apparatus - he ran his hand up her leg. On and on it went. The length of those glorious pins never ceased to amaze him, and he loved to wander from knee to thigh. Measuring me, she always called it, laughing. 'What happens now?' she said.

He groaned, shifted his weight. 'When I'm healed up, I come in and, you know, ejaculate into a pot of some kind.'

'Talk to my brother-in-law Paulo. I know he's done that lots of times.'

'Cat, if there's one thing a man doesn't need lessons in, it's - oooh!' He gasped and flinched with the eye-watering pain. 'Masturbation.' 'Then they count your sperm?'

'Count 'em. Tickle 'em. See if they can jump through hoops. See if they are there.' 'They'll be there. I know it.'

He smiled at her beautiful, expectant face. And, yes, it was all worth it to have her back in his life. But she acted as though this part, the sperm-meets-egg part, was the difficult bit.

The really difficult bit, in Rory's experience, was keeping a relationship together over the long years that it took to raise a child. Staying together when you were a father and mother was the truly difficult bit, and, in some secret chamber of his heart, he really wasn't sure if he could do it all again.

The thought of becoming a parent once more both excited and appalled him. Because he knew what it took, and it took so much. But he couldn't deny her. If she was going to have a baby with any man, then, please God, he wanted it to be with him.

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Later his son sat on the edge of his bed, eating his grapes and wearing a frown. 'So, like, Cat wants children, does she?' Jake said.

Rory moaned, tugged at his bandages to relieve the fire down below. 'In the end,' he said, 'they all want children.' It seemed to Kirk that the female attitude to the blow job had changed over the years.

When he was a boy, a blow job had been the ultimate prize - bestowed only when a girl (and back then, they were girls not women) decided that you were the one she was going to spend her life with - or at least the next few months of it. When you got a blow job back then, you felt like it was your lucky day. It wasn't like that any more.

Now a blow job felt like you were being fobbed off with some kind of consolation prize. Blow jobs were handed out willy nilly, while real sex, penetrative sex, vaginal sex, old-fashioned sex, was withheld, the dangled carrot, the Holy Grail.

It wasn't as though women enjoyed giving a man a blow job. Unlike the other kind of sex, the penetrative kind, you never heard any of them complaining that a blow job was over a bit too quickly. 'Oh, that blow job was over a bit fast.' You never heard them say that, did you?

When he was a boy, a blow job felt like a gift. Now that he was a man, it felt more like an act of charity. What had changed? The rise of the blow job couldn't be attributed to a fear of pregnancy, because the teenage girls he had known in suburban Sydney had a sheer terror of becoming pregnant that was not shared by the capable, independent women he knew now, with their coils, caps and morning after pills. Perhaps the blow job had become a bargaining chip, a way of ensuring that you found it hard to walk away, and a way of giving the woman the power. If a woman would do that for you, then why would a man ever leave her? What could be better than that?

He touched the hair of the woman kneeling before him. She was from Perth, in London for two years after a period of wandering, getting ready to go back to Australia and her real life.

She had been in Mamma-san on a large drunken table, some kind of birthday bash, and their accents had been like a green light to conversation, a trip to an after-hours bar he knew, and then finally back to his place.

Now the telephone rang and she lifted her gaze to him, making them wide, holding eye contact. A lot of them did that during a blow job. Eye contact was often the trigger that - oh, sweet Jesus. Kirk struggled to breathe. It seemed to work. But the telephone kept ringing, and he realised that nobody should be calling him at this hour.

The answer machine clicked on and he heard Megan's voice. She was upset, he realised with alarm. Something bad had happened.

'I'm sorry to disturb you… I need your help… if you could come over… it's Poppy… if you get this message -' He snatched up the phone.

'Megan? What? Okay. Okay. I'll be there, okay? Soon as I can.'

He slammed down the phone, tearing himself free from the girl kneeling before him. She was still staring up at him, but now there was cold fury in her narrowing eyes.

'You're making a date with some bitch when you've got your cock in my mouth?' 'Sorry,' he said. 'I've got to go. It's my daughter.'

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Megan answered the door in her dressing gown. She looked dead on her feet. From the flat's only bedroom, Kirk could hear the sound of Poppy howling with rage.

'I didn't know who else to ask. I couldn't ask my sisters. They do so much already. And it's so late. What time is it?' 'I don't know.'

There was something about Poppy's crying that chilled his bones. 'What's wrong with her?'

'She doesn't stop,' Megan said. 'She's been fed, winded, changed, cuddled.' 'Is she sick?'

'No fever. No temperature. She's strong as a baby bull.' Megan wearily shook her head. 'And she doesn't stop crying. I'm a doctor, right? I should know why.'

'Well, you're a woman too. That's what I always sort of liked about you.'

Kirk went into the bedroom. It was impossible to believe that something as tiny as Poppy could make so much noise, or express that much anger. Her little face was screwed up with fury, almost purple with apoplexy, and sopping wet with tears. He picked her up and felt the warmth of her through the Grobag, smelled the mint-fresh newness of her skin.

He laughed and his eyes filled with tears. He loved her so much. He had never known he was capable of such pure, unconditional love. His daughter. His baby daughter. She screamed in his ear.

Megan was in the doorway. 'Do you want a cup of tea or something?'

'A cup of tea would be great. Do you know what I think is wrong?' 'What?'

'I think she's a baby. That's all. That's the only problem.' He patted Poppy's back. Her scent was of milk and her bath time. 'And I think you're trying to do too much by yourself.' Megan pulled her dressing gown tighter. 'I'll get that tea.'

Kirk held his baby daughter out in front of him, looking at her through a film of tears, a wide, grateful grin on his face. Poppy was becoming undeniably beautiful, losing that scrawny, foetus-faced look she had had at birth, and beginning to look more like a regular baby, all curves and circles and chubby flesh.

But even when she wasn't beautiful, he thought, she was still beautiful. He pulled her close. His beautiful baby girl.

She was as warm as a hot-water bottle, as new as tomorrow. He had to be careful not to squeeze her too tight, she was still so very small. But it was difficult not to wrap his arms around her, and believe he would keep them there for ever, because she made him feel such a fierce, protective love.

Perhaps he did hug her too hard. Because just as Megan came into the room with two cups of tea, Poppy farted like a flatulent navvy on Friday night - a great, big burst of wind that was muffled by her nappy. Then she immediately fell asleep.

Kirk and Megan looked at each other and laughed. Then Megan put a finger to his lips. 'For God's sake, don't wake her up!'

Kirk gently kissed the baby on her cheek. How could anything be that new, that perfect? He placed her back in the centre of her cot. 'Thanks,' Megan whispered. 'She's getting bigger.'

'I reckon another month and she will be out of these preterm clothes. She can start wearing clothes for a newborn baby. All the stuff that Cat bought her.' 'That will be great.' 'It will be the best thing in the world.'

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They went into the kitchen and drank their tea, leaving the bedroom door slightly ajar. But the baby was sleeping soundly. Then the tea was gone, and they just sat there, listening to the night. But it was so late now that even the streets of Hackney were finally silent. 'Well,' Kirk said, getting up to go.

Megan stood up with him, gathering her dressing gown around her neck. She placed her finger on his lips again. 'She's got your mouth.' 'Really?'

'Yes. It's really wide. That's why she's capable of making such a racket.' Kirk placed the tips of his fingers on Megan's chin. 'But she's got your chin. That strong chin. And your eyes.'

He touched her face by the side of her eyes, felt the hard curve of her cheekbone. 'I'm a mess,' Megan said.

She pulled away from him. Not that. She didn't want that from him. She wanted to show him that she appreciated him coming over in the middle of the night, and she wanted to show that there was a bond between them - that there would always be a bond between them. But not that. She didn't want that. 'You're not a mess. You're beautiful.' 'Don't say that. Please. Don't say things that are not true.'

She was self-conscious about her body. It was like being a teenager all over again. Except now, instead of braces on her teeth and a few spots, she had a scar that would never fade dividing her in half, and sore, useless nipples throbbing on painfully hard breasts, those breasts strange and unfamiliar and heavy, and a stomach that still bulged as if there was a baby in there.

'You're beautiful, Megan. You'll always be beautiful to me.' 'No, really. I'm a mess. Look.'

She pulled open her dressing gown, eased her pyjama bottoms down a few inches and cautiously lifted her T-shirt. The scar from the birth was still livid. He took a step towards her and she watched him trace the wound with his finger, not quite touching her.

'That's where our daughter came from,' he said. 'It's not ugly.'

Megan hung her head. She wanted him to stay. But she didn't want that from him. 'I'm so tired,' she said.

'Then let's sleep now.' He carefully pulled down her T-shirt. 'All three of us.'

So she let her dressing gown slip to the floor, and he undressed in the darkness of the bedroom, listening to the steady breathing of their baby daughter. He climbed into the bed. She had her back turned to him but didn't object when he snuggled against her, making spoons. 'I'm so tired.' 'Then sleep now.'

'Maybe in the morning.' i 'I'm not going anywhere.'

He put his arms around her, and as they huddled together she felt the warmth of human contact and the glorious blanket of sleep finally closing over her tired bones, and Megan surrendered.

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nineteen When Cat was twelve, and Jessie was eight, and baby Megan was a big girl of four, it was decided that the girls would live with their mother.

The decision was not taken by Olivia, or Jack, but by Cat herself, independently and without consultation.

In the year since their mother had left, things had become bad at home. There seemed to be less money than there was before, because their father was away working all the time - although years later Cat saw how people sometimes hid from their home lives in their work lives, so perhaps the problem wasn't money after all.

The new au pair, a great blonde lump from Hamburg, couldn't handle them, didn't know where to start. And suddenly they needed a lot of handling.

There was a fury inside Cat that she couldn't explain, Megan had started wetting the bed again, and Jessie kept bursting into tears, wailing that she wanted things to be how they were before. So did Cat.

Food from tins, that's what Cat remembered about that time. Food from tins and the fury inside. In her twelve-year-old heart, Cat knew that things could

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never be the way they were before. Not after the man in the taxi came for their mother. This was the best she could do. Take them to live with their mother.

It was surprisingly easy. Cat had already mastered a good impersonation of the haughty indifference their mother had employed whenever speaking to the help, and she informed the dumbfounded au pair that it was all arranged, they were off to St John's Wood for the foreseeable future. 'Aber your farter, Cat-kin…' 'My father is quite aware of our plans, I assure you.'

The girls excitedly packed their bags while the big blonde lump tried, unsuccessfully, to reach Jack Jewell. They took only the essentials - pyjamas, toothbrush, a talking frog for Megan, a flock of Barbies and Kens for Jessie, and a Blondie picture disc for Cat. Then they walked to the tube station, holding hands, Cat and Jessie taking turns to carry Megan when she refused to walk any further.

When they were on the tube, Jessica presented her big sister with her secret gift - a fistful of Monopoly money. Cat accepted it with thanks, and didn't tell Jessie that she was a silly little kid. She was going to take good care of her sisters from now on.

St John's Wood was another world, completely unlike their leafy suburb. There were black people here, lots of them - it wasn't until years later that Cat realised they must have been there for the cricket at Lord's - and everyone seemed to be a millionaire. Megan stumbled over some litter on St John's Wood High Street, and it turned out to be a half-smoked cigar, the size of a Wall's sausage.

A fabulously wealthy black neighbourhood. That's what St John's Wood looked like to Cat. She knew that they could be happy here.

That illusion was shattered as soon as their mother opened her front door. 'That's not who I am,' Olivia kept telling Cat - as if she hadn't heard the first time - as she tried to reach her ex-husband on the phone, while Jessie and Megan bumped around the pristine apartment, getting in the way of the Filipina housekeeper - who smiled at them with some sympathy, it seemed to Cat - and touching all the things that were not meant to be touched by the sticky fingers of little girls - 'Megan, not my photograph with Roger Moore' - and Cat, increasingly desperate, tried to explain why it was a good idea if they came to live here, following her mother around the flat as Monopoly money fell from the pockets of her jeans.

'But I thought you would be pleased to see us. I thought it would be nice if we were together again. I thought -'

'You thought, you thought, you thought. You think too much, young lady.'

'Don't you want to live with your children? Most mothers -'

But Olivia had turned her back on her eldest daughter. She had reached Jack, and now she spoke softly but angrily, urgently, as if convinced that he had planned this invasion just to wreak havoc in her love nest.

When she hung up the phone, Olivia turned to face Cat, and the child looked at the woman and saw that there was no softness in her, no shame, no love.

Years later, Cat had no trouble in turning back the clock to when she was that twelve-year-old girl standing in her mother's rented apartment, her younger sisters now silent on the sofa, the photographs of their mother with various celebrities unmolested, the housekeeper's vacuum cleaner buzzing distantly in some other room, and being told - as her mother furiously snatched up the Monopoly money from the carpet - that all her childish hopes were ridiculous. 'Do you get it yet, Cat?' her mother told her. 'The woman

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you want me to be - the mother you want me to be. That's not who I am.'

And as she waited for the day in her diary when she would find out if there was a baby growing inside her or not, and all the momentous what-if doubts began to stir - was it ten years too late? was the risk of miscarriage and disability too great? would Rory be happy if she was pregnant, or would he feel trapped? - there was one thing she knew with total certainty.

If she was pregnant, she would never be the kind of mother that her own mother had been. She had to be better than that.

She might not be the best mother in the world - the other date, the potential birthday on next year's calendar both excited and terrified her, she had been childfree for so long - and she might not even be a particularly good mother. She had seen with her youngest sister that the sleepless, milk-stained reality had no resemblance to the expectation.

But she knew she could never walk away from the life she was creating. She could never be so cruel, or selfish, or cold. That's not who I am, Cat thought. Here was the problem, as Rory saw it.

Once upon a time a woman had a baby with the first man she met. But these days she was far more likely to have a baby with the last man she met.

You could see how having a baby with the first man she met could cause all sorts of problems, and they were mostly the problems of what she would be missing.

An education. A career. Recreational sex. Lots of that, with a wide and varied selection of men. And all those priceless moments when you know that you are young and free and at loose in the world. Watching the sun come up over a beach in Thailand, driving through Paris in an open-top sports car, waking up to the sound of the Caribbean outside your open window… and even if Rory's hypothetical woman never did any of these things, then at least the possibility was always there.

But you can't fit a baby seat into an open-top sports car. It just doesn't go.

He knew how it changed your world. His mother had constantly reminded him when Jake was born - your life is not your own now.

She was trying to be encouraging. But she made it sound like a life sentence.

So he had no difficulty understanding why the women of the modern world needed a baby with the first man they met like they needed a hole in the head. But had it all gone too far in the other direction? What about the problems of having a baby with the last man she met?

The later maters - that's what they called them, later maters, the women who had body-swerved around their childhood sweethearts, and unplanned pregnancy, and their college squeeze, and a ragbag of romances formed on holidays or in offices, clubs and bars. The women who experienced fifteen years or so of being unfettered by maternity, and left a tiny window for babies, a fleeting ten years of fertility.

They had had the education, the career and the recreational sex. And now they were ready to squeeze out a baby while the biological option was still there.

But here was the problem - a lot of the good ones, and maybe even the best ones, were already gone. Surely there was a random element to the last man, just as there was to the first. Rory worried about the later maters. He worried that they were not nearly as smart as they thought. The later maters were like last-minute shoppers on Christmas Eve. There simply wasn't a lot left to choose from.

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And what about Rory himself? Was he the love of Cat's life, or just some guy who happened to be there? The thought depressed him. This was no way to bring a new life into the world. And yet he didn't know how to refuse her, or even to say that he had his doubts.

You couldn't tell the woman you loved that you weren't sure you wanted a child with her. It wasn't natural. 'Nobody will fuck your brains out like a bored housewife,' Michael told Paulo. 'Think about it. The kids are grown or growing. The old man's falling asleep in front of Match of the Day. And she suddenly thinks, what exactly am I saving it for? I go to the gym - this is her thinking, right? - I do my Atkins diet. I'm still a relatively young woman. I have my needs.' 'And then there's you,' Paulo said.

'And then there's me,' Michael said, his voice heavy with resignation. In the end, he had not been able to keep his hands off Ginger. In the end, he had brought her back for more than answering phones and posting VAT forms. Michael could resist everything except the hired help.

My brother the junkie, Paulo thought sadly. Michael thought he was in control, but Paulo knew that was no longer the case. The addiction was taking over. And Paulo saw at last that it wasn't the pursuit of fun that made Michael do the things he did. It was the pursuit of something new, the pursuit of someone who wasn't his wife. Fun had nothing to do with it.

Paulo knew that Michael and Ginger were slipping off for early evenings in the local Hilton - a time when their absence from their homes was easily explained by bad traffic, work running late - or perhaps not even explained at all. Paulo felt depressed when he thought of them coupling in that sterile businessman's room, with its little sachets of tea and coffee, the ignored trouser press parked ludicrously in the corner, the Do Not Disturb sign warding off the maid. Paulo could feel the guilt and regret in his brother but it was buried under layers of all of the old cockiness. Michael thought he was going to get away with it.

'The good thing about married women is that eventually they have to be somewhere,' Michael said. 'It's not like single birds, who want you to hang around and talk about your feelings and go out for dinner. The married woman has to be off pretty sharpish.'

Paulo was tired of hearing about his brother's sex life. There had been a time when he thrilled to hear of Michael's adventures, which he had always dressed up as a kind of personal philosophy, a way of looking at the universe.

Yet that was when they were boys, that was before the promises they had made at their weddings, and now he was sick of it. Let Michael screw up his life if he wanted to. Paulo just wanted to sell cars. He wanted hot shots from the City to come in with their big fat six-figure bonus and talk to him about the Ferrari Pininfarina of their dreams. But business was slow, and most days the showroom echoed with the voices of the two brothers, and nobody looked at the cars for sale.

'There's this motor show in Hong Kong,' Paulo said. 'Baresi Brothers has been invited by their board of trade. Two club class tickets. Hotel.'

Paulo handed his brother a glossy brochure. The cover showed the soaring Hong Kong skyline rising behind next year's Fl Ferrari. A pretty Asian girl in a short skirt was beaming on the bonnet.

T saw that,' Michael said. 'Yeah. It's going to be pretty big.'

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'I thought I would take Jessica. If you can manage without me. It would do her good to get away for a week or so. I'd call it my holiday for this year.'

'Go ahead. There's not much happening here. We'll be fine.'

Paulo nodded. It was settled. He went to turn away, then suddenly stopped. He would have one last try to stop this madness. Before it was too late.

'I watch you with your daughter, Mike. I know you love her. I know you want to be a real family man.' 'I don't want to be a family man. I am a family man.'

'But if you lose Naoko, you'll lose everything. You know that, don't you? Your marriage. Your daughter. Your family. You don't want that, do you?'

Michael was watching Ginger in her little glass box. You would never guess she could fuck someone's brains out in a Hilton. And all before tea time. Paulo saw his brother wince, as if these proceedings gave him physical pain. 'I can't help it, Paulo.' 'Of course you can!' Michael shook his head.

'You think it's going to end when you fall in love. Or when you get married. Or when you become a father. But it never ends - that hunger.' Michael looked at his brother with a sad kind of love. 'You think it's babies that make the world go round. You think that's what it is all about. It's not, Paulo. It's desire. It's fucking. It's always fucking somebody new. That's what is at the heart of it all - the whole great game. Wanting it. Desire. Call it what you like. The babies are just a by-product.' 'Not for me. Not for my wife.' Michael shook his head.

'You think women are any different? They are the same as us. That's the big secret. Women are the same as us. They take their pleasures where they can. And nobody will fuck your brains out like a bored housewife and mother.' Michael paused in thought, and stared out across the empty showroom. 'Unless you're married to her, of course.' Poppy smiled up at Jessica.

It was a winning smile, gummy and wide, a little shaky at the edges, but definitely aimed at her aunt. For an encore she kicked her legs, as if attempting a backstroke in her cot.

'She recognises me, doesn't she?' Jessica said. 'She's starting to recognise me!'

'Look at the little cow,' Megan said, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. 'All sweetness and light now you're here.'

'Oh, she's not a little cow!' Jessica reached into the cot and lifted Poppy into her arms. The baby gurgled with delight. 'She's a little angel!'

'The little angel's been up screaming half the night. It was so bad the guy downstairs turned up his 50 Cent CD. But there's not a gangster rapper alive who can compete with Poppy.'

The baby regarded her mother with an impassive stare. Kirk came into the room towelling his wet hair. 'We've got to get out of this place,' Megan told him. 'Tell me about it.'

'Is there anything wrong with her?' Jessica said, holding Poppy up for inspection, stroking her wispy hair. 'Colic,' Megan said. 'Colic? That's what horses get.'

Megan nodded. 'Horses and babies. She screams like it's the end of the world. Then she sleeps - but by now you're wide awake. And just as you're finally going off to sleep, she starts screaming blue murder again.'

Jessica said nothing, holding her tongue. She rocked Poppy in her arms, the baby making appreciative noises. And then she said, 'You're so lucky to have her, Megan.'

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'I know that, Jess,' Megan said with a tight smile. She wanted to acknowledge the love she felt for her baby girl. But that wasn't the whole story, and she needed her sister to know that it wasn't all happy endings when you had a baby. 'I do know I'm lucky. But I never thought I could be this tired.'

Megan went into the kitchen and came back with two dummies designed to look like the mouths of animals. One featured a smiling bear, the other a tiger licking his lips. 'If she goes absolutely crazy, stick one of these in her gob.'

'Dummies?' Jessica said, as if Megan had produced a couple of spliffs. 'I thought you were against dummies? I thought babies became addicted to dummies, and that they weren't good for their teeth, and all of that.'

Megan laughed. 'I was anti-bottle feeding. I was anti-dummy. I was anti-running to the baby every time she cries. Then I had Poppy and you know what changed? Everything. The good intentions, the baby books, the firmly held beliefs about breast-feeding all went straight out of the window. It's all bullshit, Jess. The lot of it. You just have to get through it. You just have to survive.'

Megan placed a hand on her daughter's bulging baby forehead. Poppy snuggled in Jessica's arms, coolly averting her face from her mother.

'Real baby,' Megan said, withdrawing her hand. 'Real world.' The best thing about teaching people to dive was that moment when a beginner surfaced for the very first time.

A small percentage of first-timers were panicked - tearing off their mask, sucking in air as though they had just been exhumed from some claustrophobic watery grave - but most of them were ecstatic. Raving with joy about the teeming marine life, the psychedelic coral, the sensation of flying that scuba diving so closely resembled. It was another world down there - a better world, a freer world - and most people loved it at first sight. But you didn't see that feeling in his new job. Seven mornings a week Kirk taught beginners to dive at a swimming pool in the back of a private house in Battersea. And in Battersea everything was different.

No fish, no coral, no sense of all that limitless space containing the shipwrecks of the centuries and mountains taller than Everest and waterfalls bigger than Niagara.

Just a little blue box full of heavily chlorinated water where young women and men - and they were almost entirely in their twenties and thirties, doing the prep for two weeks of summer fun in the Indian Ocean or the Caribbean or the Red Sea - struggled with neutral buoyancy, mask clearing and all the other basics.

In the back room of a dive shop on the Edgware Road, he steered his students through the theory necessary to get their PADI dive card, and it was like trying to explain magic.

There wasn't much money involved. There never was with diving. You did it out of love. But love wouldn't pay the rent so in the afternoons Kirk got on a racing bike that didn't belong to him and delivered sandwiches and coffee to addresses in the City until it was time to go home and take over from Jessica.

Megan knew all about his job teaching in the pool of a house in Battersea. But he didn't tell her about his second job delivering snacks to stockbrokers and bankers and insurance salesmen. He didn't tell her, because he wanted her to be proud of him. The way he was proud of her.

Megan was what he wanted. Poppy was what he wanted - she was a beautiful child and he knew that the endless crying would eventually stop, and things would get better.

But this life in London - the grey streets, the unsmiling faces, the longing to escape even among the people who

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wouldn't dream of living anywhere else - this was not how he imagined his life would be.

Sex, sleep, sunshine, real diving - all these things, his very favourite things, had somehow been consigned to his past. And he wondered. He really wondered.

How much can you give up for the person you love, and still keep loving them? Jessica pushed Poppy through the filthy, crowded streets, thinking that most of the mothers around here looked completely worn out.

Old before their time. Stains on clothes that Oxfam would reject. Greasy, untended hair. Knackered beyond belief. They reminded her of someone. With a jolt, she realised that they reminded her of Megan.

But her sister didn't have their anger. These women were angry with the world, with their children - the language they used when the little ones tarried by the sweet counter! More like sailors on shore leave than young mothers out shopping with their children! - and with Jessica herself when she clumsily steered Poppy's trendy three-wheel baby carriage through the mobs of young Hackney mothers and their bawling, whining, underdressed, filthy-faced brood.

'Oy, darling, watch them bleeding wheels,' one of them said, not bothering to take the cigarette from between her lips. 'You nearly run over me fucking foot, innit?' 'Sorry,' Jessica said, smiling politely.

With her trim figure, immaculate clothes, careful makeup and quiet decency, Jessica looked nothing like the effing and blinding brood mares of the Sunny View Estate. And yet she knew they took her to be one of their number, and it made Jessica's heart thrill with joy.

A young mother, on her way to the park, a bit of fresh air for the baby, out in the world with her own flesh and blood. twenty In the late morning the playground was taken over by the young mothers of the Sunny View Estate. With their toddlers waddling with solemn purpose between them, and their babies dozing in the prams, the women lounged on the roundabout and swings, and leaned against the climbing frame, talking and smoking.

They had a proprietorial attitude to the playground, because only a few years ago they had been among the teenagers who gathered here in the late afternoon, idly lounging on the swings, or gently twirling on the roundabout, talking and smoking.

Jessica and Poppy remained a little apart from them, concentrating on feeding the fierce East End ducks who lived in the park. Jessica tossed them stale bread, and Poppy's bright blue eyes were wide with awe as the ducks squawked and fought around them. 'She's a little cracker, your one.'

It was one of the young mothers. Barely out of her teens, with a pretty face, and two crop-haired boys milling at her feet. Jessica realised with a start that the woman - a girl was more like it - was talking to her about Poppy.

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'A real little cracker,' the woman repeated. She took a long suck on a Marlboro. 'She's - what? - 'bout free months?' 'Five.' Jessica shooed away the ducks, and clutched Poppy closer. 'She was a bit early.'

'Premature? They catch up.' She indicated one of the shaven-headed bruisers in her care. 'Thirty-five weeks, that one. He looked more like a bleeding Kentucky Fried Chicken than a baby. You'd never guess it now.'

The young mothers began making delighted, cooing noises at Poppy, and Jessica found herself drawn deeper into the group. Looking at the women, you would not expect they were capable of such gentleness. These were, after all, the same women Jessica had seen screaming abuse in the local supermarket. Perhaps, Jessica thought, the children allowed them to show a tenderness that was absent from the rest of their lives. She perched on a vacant swing while the women fussed over Poppy, as if every new baby was a miracle they couldn't begin to explain. And it was funny - they wanted to know the baby's name, but nobody asked for Jessica's name. Jessica found she didn't mind at all. 'Don't look like she's just had a baby, does she?' one of the Sunny View mums commented.

There was a murmur of assent. Jessica laughed modestly, bouncing Poppy on her knee. The baby smiled, fighting to keep its head steady.

'You're a little sweetheart, ain't you?' said another young mum, stroking Poppy's rosy cheek with a nicotine-stained finger. 'Do you look like your mum or your dad?'

'Her dad's Italian,' Jessica said, her head thrilling with the lie, and more than half believing it herself. 'He's crazy about her. He calls us his two girls.'

'It's nice when they stick around,' said one of the Sunny View mums. 'Jessie?'

Then suddenly Cat was there, in the middle of all the smoking women and their crop-haired toddlers and fat-faced babies, and you could almost see their faces hardening in the presence of this well-dressed, well-spoken, conspicuously» luldfree stranger. 'What are you doing here?' Jessica said, bewildered. Cat wagged a bag of pastries. 'Same as you. Feeding the ducks.'

Jessica gathered up Poppy's things - mittens the size of matchboxes, a woolly hat with animal ears, her bottle - and carried the baby while Cat pushed the empty pram.

"Bye, Poppy,' said the woman who had first spoken to Jessica. 'Be a good girl for your mum.' Cat looked at Jessica. And Jessica pulled Poppy closer. On the far side of the lake they sat on a scarred park bench, the bread and the ducks all gone, Poppy sleeping in Jessica's arms. The distant laughter of the Sunny View mothers drifted to them across the water.

'You know that I've been on this rVF cycle,' Cat said. 'The doctor recommended it because of my age. My age! Rory's almost fifteen years older than me.' Jessica studied Poppy's sleeping face. She said nothing.

'Anyway,' Cat said. 'It's been like - I don't know - a marathon with hurdles. All these hurdles, Jess. The injections, the scans.' She shook her head. 'Your mood changing with the weather. All that time, all these hurdles, never knowing if it's going to work.' 'I know what it's like, Cat. I did it myself.' 'Of course you did. I know you did.'

Jessica stared out across the lake, as if lost in her own dreams, not really listening. Cat was talking more quickly

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now. Getting it out. Wanting her to know. Wanting to get it over with. 'They put two fertilised embryos inside me.' 'Rory's working again, then?' 'Yes, Rory's working again.' 'Good, I've always liked Rory.'

'Then I had to wait, I had to wait two weeks, the longest two weeks of my life.' 'And now you're pregnant.'

Jessica's voice calm and flat, with just a hint of irony. It wasn't a question.

Cat looked at her sister, and she wanted to hold her, to ask her - do you know how much you are loved?

It seemed to Cat that Megan had breezed through life, taking everything in her stride - parental divorce, school, boys and men. Even her youngest sister's postnatal depression, or exhaustion, or whatever it was, had seemed to disappear when Kirk moved in.

But Jessica, thought Cat - right from the start it had all been so hard for Jessica. Cat felt a flush of shame, because she was here to hurt her sister some more. 'And now I'm pregnant, Jess.' Jessica laughed, and it frightened Cat.

'Do you know how I know? Because you wouldn't come all the way to the East End if it hadn't worked.'

Cat exhaled as if she had been holding her breath for minutes. Perhaps it wasn't going to be so bad after all.

'I wanted you to be the first to know, Jess,' grabbing her sister's arm, suddenly feeling free to touch her. 'Even Rory doesn't know yet.'

Jessica frowned at Poppy, nodding. Then she looked up at her sister, waiting for her to continue. But Cat thought, what else is there to say? 'I never thought it would work,' she said, aware she was kibbling. 'AH those hurdles. Rory having to go through an operation just so he could have one off the wrist. It all seemed so fragile, right from the start. What are the odds of success? Less than thirty per cent.' She shrugged helplessly. 'It's a miracle. I never thought it would work for me.'

'That's funny,' Jessica said, not laughing now. 'Because when I had IVF, it never occurred to me that it wouldn't work.' 'Oh, Jessie. I don't want you to feel bad about this baby.' Jessica took her sister's hands.

'Congratulations, Cat. And thanks for thinking of me.' She smiled, rolling her eyes. 'Don't worry, I'm not going to freak out. I'm not going to run amok. I'm not jealous. I'm not sad. Well, maybe a bit. That's only natural. But I'm happy for you. You'll be a good mother.'

'I'm not sure if this is what Rory wants,' Cat said. She wanted her sister to know - it's not perfect. Don't think it's perfect. She was worried about money, about where they would live. But most of all she was worried about the baby's father. It's not perfect.

'Rory will be a good dad,' Jessica said thoughtfully, her index finger tracing the contours of Poppy's mouth. 'He's like Paulo. Loves kids.'

Cat was grateful to be the one who needed reassurance, encouraged to spill her heart.

'But I think he's doing it for me. I don't know, Jess. It could all be a terrible mess.'

'When the baby comes, he'll fall in love with it. They all do.' Jessica stared across the water at the playground. The Sunny View mums had gone. Jessica shook her head. 'I wish you well, Cat. And the baby. Of course I do. But don't talk to me about miracles. IVF isn't a miracle - it's big business.' Now her voice was bitter, and her eyes were brimming with the injustice of it all. 'What are they charging these days?

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Three grand a go? And you, Cat - you're just a consumer. You suddenly want a baby just like you've wanted a car or holiday in the past. And you get what you want, don't you, Cat? So spare me the talk about miracles, will you?'

Cat slowly stood up, wanting to be away from this place. She had been wrong to come, wrong to try to be the caring big sister. They were grown women with tangled lives. You couldn't just kiss it better any more.

'Jessie, what can I say? IVF gives hope to people with none. That's good enough for me. What? Babies that are conceived naturally don't have problems? Women who conceive naturally don't have problems? Look at Megan. She was ready to top herself. And this isn't really about IVF, is it, Jess?'

Poppy groaned angrily. She began to scream, her face turning first pink, then red, then purple. 'Now look what you've done,' Jessica snapped.

She can't be brave any more, Cat thought. It's too much, it's too hard. My sister has had to be brave for so long. And now all the dark stuff is overwhelming Jessica's brave, kind heart.

'Why do you think I came to you before anyone, Jess? Because I know it must hurt. But I need you. I need you to keep being my sister. I need you to be a wonderful aunt to this baby. Just as you are with Poppy.'

'That's me,' Jessica said, almost drowned out by the baby's screams. 'Auntie Jessica.'

'I have to go,' Cat said wearily. She thought, what am I meant to do? Apologise? I can't do that. 'You should have taken better care of me, Cat.' 'What are you talking about?'

T was just a kid. Sixteen years old. And a young sixteen. You were twenty. At university. A grown-up woman.' She shook her head. 'You should have taken better care of me.' Cat was genuinely shocked.

'Are you still thinking about all that old stuff? You've got to get over this thing, Jess. What else could we have done? What were you going to be - a mum at sixteen? It's got nothing to do with anything else.' 'You think an abortion is good for you?' 'I didn't say that, did I?'

'Ask your sister. Ask Megan. You career women really make me laugh. You think it's another form of contraception. They tear the baby out of you. With a vacuum cleaner. A fucking vacuum cleaner. What does that do to you? I'll tell you. It ruins you for life.'

'It's not your fault. None of it was your fault. There was nothing else you could do.' 'It ruins you for life.' 'It's not your fault, Jess.'

By now Poppy was apoplectic with rage. Jessica rocked her furiously. Cat had never seen a baby turn that colour. She was howling as though she would never stop. 'Is she all right?' Cat said.

Jessica turned her full attention to the baby, making soothing noises, sssh-sssh, sssh-sssh, that sounded like waves or the wind. The baby stifled a snotty sob, and was silent.

'Megan can't do that,' Jessica grinned. 'She just cries and cries all night.' She smoothed the baby's newly minted skin. 'You're driving your mummy mad, aren't you, darling?' At least we've got each other.

That's what Rory was planning to say to her when IVF failed them, as it surely would.

What were the odds against it? He didn't need a doctor or a bookie to tell him that it was a long shot.

People thought that IVF was something that only the woman went through. And of course it was true that it was

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Cat who was pumped full of hormones, who had her body turned into an egg factory. But he was there too - watching her stick those needles into her beautiful flat stomach, he was there seeing her mood change from cautious optimism to bleak despair, holding his breath for all that time, waiting for something to go wrong. At least we've got each other.

He felt they had to try. And he tried because he loved her. But in his heart he had steeled himself for failure.

They had tried, he told himself, during the longest fortnight of his life, the big countdown, when all they could do was wait to see if both of the fertilised eggs placed inside her had melted away. At least we gave it a go, we did our best, and it would have been great, of course it would, but at least we have got each other. It's not the end of the world and it's not the end of us. But that's the thing about long shots. Sometimes they come in. They stood in the middle of the deserted dojo, smelling the sweat and effort of all those departed bodies.

'You're happy, aren't you?' Cat asked him. 'It's what you want too, isn't it?'

'Are you kidding?' he laughed. 'It's the best thing in the world.'

And as she smothered him in kisses, he forgot all the doubts. The best thing in the world! A little boy - or maybe a girl! - who was half of him and half of her. Another human life created from the love between them. It was the most natural thing on the planet, and yet it felt like something magical. The birth of a child, this everyday wonder.

The bitterness of his divorce from Ali hadn't obliterated his memory of what it was like when Jake was born - the pride they had both felt, the surge of overwhelming happi- ness, and the love that gets unlocked inside you, all the love that you never knew existed.

He kissed Cat's face, her head in his hands, his feelings tor her and their unborn child all one, inseparable. 'You did it,' he said. 'You really did it.'

'I did, didn't I?' she chuckled. 'And you want it as much as me - you're sure about that?' 'It's the best thing in the world.'

And he meant it. He only remembered the nagging uncertainties when Cat had gone off to Mamma-san and he called his son to tell him the good news. 'That's great, Dad,' Jake said, sounding as though someone had changed his world without asking him if it was okay. 'But what does this mean for me? Am I this baby's sort of grown-up half-brother, or a kind of uncle, or nothing at all? Is this my family or some other family you're starting?' Rory had no answers for his teenage son.

And there was something else. This baby - this magical, unborn child - measured out the boundaries of Rory's life. When Jake had been born, Rory had not thought about how long he would live. It hadn't occurred to him. He had taken it for granted that he would at the very least last as long as it took Jake to grow up - and so it had proved.

But Rory was no longer a young man. Before Cat came to the dojo tonight, he had felt it in his lesson. The aches and protests of joints and muscles that had spent half a century on the planet. He could still do a mawashi-geri, a roundhouse kick, that would knock your hat off, but afterwards the burning soreness in his knee told him that time was running out.

By the time the baby came, he would be over fifty. He remembered his father at the same age. An old man, his race almost run, only ten years or so from dying of a massive heart attack.

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Rory could tell himself that it was different now, another age. Unlike his father, he had never smoked. Unlike many others of his generation, he had never taken drugs. His job kept him fit - fitter than any man in his middle years had any right to be.

But only an idiot would deny the march of time. And when this baby was in its teens, Rory would be indisputably old. If he made it. If he didn't die at the same age as his father. If he avoided cancer, heart attacks and strokes. If he didn't get hit by a bus.

And what if the things that had happened in the past happened all over again? What if his private history repeated itself? What if he didn't stay with Cat, just as he hadn't stayed with Jake's mother? What if they couldn't hold their relationship together for far longer than any relationship he had ever had?

His generation had grown accustomed to their relationships, their marriages, revolving around the three Fs - fucking around, fucking up and fucking off. The three Fs were considered the norm.

And as a moral philosophy, or amoral philosophy, the three Fs certainly had their advantages.

He would never have known Cat if his ex-wife hadn't fallen in love with someone else. Escaping from the wreckage of his first marriage had left him free to find the love of his life. This new baby would never have existed without his visit to the divorce court.

But what had hurt most about the break-up of his marriage - what had bust his heart wide open, and clawed at it even now - was watching their son change from a bright, sunny-natured child to a withdrawn, frightened boy who trusted no one.

Ali blithely attributed the change in Jake to the miserable transformations of adolescence. But in his bones, and with ult that he would feel until his dying day, Rory knew it i because of the divorce. ?? liked to pretend that the three of them were happier than they had been when they were together. Perhaps lying in herself about their son was her way of coping. Because how could any parent live with the knowledge that they had itil 1 icted wounds on their child that would last a lifetime?

It all came back to him, the fathomless anger and sadness nl their divorce, the feeling of having his child torn away from him. He remembered when Ali and Jake had first moved m with the man who was going to restore Ali's happiness. Rory wasn't allowed to call to tell Jake good night - 'An invasion of our space,' Ali said - so Rory would drive to their house, and park outside until he saw the light go off in his son's bedroom. Good night, good night.

Would he one day park outside some other stranger's home and watch the light go off in this new baby's bedroom?

'This is the best thing in the world,' he had told Cat, gently placing one of his scarred hands on her belly, and he truly felt it.

But he didn't have the words to tell her that the baby also measured out the distance of his life, that little he or little she was a reminder of his own mortality, and nature's way of telling him that everything in this world comes to an end.

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twenty-one 'Hilarious,' Brigitte told Cat. 'You're squeezing one out before you hit forty! You're really doing it! Dropping one at the very last minute! I think it's… hilarious.'

Cat smiled uncertainly. 'Well, I'm not quite ready for the change, you know.'

'No, no, no,' Brigitte said. 'Don't get me wrong. Congratulations to you - and Rory, of course. Who would have thought he had it in him? I just think it's, well, hilarious. Wait a minute.'

Brigitte disappeared into the kitchen. It was early evening in Mamma-san and the restaurant was empty, the only sounds the murmur of the kitchen staff preparing for the night ahead, and the rain lashing against the windows. Cat touched her stomach again. It was good to be inside on a night like this. Brigitte came back holding two glasses and a bottle of champagne. 'Let's drink to you. My clever Cat.' Cat hesitated.

'I'd love to, but I guess I shouldn't.' She patted her belly. 'You know.'

Brigitte groaned. 'Oh, come on. It's a special night. Just one. That's not going to hurt you.' Brigitte expertly tore off the foil, peeled back the wire.ind began unscrewing the cork. It came away with a discreet pop. She poured two glasses and held one out to Cat. '1 really don't want to. But thanks.'

Cat reached out to stroke Brigitte's arm. She owed so much to this woman, she didn't want to hurt her. But at the same time - she had to give her baby every chance. 'You're not going to get all prissy on me, are you, Cat?'

Brigitte held a glass in each hand. She took a sip from one of them.

'It's nothing like that. I just - well, it doesn't seem right. But thank you for the thought. Really. Later, okay? After the birth.'

Brigitte swiftly drained her glass, and lifted the other in a salute that was almost mocking.

'After the birth,' she said. 'Of course. Just promise me you're not going to turn into one of those smug, born-again mums who renounces her wild past.'

'I'm not sure I ever really had a wild past,' Cat said. 'But I think I know what you mean. I certainly lived the single life for long enough. The free life. But it gets old, doesn't it?'

Brigitte's face was impassive. She sipped her drink and said nothing. Cat took the empty glass from her hand and filled it with water. There were not many people in this world she would share a glass with - only her sisters and Brigitte.

T can't say I'll miss it,' Cat said. 'All those men who have either just broken up with the greatest girl in the world or the biggest bitch in the universe.' 'Hmmm,' Brigitte said, non-committal.

'It's funny. When I was growing up, looking after my two sisters, all I wanted was to be free. Nobody holding me down. But being free didn't really work out that way for me. I always felt it should have made me happier than it

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did. To tell the truth, I was starting to feel desperate. And I hated feeling desperate.' Brigitte was smiling at her. 'Oh, come on, Cat. You don't think what you're doing is a little bit desperate?' 'What am I doing?'

'Having a baby at the last moment with the man who happens to be handy.' 'It's not the last moment!' 'Well - it's getting there. Come on. It's far more desperate than anything you did as a single woman. And it's hilarious.' Cat could feel the ice inside. She didn't want it to be this way. She wanted Brigitte to be happy for her.

'Could you please stop saying that?' Hearing her voice trembling with emotion, and hating it. 'Whatever my baby is, I promise you she is not hilarious. There's nothing funny about her.'

'Ah, but it is amusing. Women like you make me laugh, Cat. You really do. All your talk about independence and freedom, and then you grab the first chance you get to play hausfrau.'

T intend to keep working. I can't afford to do anything else. Rory loves his work, but it doesn't pay much.'

'So how's it going to work? Have you thought about it at all?'

Of course she had thought about it. Not as much as she had thought about the doubt she saw in Rory's eyes, and not as much as she had thought about whether the baby would be all right or not. But she had thought about her life as a working mother, even though it all seemed impossibly distant.

'I'll come back to work after twelve weeks. If that's okay with you. My sisters will help. Rory doesn't have classes beyond eight. It will be fine.' Brigitte finished her champagne. She wasn't smiling now.

'But you'll have to slip off earlier, won't you? Because vour baby will be teething, or have the running squirts, or miss its mummy. Or when it gets a bit bigger it will be dressed up as a donkey's arse in the school play at Christmas. And Mummy will have to be there, won't she?'

Cat shook her head, her eyes brimming with hurt. She would never have believed this conversation was possible. Beyond her sisters, and Rory, and her father, there was no one she cared about more than Brigitte. She had taught Cat how to be a grown woman, independent and strong. And now she was withdrawing her love, just as everyone took away their love in the end. 'You act as though my pregnancy is some kind of betrayal.' Brigitte laughed.

'You don't betray me, Cat. You betray yourself. In two years you'll be pushing a pram down some suburban high street, and you'll wonder whatever happened to your life.' Cat drained her glass and set it down carefully.

'You know what the real problem is, Brigitte? It's not the smug mums. It's the sour old bags like you.' L 'Sour old bags like me?'

'It's all you old firebrands who were afraid that a baby would cramp your style. You should have had a baby, Brigitte. It would have made you a nicer person.'

'Come on, Cat. Let's not fight. I'm not sacking you or anything. You know how much I need you.'

Cat put down her empty champagne glass and picked up her coat. 'I know you're not sacking me, Brigitte. Because I quit.'

Cat didn't turn around when Brigitte called her name, and she walked out of Mamma-san thinking, oh, very smart.

She had heard of women who had lost their jobs during maternity leave, plenty of them. But she couldn't recall

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anyone else who had become unemployed simply by getting a bun in the oven. She stroked her stomach, down-up-down, and wondered what they were going to do. The three of them. Her little family.

Outside the restaurant, Jessica was standing in the rain, waiting for her. 'I don't want to be this way, Cat,' she told her sister. Cat wasn't sure what Jessica meant. She didn't want to be soaked to the bone? She didn't want to be so full of hurt and anger? She didn't want to be without a child in a family that was suddenly full of mothers?

Cat didn't know exactly what Jessica meant, but she knew exactly how she felt.

So Cat took her sister in her arms, smelling Calvin Klein and coffee, and she held her tight, loving her very much, her own flesh and blood, part of her little family too, and for those moments in the rain outside the deserted restaurant, they were both temporarily unaware of the baby who was already growing between them. When Poppy wasn't crying she lay there between her parents, and they watched her as if she were an unexploded bomb, capable of going off in their faces at any moment.

The baby slept, but the grown-ups couldn't sleep. They could barely risk breathing, in case it woke up the baby.

There was still something truly stunning about her crying. Who would ever have believed that such a tiny body could produce that ear-splitting white noise, so full of grief and outrage and fury? The baby's parents - exhausted and frightened, incapable of exchanging a word that didn't relate to the baby and her bewildering sleeping pattern - were very impressed.

This was surely the loudest baby in the history of the world. The first bone-white buds of Poppy's milk teeth were poking through her glistening pink gums, making her tiny, miy, almost non-existent nose run with transparent baby snot, and it was enough to throw their little home into total chaos.

Megan had eventually slid into an uneasy sleep just after dawn, and soon enough been rattled awake by the alarm.

Now she wearily climbed the stairs of the Sunny View Kstate, thinking about the baby, this mysterious squatter who had somehow planted herself at the centre of their world, their lives, so unimaginably changed.

When Jessica had arrived to take care of Poppy, the baby's perfect, freshly made face - the face that made Megan ache with love in a way that no man's face ever had - lit up with delight.

Poppy was happy to see Jessica. The baby recognised her auntie. And as Megan walked down the rubbish-strewn concrete corridors of the Sunny View Estate, she wondered if the baby liked Jessica more than she liked her own mother? Did Poppy even love Jessica? But then who could really blame her?

Jessica was relaxed and loving with the baby. Megan was permanently edgy and tense, not the mother she had planned to be at all, and she could not attribute everything to a lack of sleep.

Megan was forever waiting for something terrible to happen. Sometimes, when the baby had exhausted herself with crying and finally fallen asleep, Megan would lie beside her cot, straining to hear her daughter breathe, desperate for the assurance that she was still alive. For hours Megan wanted the baby to sleep more than anything in the world, but then the baby slept as if she was dead, and it terrified Megan. She had been enslaved by her love for her daughter, and

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she knew that she would never be free. It was the first love of her life that she couldn't walk away from, the one love she would never get over, the one love that was endless. The thought both exhilarated and depressed her. She knocked on a scarred door.

There was no reply, although she could hear music inside - Justin Timberlake promising to funk you all night long. She knocked again, louder and longer. Finally the door was opened and Megan stepped into a scene of unremitting squalor.

Stacks of unwashed clothes adorned the furniture. The air was rank with the smoke of cigarettes and hashish. A scrawny dog was ravaging through the remains of a dozen takeaways. 'I want a real doctor! Fully qualified! I know me rights!' Tm fully qualified now, Mrs Marley.' Mrs Marley's face twisted with suspicion. 'When did that happen?' 'Last week.'

Somehow she had got through her summative assessment. There had been late nights spent writing her submissions of practical work while Kirk cradled their howling daughter, and exhausted mornings in the surgery video-taping her consulting skills - not easy getting the camera to focus when you were examining some pensioner's dodgy prostate gland - while Lawford sat close by, making notes for his trainer's report.

There had also been the exam, the multiple choice question paper, and Lawford was right - Megan, the exam princess, could have passed it in her sleep. Which she almost did, her eyes closing and head drooping over the paper, the yellowed milk stains on her jumper. 'Congratulations, doctor,' sneered Mrs Marley. 'Thank you.' 'Let's hope you don't make any more mistakes now you're • proper doctor.'

Megan didn't tell Mrs Marley that ultimately all she had really done was struggle through her year as a GP registrar, demonstrating what they called 'minimum competence'. All i hose years of med school and the horrors of Accident and emergency, then those twelve months as a GP registrar, netting the sick and dying in and out, the Ronald McDonald of the medical profession, and in the end they said you were i lie proud possessor of minimum competence.

That's me all right, thought Megan. Little Miss Minimum (Competence. 'What's the problem, Mrs Marley?'

'It's me nerves.' She reared up defensively, arms folded across her expansive bosom. 'It's not mental. I'm not a loony. Just can't get up in the morning. Can't get out of the house.' 'You feel agoraphobic?' Mrs Marley looked blank. 'Afraid of spiders?' 'You dislike leaving the house?' She nodded. 'I've been taking the pills. But they're all gone.'

Megan consulted her notes. 'That prescription should have lasted another two weeks.' 'Yeah, well, it didn't, did it?' 'Were you taking them as directed?'

'They weren't fucking working, were they? So I doubled me dose.'

'Mrs Marley,' Megan sighed, 'Dr Lawford prescribed a powerful tricyclic antidepressant for you. It controls the serotonin in your central nervous system. You can't just -' 'I know me rights,' insisted Mrs Marley.

Daisy wandered into the room and began listlessly patting the scavenging dog. Megan went across to her, and knelt down. The child was wearing only a soiled T-shirt. She didn't appear to have been washed for days.

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'Daisy, darling, shouldn't you be in school?' 'Mum said I didn't have to, miss.' Mrs Marley exploded.

'How can she go to school if I can't leave the house? Daft cow.'

Megan straightened up. 'I am really sorry. I don't want to do it. But I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask social services to call round.'

Mrs Marley's face darkened. 'Social workers? I don't want no crappy little do-gooders around here.'

'This child is being neglected. Now I know you're not well -' Daisy began to cry quietly to herself.

Megan placed a hand on the child's shoulder, and turned to her mother.

'Nobody wants to take Daisy away from you. Not if we can avoid it.'

'If we can avoid it? My brother did you before and he'll do you again!'

Mrs Marley took a step towards Megan, and Megan backed away from the woman and her child. There was a sick, sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach, and it was a different kind of fear to anything she had known before.

Because if something happened to her, then what would become of her baby? Jessica and Naoko wheeled their pushchairs through the late afternoon crowds.

Poppy was sleeping in a three-wheel pram, while Chloe sat upright in her pushchair, her eyes bright as buttons, a grinning penguin in her arms. Chloe never went anywhere without her penguin.

When the women stopped for coffee, Chloe placed the penguin on the floor and pressed a button on one of its Hubby wings. It immediately sprang into life, and began linging in its mechanical voice. 'Bounce, bounce - everybody bounce! Bounce to the ocean and dive right in. Bounce, bounce - everybody bounce! Don't you want to be a bouncy penguin?' As the penguin leapt up and down, Chloe shook her head, iniling to herself. 'That's new,' Jessica said. 'The head thing.'

'She's just realised that her head moves from side to side,' Naoko said.

When they came out of the coffee shop, they started to say goodbye. Naoko stroked Poppy's sleeping face, Jessica stooped to kiss Chloe and - upon the child's insistence - her penguin. That is when they saw them.

Michael and the woman were saying their own goodbyes outside the local Hilton, their serious kissing out of place surrounded by all the businessmen and women in their drab corporate grey. Michael and Ginger, the receptionist who wasn't saving it for anything.

Jessica looked at Naoko. Ginger was ten years older than her friend, and nowhere near as pretty. So - why? Why would a man risk losing his wife and child for an old boot like that?

Chloe took advantage of the pause in proceedings to turn on her penguin. 'Bounce, bounce - everybody bounce!'

Naoko bent down and turned off the penguin, saying just one word to her daughter. 'Enough.' #**

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When the baby finally slept, they made love - nothing like the fierce coupling of their first night, on the coats at the party, but sex that seemed to Megan like it belonged in a library -muffled and hushed, watched by signs saying Silence Please. But she liked this man who had given her a child, and crossed the world to find them, she liked him more and more.

She knew all about the second job delivering sandwiches, although she never let on, and this menial job didn't make him seem pathetic to her. It touched her heart. It didn't make him look like a loser in her eyes, it made him seem like a real man. He would do anything for them. So she trusted him now.

'I thought I could make a difference around here,' she whispered. 'I really believed that. And look at me. Just like everybody else. Dishing out the antidepressants and calling the social services.'

'You can't help these people,' he whispered back. 'They're too poor, too sick, too far gone on junk food and drugs, fags and booze. Too stupid.'

'No, there are good people around here.' She thought of Mrs Summer and the boxer and Daisy. She thought of all the good and decency that managed to exist in these mean estates. 'They're not all the same.'

'You've got to think about Poppy now. About us. I mean it, Megan. We should get out.'

She smiled at that. It seemed to her that he had spent his life dreaming of going to some new place. Somewhere the sea was bluer, the beaches whiter, and the water cleaner. How the hell did he end up in Hackney? 'Where do you have in mind?' 'I'm serious, Megan.'

'I'm not laughing at you. Honest. I love it. I love the idea of getting away from all this.' He grabbed her excitedly.

'Somewhere with decent diving. Somewhere I can teach. I lusc are the best places on the planet. Any major diving i cntre will have me. The Indian Ocean. The Caribbean. Even kick home - Australia.' Suddenly she wasn't smiling.

'You think I want to lie on a beach all my life? You think I'd give up my job?'

'They need doctors everywhere. Why do you have to practise in a place where they don't respect you - or anything else? Where it's filthy, and full of drunks, and ignorant bastards?' 'You hate it here.'

'That's right. But I'm not here for the place. I am here for you. And our baby.'

'This is where I can do the most good. It's not true what you say - and even if it was, what do you think a doctor does? You think I should only treat rich people? Nice people? It doesn't work like that. That's not what I trained for.' 'What did you train for? Not this life. Surely not this life.'

Megan searched her memory. During all those years of study, she had certainly had a vision of herself as a doctor.

In the vision she was calm, kind and endlessly capable. Bringing hope to those in despair. That sort of thing. She had never imagined that she would ever be physically threatened by her patients. She thought that they would be grateful, that they would love her even, or at least respect her. She had never imagined that some of them would see her as a middle-class cow depriving them of the pills they craved, and blighting their lives by calling in the dreaded social workers. And Megan had never guessed that she would ever feel so tired.

'I guess I wanted to make a difference. Yes, that's it. I wanted to make things a little bit better. What's wrong with that?'

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'Nothing. But you can't save the world, Megan. Look at us. I mean, just look at the pair of us struggling with the baby every night. This tiny little thing doesn't stop crying and we feel like the sky is falling down.' The baby stirred in the cot beside their bed. 'Keep your voice down,' Megan whispered.

'How are you going to save the world?' Kirk whispered back. 'We can't even take care of ourselves.' twenty-two From their window at the Ritz-Carlton, Jessica could look out on the timeless bustle of Hong Kong harbour.

There was something magical about this place, but what it was felt just beyond her reach. It was a city that was constantly being reinvented, where new dreams pushed aside the old dreams, and everywhere you looked there was land being reclaimed from the harbour, and shining skyscrapers being raised upon it while the soil was still wet.

Out in the harbour there were vessels of every kind and every century. Hydrofoils taking the gamblers to Macao, puffing tugs accompanying giant cruise ships, ancient wooden junks with their orange sails and, always, the green-and-white Star Ferries, shuttling between Central and Wanchai and Tsim Sha Tsui. There was an old film that Jessica had glimpsed late at night, where a man had fallen in love with a girl he first saw on the Star Ferry. Jessica thought it looked like a good place to fall in love.

Framing the chaotic pageant of the harbour were the two shining skylines, the corporate towers of Hong Kong island staring across at the forest of apartment blocks Kowloon side, and beyond them the green hills of the New Territories.

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Jessica knew what was on the other side of those hills, and suddenly she realised she wanted to go there, she wanted to see it while she had the chance. Who knew if she would ever be back in this part of the world? 'I would like to see China,' she said. Paulo didn't reply.

He was lying on their bed, still jet-lagged after five days, listlessly thumbing through a sheaf of glossy brochures from the Hong Kong Motor Show. On the cover of the one he was holding, two smiling Chinese girls in cheongsams were sitting on the roof of some expensive car. 'Paulo? I want to see China.' 'China? Darling, you're looking at it.' 'That's not what I mean.'

'Who do you think Hong Kong belongs to now? Not us, Jess. The British went home. End of empire and all that.'

'I mean the mainland. Across the border. You know. The People's Republic of China.' He grimaced.

'We can do that, if you want. But I don't think it's as nice as here. I bet those Communists can't make a decent cappuccino. Why can't we just stay in Hong Kong?'

'I'd like to see it anyway. While we're here. Who knows if we'll ever come back?'

He stretched out and smiled, feeling that strangely soporific sensation of being in a five-star hotel room on the far side of the world. He loved the way she looked standing by the window, half turned towards him, the late afternoon light on her beautiful face. He could never refuse her anything. 'Come over here, you little minx, and we'll talk about it.' 'What for?' she laughed. 'You're too tired.'

'Okay, okay, we'll take a look at China.' He yawned and tossed the brochure to one side. 'A day should be enough, shouldn't it? I mean, how long does it take to see China?' Paulo closed his eyes and Jessica turned back to the view I ust in time to see a Star Ferry mooring below her. Crowds nl sleek, black-haired businessmen and women disembarked, pouring into Statue Square and their working lives in Central.

Most of them probably lived in those endless skyscrapers she could see Kowloon side, sprouting like a forest on the tip of the Chinese peninsula. That's where their families would be waiting when they caught the Star Ferry back home. The husbands and wives. A couple of those beautiful, bell-haired children you saw on the MTR, smart in their old-fashioned school uniforms, looking forward to their future, and the future of this wonderful place.

And suddenly, all at once, Jessica understood the source of Hong Kong's magic.

'You know what it is?' she said out loud, although she knew her husband was sleeping. 'I have never seen anywhere so full of life.' 'Anybody here ever changed a baby's nappy before? Mummies? Daddies? Come on, don't be shy.'. Cat looked at Rory.

'Go on,' she hissed. 'You told me you changed Jake all the time.' 'But that was years ago.'

'You told me your ex-wife was a lazy bitch who wouldn't get up at night.' 'Leave me alone.' 'Put your hand up!' 'No!'

The teacher of their antenatal class smiled at her students. They stared back at her, or at the pink doll flat on its back on the mat between them. The doll was wearing a sodden nappy. It was one of those dolls that sold itself on the fact

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that it could cry and pee its pants. Just like the real thing. Just add water.

The teacher was one of those earth mother types that always made Rory feel uncomfortable. A big body in a floaty dress. Long, flowing hair that was probably meant to signify her belief in personal freedom, but just looked unkempt and dirty. Ethnic earrings and a beatific smile, as if she knew the secrets of the universe.

'Changing baby's nappy when she has done a wee or a poo is one of our most fundamental parenting skills.'

'I watched me sister change her baby,' said one of the expectant mothers. She was typical of the class. Hardly out of her teens, bedecked with tattoos and pieces of metal that suddenly peeked out at you from ankle, breast and buttock. She was accompanied by a surly-looking young man with bad skin.

Babies making babies, thought Rory, thinking of an ancient Sly and the Family Stone song that must be - my God! Almost forty years old! Your granny might know it, he thought. These kids. They don't know what they're letting themselves in for. 'Anyone?' Cat elbowed him in the ribs. 'Ah!' he said.

The teacher turned her smile on him. The expectant mothers and their blank-faced men all noticed him for the first time. 'Ah, ah, ah did it once, years back. My son.'

'Real hands-on experience,' the teacher said, all mock-impressed. 'Let's see what you remember.'

Rory joined the teacher on the mat. Smiling still, she gave him a new nappy, a box of baby wipes and a jar of cream. 'Most newborn babies have erythema toxicum,' she said. Rory must have looked alarmed.

'Nappy rash. Crucial to keep baby clean.' She nodded briskly. 'Off you go.' Rory thought back. It wasn't so difficult. It was true he had been the one to get up in the middle of the night while Ali slept off a few glasses, or perhaps a bottle, of something white and fruity. Feeling a surge of confidence, he tried to straighten the pretend baby, ready for changing. Suddenly the doll's head came off in his hands. 'Bugger.' The class roared with laughter.

'Never lift baby by her head,' the teacher said sternly, her smile finally vanished.

'I was just straightening it,' Rory said, desperately trying to put the head back on. 'Obviously in real life I wouldn't -'

He had managed to get the head back on but as he fumbled with the wet nappy he realised it was the wrong way round. The class laughed again. The teacher looked disappointed.

'Stone me,' said one cockney wag. 'It's The Exorcist. That head will start going round and round in a minute. Your mother sucks cocks in hell! Your mother sucks cocks in hell!' Oh, that's lovely talk in a parenting class, Rory thought.

He angrily pulled off the head and jammed it on the right way. He placed the doll on the mat and tore off the soiled nappy. Its pink plastic private parts were flooded. Rory delicately swabbed them with a baby wipe, controlling his breathing so that he calmed down a little, then quickly applied a layer of cream and began fumbling with the new nappy. He bent over the pretend baby, smiling proudly, the nappy ready to go. Then the doll squirted a jet of water in his face. The class applauded and cheered.

'Incidentally,' the teacher said, smiling calmly through the laughter, 'fresh urine is sterile and not at all harmful.'

Oh yes, I remember it now, thought Rory, it's coming back to me. It's all a nightmare.

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The class ended with the teacher telling them that next week they would be dealing with the colour of stools - vivid yellow to pale green, apparently - and, as a special treat, they would be meeting a baby, the six-month-old offspring of a graduate of the class.

On the way back to the car, Rory chose to make meeting a baby the focus of his discontent.

'How can you meet a baby? You don't meet babies. What's he going to do? Stand around with a cocktail in his hand, making small talk and chatting about the weather?' 'Maybe he'll give you a few pointers on changing nappies.' 'It's all rubbish.'

Cat stared at him. 'You really don't want to do it, do you?'

'Of course I do. It's just these stupid classes. All that talk about mummy and daddy and baby. That's not who we are.'

She shook her head, thinking it through. Really thinking it through for the first time.

'No, you really don't want to do it.' She stared at him, and it was if she had realised he was someone she didn't really know. 'It's not your fault. I should have seen it coming. I forced you to do it. And now it's all coming out.'

'Come on, Cat, let's go home. Your hormones are running wild.' She smiled sadly.

'It's not my hormones that are the problem. It's you. All your doubts.'

He tried to take her hand. 'Come on. We're in this together.' 'I wonder. Because it feels like I'm in it alone.'

'Cat, stop it. You know I don't like these women with big earrings.'

'It feels like you're here because - I don't know. Because of your conscience, or because you would feel guilty about leaving, or because I trapped you. That's what it feels like. Do you know what I think?' 'Let's stop this. It can't be good.' 'I think you don't have the guts to go the distance.' 'That's not true.'

'I think you're not really here for this baby and me. If you were, some old hippy in an antenatal class wouldn't matter at all. I think your luggage is packed. I think - sooner or later - you're going to leave.' 'I want this baby as much as you do.' She smiled sadly, shaking her head, and it broke his heart.

'I think you're just like my mother,' she said, and he knew it was the very worst thing she could ever say. The traffic was insane.

Bicycles gliding like schools of fish through the teeming streets - she had been expecting that in mainland China, but not all the cars beyond number, none of them keeping to their lanes, all of them constantly sounding their horns, even when they were stuck in one of the apparently permanent gridlocks and going nowhere. What would happen when the bicycles were gone and they all got cars?

As the traffic ground to a halt again, a pick-up truck pulled alongside their taxi. The back was a high, wire mesh cage, the kind of thing that her gardeners used back home. But this cage was loaded with pigs.

Overloaded with pigs, grotesquely overloaded, because there were twice as many of the curiously small animals than could be comfortably contained by the truck's cage. They had been thrown on top of each other, as if they had no more rights or feelings than her gardeners' sacks of compost, and now they fought for space, stepping on each other, their eyes gleaming with wild panic as they desperately lifted their heads for air, and shrieked with a terror that turned Jessica's stomach.

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She wanted to go home.

This wasn't what she was expecting at all, this wasn't like Hong Kong. China was dirty, and desperate and cruel. Beijing was a hard place, choked with dust from the ever-encroaching Gobi desert. If Hong Kong had seemed full of life, then here everyone seemed to be fighting for their life. Struggling for life, scrabbling for it, stepping on each other without thought or pity. The old taxi driver was contemplating Jessica and Paulo in his rear-view mirror. 'Meiguo?' The young translator in the passenger seat shook his head. 'Yingguo.' He turned to grin at them. 'They are English. Not American.'

He had attached himself to them in the vast concrete expanse of Tiananmen Square, as they stared across at the epic blankness of Mao Tse-tung's giant portrait, and for the last few hours he had acted as their guide, translator and chaperone as they wandered the Forbidden City, ancient hutong back alleys and tacky tourist shopping malls. He was a pleasant, good-looking young man, an architecture student who called himself Simon. When they asked for his Chinese name, he said it was too difficult for them to pronounce.

'What you do?' he asked Paulo. 'What you do in England for job?' Paulo sighed, staring grimly out of the window. At first he had been happy to respond to Simon's constant questions. But it had been a long day. And the questions never stopped. 'He sells cars, Simon,' Jessica said. She shoved Paulo. 'There's no need to be rude.' 'Well. It's like the Spanish Inquisition with this guy.' 'How much money make?' Simon said, as innocently as if he was asking how they liked the weather. 'None of your bloody business,' Paulo said. Simon turned to Jessica. 'You marry? Or boyfriend-girlfriend just partner?' 'We're an old married couple,' Jessica said.

She smiled and lifted her left hand, displaying her wedding ring. 'See?'

Simon took her hand and inspected the ring. 'Tiffany. Very good quality. Cartier better though. How long marry?' 'Five - no, six years.' Simon nodded thoughtfully. 'Where the baby?' he said finally.

'Jesus Christ,' Paulo said. 'Not here too. We're on holiday, mate.' 'No babies,' Jessica said. 'Six year no baby?' Simon said. 'That's right,' Jessica said. 'What a pair of freaks, right?'

She took her husband's hand, and he squeezed it, still staring out of the window at China.

Simon turned in his seat and said something to the driver. The old man nodded. The stalled traffic began to move. When morning surgery was over, Megan called in her extra patient.

'There's a man in your reception area with a dog,' said Olivia Jewell, coming into her office, 'and they are sharing a packet of potato crisps.' 'Don't worry, Mother. I don't think he'll bite you.'

Olivia shot her a look that made Megan smile - the same startled double take that had tickled the watching millions thirty years ago.

'We are talking about the dog, aren't we, dear?' Olivia looked around Megan's tiny room. 'Is this where they make you work every day?'

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'I know it's not quite what you're used to. So why didn't you go to see Dr Finn?'

Finn was the private doctor her mother had seen since they were children. Megan remembered the reception area of his practice on Harley Street. Deep-pile carpets, glossy magazines, comfy sofas and a chandelier that had impressed Megan deeply. It was more like a hotel lobby than an NHS waiting room. It was only years later that she realised the most luxurious thing of all was that Dr Finn could spend thirty minutes with every patient.

'Dr Finn retired last year. I don't like the one who replaced him. Keeps going on about my smoking. And besides. I wanted to see you.' Megan rubbed her eyes. 'What's the problem?' 'God, you look awful.'

'Poppy was up for most of the night. She seems unsettled with Jessica away. Kirk's taking time off to look after her, but she misses Jessie.' 'They're just so much work, aren't they?' 'How would you know?' 'Charming bedside manner.' 'You should come and see her some time.' 'I keep meaning to. It's your flat. It depresses me, Megan.'

'Yes, it depresses me too. Look, can we get on with it? I have to go home and take over from Kirk. What's wrong?'

What was wrong was that the pins and needles in her mother's arms were getting worse. She had blurred vision in one eye. Sometimes she was so overcome with fatigue that she could hardly light a cigarette.

Megan's face was an unreadable mask, but she was shocked. She thought the old girl was lonely. It was worse than that.

'You need to see a specialist.' Megan started scribbling a name and address. 'A neurologist. Someone I use in Wimpole Street. Very close to where Dr Finn used to be, in fact.' 'What is it? What's wrong with me?'

'You need to see a specialist. You can talk to him about your symptoms. He will almost certainly ask you to have an MRI scan. You should also prepare yourself for a lumbar puncture.' 'What the fuck is a lumbar puncture?'

'Don't be alarmed. Please. A sample of fluid is drawn off from around the spine and given a series of tests.' 'Megan, what's wrong with me?' 'That's what they're going to find out.' 'But what is it?' 'It's not my place to make guesses.' 'You know what it is, Megan. You know.' 'No, I really don't.' 'I'm not going until you tell me.'

Megan took a deep breath. 'Okay. From what you're saying, it looks like the early stages of multiple sclerosis.' Her mother reeled. 'Am I going to end up in a bloody wheelchair?'

'It's unlikely. Most people diagnosed with MS never need to use a wheelchair. But it's unpredictable. No two people with MS experience exactly the same symptoms. If MS is what it is - and we don't know yet.' 'Is it curable?' 'No.' 'It's incurable? They can't cure it? Oh, God, Megan!'

She took her mother's hand, feeling the bones and the tired skin.

'Incurable but not untreatable. There are some very effective beta interferon products. They're self-injected.'

'Stick a needle in my arm? Are you serious? I couldn't possibly -'

'And there's a school of thought that says what works best of all for controlling MS symptoms is cannabis. But you can't get that on the NHS. Or on Harley Street.'

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Olivia hung her head. 'I could be wrong. Please. Please see this specialist.' Her mother lifted her head. 'I'm so sorry, Mum.'

Her mother held out her arms, and Megan went to her, but just then there was the sound of screams and breaking glass and a barking dog. Megan ran outside.

Lawford was on the ground grappling with Warren Marley. He appeared to have recently thrown the surgery's ancient coffee table at the receptionists. There was broken glass and shards of cheap wood all over the carpet. When he saw Megan, Marley's face warped with fury.

'Because of you! My sister lost her girl! Daisy! In fucking care because of you!' When Megan got home that night she talked to Kirk about his dream of getting out.

How would it work? Where would they go? All these little slices of paradise where he could teach diving, and she could do what she had been trained to do - could they really live somewhere like that? She pushed him, seeing if the dream could survive in the real world. What about visas? Work permits? Day care? She was ready to get out of London. She was ready for another kind of life. Because she saw now that Kirk was right.

When you had a child, it changed everything. You couldn't worry about the rest of the human race. You had to be selfish, you had to think about your baby, and find a place that was safe for your own flesh and blood.

As soon as you became a mother or father, then everything was about the next generation. The new family.

You couldn't even worry too much about your own parents.

***

No tears. That was the first thing Jessica noticed.

Not exactly silence, for it was a long, poorly lit dormitory with cots pressed close together on both sides, every one of them occupied by a baby or a toddler, and the musty air was full of the singsong chatter of small children talking to themselves. But there were no tears. 'Why don't they cry?' she said. 'Maybe happy babies,' Simon said. No, not that.

'What is this place?' Paulo said. 'This is some kind of home. This is an orphanage.'

She had been afraid to enter. She had been afraid of what she might find. Negligence and cruelty and filth. Like the pigs piled on top of each other in their wire-mesh cage, and nobody even looking at them. But it wasn't like that in here.

As they slowly walked through the dormitory, she saw that these children were clean and fed. They regarded Jessica and Paulo with baffled curiosity, but they were not frightened or cowed. They had been treated with affection and kindness.

But there were so many of them that they had realised there was no point in crying. Their tears were not like the tears of a baby outside, not like the tears of Chloe or Poppy. Their tears were not the end of the world for a mother and a father, and those tears would only be ignored. Because they were so many.

'Four million baby girls,' Simon said. 'Four million baby girls like this in China.' 'They're all girls? All these children are girls?'

He nodded. 'Because of one child policy of government. People only have one son or daughter. Many prefer son. Especially in countryside. Low people. Uneducated.'

Four million baby girls in care because of the one child policy.

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And yet everywhere from Tiananmen Square to Beijing McDonald's, they had seen the other side of that policy - a generation of overweight, overindulged children, the biggest spoilt brats in Asia, China's Little Emperors. And now Jessica thought of it, the Little Emperors had all seemed to be boys.

A nurse approached them from the other end of the corridor. 'You want baby?' she said.

'Oh, thank you, but we're just looking,' Paulo said. 'Jessica? We have to catch a plane.'

'Very difficult to have baby now,' the nurse said, ignoring him. 'Many Westerners come. Think easy. Oh - go China, get easy baby. But not so easy. Much paperwork. Need proper agency. Called international child programme.' Simon cleared his throat. 'I have,' he said. Jessica and Paulo stared at him. 'You run an adoption programme?' Jessica said. 'I know. Can introduce.' 'For a nice fee, I bet.' Simon spread his hands. 'All have to eat.'

'Jessica, we're being scammed, can't you see that? I wouldn't mind if it was just a fake Ming vase and a jade dragon for the mantelpiece. But not a child, Jess. Not this.'

He gestured helplessly at the endless rows of cots. The cots were old-fashioned and heavy. Inside them the babies were wrapped up tight, swaddled like tiny Egyptian mummies, so their arms were bound to their sides, while the toddlers had a gap at the rear of their trousers where their bare little arses poked out, making it easy for them to go to the toilet. And Jessica couldn't help smiling, because they were beautiful. Serious, almond-eyed little angels, some of them with surprising shocks of hair, all these Elvis-like eruptions of jet-black plumage. Paulo shook his head. You can't just bring home a baby from your holidays. You can't do it. This was madness.

'Don't forget, you dealing with the governments of two countries,' the nurse said. 'Now wait a minute,' Paulo said. 'Nobody said -'

'Your government and Chinese government. Need checks. Visas. Permission. Not so easy. Not so easy as Western people think.'

'Ah, but agency help,' Simon said to Jessica. He had given up on Paulo. But Jessica wasn't listening to any of them.

She was walking to the end of the dormitory, where a small girl of about nine months was shakily standing in her cot, holding on to the bars for support.

Jessica watched her fall on her bum with a thump, then grimly drag herself up again. She fell again. She got up again.

Then they were standing by the baby's cot. Paulo thought she resembled one of those cartoons of what an alien is supposed to look like - huge, wide-set eyes, a tiny mouth and an even tinier nose that looked as though it had been stuck on as an afterthought. That tiny nose was streaming.. 'This Little Wei,' said the nurse. 'What happened to Big Wei?' asked Paulo. 'Big Wei gone Shenyang.' 'Shenyang? Where's that?' 'City in north. Dongbei region. About ten million people.'

This country, thought Paulo. China. They have got cities of ten million people that we have never even heard of.

Jessica was staring at Little Wei. The child stared at her and then at Paulo. He looked away from those huge, wide-set eyes, and touched his wife's arm, as if he were trying to wake her. It was time to go.

'I know, Jess. I know how you feel. I really do. This child - it's tragic'

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'Is she any more tragic than I am? I wonder.'

'You want to help the starving millions? Make a donation. Write a cheque. I mean it. You know - sponsor her. These are poor people, Jess. They will be grateful for your help. Call Oxfam. Fill out a direct debit. Give a little something every month. It will be a good thing you're doing. But it's the most you can do.'

'You know why they don't cry, Paulo? Because they're not loved. There's no point in crying if you're not loved. Because nobody comes.'

Paulo watched his wife reach into the cot and pick up Little Wei.

Jessica gently touched the back of the child's head, clearly hoping that she would rest it against her chest, the way Poppy did when her aunt touched her in the same way. But Little Wei's head remained stubbornly upright as she considered the two big-nosed pinkies on either side of her.

'You were the one who talked about adopting,' Jessica said.

'And you were the one who said you would rather get a cat,' Paulo said.

'Look at her,' Jessica said. 'Just look at her, Paulo. This child needs someone to love her. And look at me. Just look at me. I want to be somebody's mother. It's as simple as that.'

Paulo shook his head, and stared at the pair of them. This was insane.

But he watched Little Wei as she placed a tiny hand on Jessica's chest, her fingers like matchsticks, and some chunk of ice buried deep inside him began to thaw. Maybe she was right after all. Maybe it was as simple as that.

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twenty-three When the baby was finally sleeping, Megan lay in bed imagining that she could hear the sound of the island's two oceans.

She knew that was impossible. Their apartment was in Bridgetown, on the west side of the island, where she tended to accident-prone tourists in the grand hotels of St James, next to the gently lapping waters of the Caribbean.

But Megan liked to believe that she could actually hear the other sea on the other side of the island, her favourite part, where there were no luxury hotels and only a few of the most intrepid tourists, and where the Atlantic whipped huge waves against the rocks of Bathsheba and the east coast of Barbados.

An island with two seas. She had never seen anything like it. And she wondered how many of the tourists who flocked to the west coast of Barbados were ever aware of the rough majesty of the east coast. Everything she had heard about Barbados was true - the postcard images of white sands, wild palms and endless sunshine. But there was another side to the place, untamed and unpredictable, and you would never find it in the glossy brochures. You saw it in the pages of The Advocate and The Nation, all the crimes featuring

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drugs and knives, sometimes guns, and you could hear it in the wind at night. The heart of the island was wild.

It was hard being so far from her sisters, and their absence left terrible gaps in her everyday life. She missed their phone calls, the ritual breakfasts in Smithfield, the knowledge that they were only a few tube stops away. She missed the selfless hours that Jessica devoted to Poppy, she missed the constantly reassuring presence of Cat.

For as long as she could remember, Megan had thought of herself as self-sufficient - the only one to come through her parents' divorce undamaged, the straight-A student, the med school princess, doctor baby sister, tough and smart. It was only when she moved abroad that she saw her self-image as the clever little sister had always been built on the unconditional support of her family. But Megan had come to this place to start a new family. She would have preferred someone to look after her daughter out of love. But if love was out of the question, then Bajan dollars would have to do. Poppy was already enrolled in the Plantation Club Nursery in Holetown, and Megan was interviewing prospective nannies. For the first time in her working life, she didn't have to worry about money.

There was work for her here. Lots of it. But it was a different kind of work from anything she had known in the past. Looking back, it felt like her patients in London had been the victims of poverty. In Barbados they were the victims of affluence.

Yesterday she had visited three different hotels in St James. She had tended a child who had been stung by a jellyfish, a woman who had broken her nose when her jet ski took off without her and a fifty-year-old man who had torn a cartilage in his knee while attempting to windsurf for the first time. The man's young wife - she had to be the second or third - stood by holding their brand-new baby boy while Megan examined him and wrote a prescription for painkillers.

Typical, Megan thought. They sit in front of a computer screen all year and then imagine they are Action Man as soon as they reach the tropics. Oh yes, there would always be plenty of work for her here.

Megan was also called out to see the victims of sunburn, the ramblers who had blisters caused by touching the poisonous manchineel apple trees that grew all along the St James coastline, and of course the great raft of what back in Hackney they had called UBIs - unexplained beer injuries.

The suspected strokes, possible heart attacks and other emergencies were all shipped straight to the excellent Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Bridgetown. Disappointingly, there were no tropical diseases for her to cure - Barbados had wiped them out long ago. So the medicine that Megan practised in her new life felt curiously bland compared to what she had known in the past.

In Hackney she had looked after heroin addicts, stab victims, alcoholics, the chronically obese and all those residents of the Sunny View Estate who were smoking themselves to death. Here she was far more likely to administer to someone who had been brained by a falling coconut.

It was almost as though nobody could ever really get hurt here, and nobody ever had to die, and the holiday would never have to end.

She felt Kirk stir beside her and she lay dead still as he rolled over and moaned in the darkness, pretending to be sleeping, just in case he awoke and reached for her, just in case he might want sex and not give her a chance to prepare her excuse. They had never been able to get back to how it had been that first night.

But he didn't wake up, and he didn't reach for her, so Megan lay there in the Bajan night, listening to the winds

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whip and whistle around Bathsheba, on the other side of paradise. Cat took the lift to her mother's flat.

Even a quarter of a century on, there was still a part of her that was for ever that bright, gawky eleven-year-old girl, all legs and arms and eyes, watching her mother apply her make-up, smiling at her in the mirror, her eleven-year-old world about to fall apart.

'Now you're my big girl, Cat. Yes, Jessie is big too but she's timid and Megan's still a baby. But you're my big, big girl, and I know you are going to be brave, aren't you?'

Cat had nodded uncertainly, and then the taxi was there with the man in the back seat, waiting to take her mother away for ever.

In the years to come, when Cat and her sisters suffered the thousand cuts of having an absent parent, she really tried - she tried so hard to be brave. And as the lift opened on her mother's floor, she was trying still.

But she was afraid that her mother would always have the power to hurt her, and that she would never be quite brave enough. Cat rang the bell and Olivia's face appeared before her. 'Get it, did you?' Cat nodded. 'I've got it.'

They went into the flat. It seemed far smaller than Cat remembered from that day long ago when she tried to move in with her sisters, but just as immaculate, just as untouched by any dirty childish paws. There were photographs of her mother, young and beautiful, in the smiling company of people more famous than herself. Once these photographs had seemed impossibly glamorous to Cat, and now they seemed rather pathetic, almost touching. Those end-of-the-pier comedians, corny macho men from the telly - so many of them, all those hard-bitten cops, wayward private dicks and sub-James Bond special agents - and fading starlets, most of them long forgotten now. Was that the best her mother could do? Was that why she had given up her children? For some little league hunk in the back of a cab, and a life of small-time glory? Yet even now Cat was stung to see there were no pictures displayed of Olivia's children. Cat was angry with herself and thought, why should I care?

In the next room there was the sound of some kind of domestic chore being performed. The dark face of a cleaner or housekeeper appeared in a doorway, and then was gone.

'You're having a baby,' her mother said, lighting up a cigarette. 'That's right,' Cat said. 'But please smoke anyway.' 'Do I know the father?' 'The father's out of the picture.' 'Oh dear. Chuck you, did he?'

I have been in the room for two minutes, Cat thought, and we are already at each other's throats. I must rise above this, she thought.

'I didn't let him stick around long enough to do that.' Her mother raised her eyebrows. Did that well-worn gesture actually mean anything? 'Do you remember what you once told me?' Cat said. 'Your parents fuck up the first half of your life, and your children fuck up the second half.'

'Did I tell you that?' Olivia chuckled, clearly pleased with herself. 'It's true.'

'Well, what about your partners? It seems to me that they fuck it up more than anyone. But only if you let them. Only if you allow them to.' Her mother laughed again.

'You're not one of those sperm bandits that I keep reading about, are you?'

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'A sperm bandit?'

'One of those women who just wants a man for as long as it takes to get her up the duff.'

'Yes, that's me exactly. A sperm bandit. Here. This is what you need.'

Cat opened her bag, took out a cigarette pack and gave it to her mother. Olivia shut the door where the cleaner's face had been glimpsed and then she examined the contents of the pack - something wrapped in silver foil.

She glanced at the shut door, and then unwrapped the foil, revealing a sizeable chunk of hashish. Olivia smiled grimly at Cat. 'It must have been difficult for you,' her mother said.

Cat shook her head. 'I've worked around kitchen staff for years. They can be a wild bunch, some of them. It wasn't so difficult.' T didn't mean buying me drugs, dear. I meant coming here.'

'No problem. There's also a telephone number. If it works. If ever you want some more.'

Cat gave her mother a Mamma-san matchbox with a mobile phone number scribbled on the inside flap. 'You call this number and ask for Dirty Dave,' Cat said. Olivia shook her head. T ask for - Dirty Dave}'

'That's right. He's the one who takes care of my kitchen staff.' 'By "take care", you mean he sells them drugs?'

'No, I mean he comes in once a week and does their ironing.'

'Do you seriously expect me to call someone known as Dirty Dave and buy drugs from him?' Cat sighed.

T don't care what you do. This is for your benefit, not mine.' 'You're a hard-hearted cow, aren't you?' Olivia snarled, suddenly flaring up. 'Well, I had a good teacher,' Cat flashed back.

Then she bit her lip. She remembered that for the few years her mother had stuck around, she had never been a smacker, but when that temper boiled over, she was a big thrower of shoes. Cat didn't want her mother throwing shoes today. She was a sick woman, and Cat wanted to go home and lie down and feel her baby pushing against the limits of its little world.

'Do you know what to do with this stuff? You heat it up-'

Olivia raised her hand. 'I'm not your maiden aunt from Brighton, you know. My God. My generation invented your culture.' 'It's not my culture.' Cat turned to go.

'I really do appreciate it,' Olivia said, her voice softening, her fingers fiddling nervously with the matchbox. 'You coming here. Doing this. I know it's been a long time.? see your sisters. But never you.' - Cat turned to face her.

'Well,' she said. T see that as your doing, not mine. And don't get too sentimental. I'm only doing this because Megan asked me to.' T thought you were beautiful, you know.' 'What?' 'The three of you. You and your sisters.' Cat laughed. 'Megan's pretty. Jessie you could call beautiful. But not me.'

'Don't put yourself down, dear. You've got a great pair of pins. I have a friend - he's a shrink - and he thinks that was part of the problem. It's hard for a woman. Your daughters are turning into gorgeous women just as everything

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is starting to head south. Beautiful children who grew into beautiful women. My three girls.' 'Your three girls?'

Cat let her mother's claim hang in the air, and the silence said, You don't have a right to call us that.

Olivia squinted at Dirty Dave's phone number, her hands shaking. She's an old woman now, Cat thought. When did my mother become an old woman?

'It's difficult with them both away. Megan in Barbados. Jessica still in bloody China. How long is she going to be gone anyway?' 'I'm sure they'll both send you a postcard.'

'You know why I need this, don't you? You know why I'm turning into a drug user in my twilight years?' 'Megan told me.' A pause. 'I'm sorry.' 'Really?' 'Of course I am. I wouldn't wish that on anyone.'

'Don't turn your back on me, Cat. This specialist that Megan sent me to - it's not good. The pain is getting worse. And the tremors. And you know the funny bit? MS doesn't shorten your lifespan. Your muscles go, and you shake like a leaf, and you go blind as a bat. But it doesn't kill you. You have to live with it.'

It's a cruel world, Cat thought. Just ask the three children you walked out on. But it was hard hating her mother today. It was harder than it had ever been.

'I hope this stuff brings you some relief,' she said, indicating the cigarette packet. 'I really do.'

Suddenly Olivia took her by the arm. Cat could feel her mother's long, bony fingers digging into the flesh just below her elbow. It was the firm grip you would take on a recalcitrant child who was about to do something they would soon regret. The shock of unexpected physical contact with her mother made Cat catch a breath. 'I'm frightened, frightened about what's going to happen to me,' Olivia said, pleading now. 'I'm scared what I am going to become. The person I'm going to turn into. I need someone to take care of me. I need you, Cat. There's nobody else.'

Cat stared at her mother. Maybe if she had asked for her help twenty years ago - maybe then they would have had a chance. But you can leave it too late, Cat thought. You can run out of time.

As gently as she could, Cat tried to remove her mother's hand. But Olivia's grip tightened and Cat's heart fluttered with panic. It was like being held by the past, still feeling the sting from all those old wounds, and knowing you can never really be free of all those ruined years.

Their eyes met. Olivia's voice was soft, but her grip didn't weaken.

It wasn't the grasp of someone old, Cat thought. It was full of steely determination and physical strength. The clench of someone who was used to getting their own way, to bending the world to their will. Cat could feel her heart beating, could smell her mother's perfume, could see the old woman starting to fight for breath. Her mother's fingernails buried deep into her flesh, five points of pain that blurred into one, and her arm started to throb. Cat thought, she is never going to let me go, is she? 'Stay with me, Cat,' Olivia said. 'Do you want me to beg?'

But, more firmly now, Cat took her mother's wrist and pushed her hand away. The two women took a step away from each other, as if they had finally completed some ancient dance. 'That's not who I am,' Cat said. When Paulo saw that the Baresi Brothers showroom was locked up and in darkness, he told the taxi driver to wait.

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His head still fogged with jet lag from the flight, he rang the bell and pressed his face up against the plate glass. For a moment China felt like a dream. The stock in the window was exactly the same as when he had last seen it, over a month ago. Five weeks without a single sale? That wasn't right.

He had been gone too long, he saw that now. But it took a long time to become instant parents, and they were still not quite there.

Paulo went back to the taxi and gave the driver Michael's address. The cab crawled down the stalled Holloway Road, and Paulo felt a creeping sense of dread.

He had pushed London and work out of his head, and that had been wrong. But it was his only way of coping with the marathon that they had been asked to run before Little Wei could come home.

There had been countless interviews at the adoption agency, the orphanage and the British embassy. Their entire lives were under the microscope - their financial situation, their character references, their experience with children, their suitability for adoption. Everything had to be translated into English and Chinese, every evaluation, assessment and recommendation, and everything took far longer than expected.

The only thing that kept them sane were the moments of magic between all the bureaucracy and waiting, the days when they were allowed to take Little Wei for a walk in her new stroller around the Summer Palace and Beijing Zoo and Tiananmen Square, always back to Tiananmen, so big it felt that you were walking on the surface of the moon, pushing Little Wei until she slept, ignoring the gawping stares and smirks of locals and tourists alike. Spending time with their baby daughter, terrified at how much they loved her, no longer a family of two.

Now they were waiting for final approval from the Chinese authorities before they could apply for a temporary British passport for Little Wei, and the thought that they could lose her now was too much to bear. There had simply been no room in Paulo's head for fretting about his brother and the business. But by the time the taxi pulled up in front of Michael's house, his heart was pounding and his head was making up for lost time.

Michael opened the door in his pants and a filthy T-shirt. He was unshaven and bleary-eyed. As the two brothers hugged each other, Paulo thought there was something metallic about his breath. He followed Michael into his home. The TV was blaring some daytime game show. The air was thick and stale.

'Want a grappa?' Michael said, reaching for the bottle on the coffee table. 'Isn't it a bit early?'

Michael shrugged, and poured one for himself. There is no word in Italian for alcoholic, their father had told them.

Paulo looked around the living room. Chloe's playpen was still there, containing a scattering of toys. But where there was once the odd Teletubby underfoot, there were now beer cans and unwashed clothes. Paulo picked up Chloe's penguin and pressed the button in its synthetic paw. But it no longer worked. 'Where's Naoko and the baby?'

Michael slumped on the sofa. 'Osaka,' he said, his eyes drifting to the television's canned laughter. Paulo picked up the remote and turned it off. 'They went back to Japan?'

Michael looked at his brother, and nodded. Paulo sat down beside him, and took him in his arms, holding him very tight, rocking his brother as if they were still boys, and Michael had just lost his first fight.

'I told you, Michael,' Paulo said. 'I told you what would happen.' 'It's not as though I had lots of women,' Michael said,

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his voice choking. 'I had one more than you're allowed. One extra. One more than normal.'

Suddenly disgusted, Paulo eased his brother away, catching a blast of grappa full in the face. 'Maybe she'll come back.'

Michael rummaged around on the coffee table, lifted a pair of discarded combat trousers and found the papers he was looking for. He handed them to Paulo. It was a letter from a solicitor. Cold and formal words swam before Paulo's eyes. Unreasonable behaviour. Reasonable financial provision. Application for a divorce order. The family home. 'I am so sorry, Michael.'

This will never happen to me, Paulo thought. This only happens to men like my brother.

'You never can tell,' Michael said, as if reading his mind. 'It's never going to work for us the way it did for Dad. Staying home every night. Happy with one woman. I know you think I'm bad.' 'I love you, you klutz.'

'But you think I'm a bad man. But I'm not, Paulo. This could happen to anyone. It could happen to you.'

'Michael - I'll be back soon. I appreciate what you've done for me while I've been away. If you could just hold the fort a little longer.'

'Thought I'd take the day off today.' He picked up the remote control and aimed it at the TV. It erupted into brassy music and wild laughter. 'Business is a bit on the slow side.'

'That's fine. Whatever you think best. Listen, Michael. My credit cards are all maxed out. We're staying in Beijing and it's no cheaper than London, no cheaper than Hong Kong. But another few weeks and I'll be back with Jessica and the baby. Are you sure you're all right until then?' Michael refilled his glass. 'No problem,' he said. 'What else can happen?' twenty-four A cornflake hung from Little Wei's fringe.

Only Paulo was there to see it. Jessica was spending another day among the crowds queuing up at the British embassy in Jianguomenwai. Every day this week she had been down there, taking a ticket with her number on it, only to be told hours later that there was still no news. The passport application for Little Wei was not yet processed.

So in their modest room at the Beijing Sheraton, only Paulo saw the soggy scrap of cereal hanging from hair that had never been cut, and something about that cornflake hanging above the innocent perfection of that face tugged at his heart, and awoke feelings in him that he couldn't even name.

It was just a tiny moment in his daughter's life, a moment that would one day be lost for ever, but not until the day he died. He would always remember the cornflake in Little Wei's fringe.

And Paulo knew that he was becoming a different kind of man now that everything about his child - especially that scrap of cornflake in her wispy fringe - made him painfully aware of life in all its fleeting beauty. Paulo became a father and his heart was no longer his own.

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She was their daughter now. They had the paperwork in two languages to prove it. What kept them hanging on in Beijing, what stopped them from returning to their lives, were the queues and the bureaucrats and the endless hours at the British embassy in Jianguomenwai. So the little family waited in limbo, tired of tramping Tiananmen Square, staying in their room, the air conditioning humming.

Little Wei began squirming in her high chair, suddenly roaring with protest. Murmuring reassurance, Paulo deftly wiped her face, removed her Hello Kitty bib and lifted her from the chair. 'Time for your nap, gorgeous.'

With the baby in one arm, he went across to the window - thirty storeys below, the clogged ring roads of Beijing beeped and tooted in the dusty light - and drew the curtains. Little Wei's huge brown eyes blinked at him in the darkness.

Paulo gently laid her on the changing mat and checked her nappy, sniffing the air and feeling for wetness with a tentative finger. When he was happy that she hadn't done anything, he placed her in the cot that stood by Jessica's side of the bed. Then he went over to the CD player that nestled under the giant flat-screen television and put on Little Wei's only record. They had picked it up from a shopping mall on the Street of Eternal Peace. A collection of nursery rhymes that seemed unchanged from Paulo's own childhood. 'Bobby Shaftoe'. 'Incey Wincey Spider'. 'Bow Wow Says the Dog'. 'One, Two, Buckle My Shoe'. They seemed to come from some other century. Even to Paulo, their references to big fat hens and tending swine, masters and dames, misty moisty mornings and froggies a-courting seemed prehistoric. He couldn't imagine what Little Wei made of them. But as soon as she heard the opening chords of 'Bobby Shaftoe', she settled herself for rest.

***

Bobby Shaftoe's getting a bairn For to dangle on his arm 'In bis arms or on his knee Bobby Shaftoe loves me.'

Paulo lay on the bed and closed his eyes. Where did these strange rhymes come from? Were they Victorian? When it was clear that Little Wei liked this CD very much, he had looked inside to find out who had written these songs, and who was singing them. But there was no information inside, and it was as if the nursery rhymes were just there, and would always be there, for generation after generation.

Paulo slipped into sleep, wondering if Little Wei's own children would listen to the same words and tunes that soothed her in the Beijing Sheraton's cot. Then the next thing he knew he was waking up because Jessica was bursting into the room, shouting and laughing, waving a red British passport, and inside the passport there was a mug shot of a child who looked like a rosy Buddha, chubby-cheeked and poker-faced, staring quite calmly at the world.

All the excitement woke the baby, and Jessica picked her up, smothering her with kisses, as Paulo rubbed the sleep from his eyes and tried to remember what he wanted to show his wife. Then it suddenly came back to him. But when he looked, he saw the cornflake in his daughter's hair was gone, vanished for ever, and next to the enormity of Jessica's news he felt silly trying to explain the feelings it had stirred in him.

So he just watched his wife holding his daughter and smiled, as Jessica laughed and showed the baby her passport, reading her name again and again. Wei Jewell Barest. A lot of adoptive parents gave their Chinese babies Western names, but Jessica had always said that wasn't necessary. She had a beautiful name already. All those nations and cultures and histories to make this

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one little girl, Paulo thought, and he felt like exploding with pride. My daughter, the future. It was no place to be fat.

The magazine was staffed by fiercely trendy young people, or by older people who had been trendy for twenty years or more. The youngsters were uniformly pale, as though a thousand nightclubs had bleached their skin, while the older ones were strangely discoloured, almost orange in hue - their skin colour appearing to have been artificially darkened, while their hair colour appeared to have been cosmetically lightened.

But they all had that starved look of the terminally funky, and they stared at Cat curiously as she waddled among their desks, eight months pregnant, twenty kilos heavier than her normal weight and horribly self-conscious about her new walk - this strangely side-to-side rocking motion that made her feel like a giant bloated crab. She collapsed, gasping for breath, in the chair opposite the features editor.

All the bun-in-the-oven magazines and books made the pregnant woman's changing body sound like some empowering earth mother experience - in titles such as You're Pregnant! and 40 Amazing Weeks! and Congratulations! You're Up the Duff! there were references beyond counting to 'y°ur new sexy curves'. But Cat didn't feel gorgeous, or empowered, or deliciously curvy. For the first time in her life, she felt frumpy. Puffy, distended and uncomfortable. She felt as conspicuous as a whale at a Weightwatchers class.

At night her enlarged breasts made her feel like she was sharing her bed with two fat strangers who couldn't keep still. There was only one compensation for turning into the Elephant Woman, and that was the tiny enchanted kicks inside that seemed to come whenever she lay down to rest. 'Been looking at your clippings,' said the features editor. A mere slip of a lad in retro Adidas, far too cool to smile.

'I'm happy to do other stuff,' Cat said, touching her tummy with that instinctive triple stroke. 'It doesn't have to be restaurant reviews. I know you've already got a restaurant critic' 'Travis, yeah? How do you like Travis?'

'Oh he's great, Travis. Oh, I love him. So… waspish. The way he manages to sound utterly disgusted with everything.'

'Yeah, he's good.' He scratched his goatee thoughtfully. 'I'd like to offer you something. But it's a bit awkward at the moment.' 'Why's that?' A smile at last. Like an anorexic shark.

'How can I put it? Because I can't commission something from someone who is going to have a baby within the next half hour. Listen - I've got kids myself. Two boys - three and one.'

Cat thought, well, who would have believed it? Sometimes it seems like I'm the only person in the world who's having a baby.

'Soon you're going to be way too busy to knock out a thousand words on some clever little fusion joint. Don't you know that?'

'But I need a job. And I can't work in restaurants because it's all too late

She stopped herself. He was not a bad guy. She had warmed to him when she found he had children. But everything about his pained, embarrassed expression said one thing. Not my problem, lady. Cat felt as though the working world was suddenly pass-

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ing her by. She also felt old, and although there were more ancient people than her in this office - all those forty-year-old groovers, Ibiza veterans and rave-hardened E-heads -they somehow seemed younger than Cat, with their bare midriffs and their unencumbered lives and artificially lightened hair.

Cat got up to go, touching her stomach again. Down, up, down. That almost imperceptible movement that said, don't worry, don't worry, don't worry, baby. Poppy sat in her high chair, eating junior yoghurt with her fingers. A small plastic plate of grapes sat waiting for her on the table, just out of reach, the treat for finishing her breakfast, or at least successfully smearing it all over her face.

The nanny, a large Jamaican called Lovely, chuckled approvingly as Poppy pushed another tiny fistful of mush in the vague direction of her mouth.

At first Lovely had seemed to be everything Megan could have hoped for in a nanny. Looking after Poppy seemed like far more than just a job to her - she seemed genuinely mad about the child. Megan had been touched to see that Lovely even had a framed photograph of Poppy in the small guest room that she stayed in during the week, before returning on Friday night to her own enormous brood in the Scotland District. Lovely was perfect. There was only one tiny, tiny problem.

Megan just wished that Lovely could remember which one of them was Poppy's mother. She watched Lovely popping a grape into Poppy's mouth. 'Lovely?' 'Yes, ma'am?' 'Do you remember what we agreed about grapes?'

Silence. Poppy contemplated her mother, her jaws chomping on the grape. 'We said - grapes must be peeled.' 'Lots of good things in the skin.' 'Yes, but she's too small.' 'One year old.'

'But she was early,' Megan said, starting to get rattled. 'We have been through this so many times, haven't we? With premature babies, you don't count from when they were born, you count from when they were due.'

Kirk came into the kitchen, shouldering a large kitbag full of diving equipment. He kissed his daughter on the head.

'We've got a night dive at the Sandy Crack,' he said. 'Don't wait up. Bye, Lovely.' 'Bye, Mr Kirk.'

Megan strode over to the table and snatched up a carton of fruit juice. 'And what's this?'

'Apple juice,' Lovely said, sulky and resentful. She tenderly wiped Poppy's face clean, and gently lifted her from the high chair.

'Lovely,' Megan said, 'this juice has got sugar in it. Sugar. Poppy has the sugar-free apple juice. I thought we agreed

They were watching her. Her daughter and her nanny. Holding on to each other, and staring at Megan with exactly the same look in their eyes.

Their look said, yes, that's all very well, complaining about sugar-free juice and peeled grapes and all the rest of it. But you're not here all day. Are you, Mummy? 'Lower your pants,' Megan said, pulling on a pair of plastic gloves. The woman gingerly lowered the bottom half of her bikini.

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One buttock resembled an albino porcupine - pink, round and covered with countless black spikes.

'It looks like you sat on a sea urchin,' Megan said. 'You can pull up your pants. I'll write you a prescription for the pain.'

Megan began gathering up her things, glancing out of the window at the bright sails of the windsurfers. A dive boat was heading towards the hotel, its red flag with the white diagonal stripe fluttering in the breeze. She wondered if Kirk was on board. 'That's it?' the woman said.

She was in her mid-thirties, tanned and toned, expensive highlights in her hair, no doubt some kind of mover and shaker back in London. Accustomed to getting what she wanted. Megan saw a lot of her kind in Barbados.

'Painkillers are the best thing for you,' Megan said. 'With these sea urchin spikes, it's much better if you just let them dissolve. Trying to pull them out will do you more harm than good.'

The woman straightened herself up. No doubt she was quite formidable in an important conference. She didn't look quite as impressive with a bunch of sea urchin spikes in her bum.

'Please don't be offended, but are you a proper doctor?' she asked. 'Or are you just some kind of - I don't know -hotel nurse?'

Megan smiled. 'I'm a proper doctor. But if you're unhappy with my diagnosis, by all means get a cab to take you to the A amp; E at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, in Bridgetown.' The woman looked appalled. 'A local hospital?'

'They're very good at the Queen Elizabeth. Get them to take a look at you. Get your bottom a second opinion.'

Out of the window she could see that the dive boat had stopped near the shore. Figures in wet suits climbed or lumped into the shallow water. Kirk was among them. Good. They could have lunch together. Megan smiled pleasantly at the woman. 'Enjoy the rest of your holiday. I hope you feel lutter soon.'

The dive centre was on the far side of the hotel's beach. Megan walked through the palatial lobby, returning the greetings of the hotel staff, and down to the sand. She felt the sea winds on her face, and took a deep breath. This was \ better life.

But when she approached the dive centre she saw that Kirk was sitting on the sand with a girl in a wet suit.

She looked like one of those Swedish girls that came to the island - sporty, independent, and younger than Megan could ever remember being. Kirk reached out and pushed a tangled strand of wet blonde hair from the girl's face, and it made Megan catch her breath. Before they could see her, Megan turned on her heels and walked back up the beach.

Then she drove clear across the island to the east coast, parked her little Vitara on a hill above Bathsheba and spent the next few hours watching the Atlantic smashing itself against the rock formations. She couldn't go home just yet. It wasn't time to take over from the nanny. The flight from Beijing to London takes ten hours.

The British Airways girl at the check-in desk must have taken a shine to Little Wei, who was effortlessly making the transformation from cute baby to radiant toddler, because the three of them found they had been upgraded to the business-class cabin.

Jessica had visions of cuddling the child and sipping champagne all the way home. But it was like travelling with a wild monkey. Little Wei screamed when she was strapped to Jessica's

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lap for take-off. She howled with outrage when she was prevented from staggering into the cockpit. Three months on from that first meeting, her walking was becoming proficient, and she liked to try it out at every opportunity.

And although Paulo rocked her and held her and told her that everything was going to be all right, she sobbed her heart out during those endless hours above the black mountains of Mongolia where time ran backwards and the day seemed to go on for ever.

'Jesus Christ,' muttered a fat businessman who had had one glass of complimentary claret too many.

Paulo, still holding Little Wei, turned on him, his face white with fury.

'Babies are allowed to cry, you know. Babies are allowed to cry. Pm sorry if she's disturbing you, I really am, but babies are allowed to cry. And if you have got anything to say about my daughter - then you say it to me. You don't talk about her under your breath. You say it to my face or you don't say it at all. Understand?'

The frightened executive retreated behind his John Grisham. Paulo turned away, shaking with emotion as he rocked Little Wei.

Jessica had never seen him so angry. Her husband was a gentle, quiet man - that was one of the reasons she had fallen in love with him.

But when the fat executive in business class complained about Little Wei's crying, Paulo had found a ferocity inside him that she had never seen before.

And the funny thing, Jessica thought, is that it seemed like the most natural thing in the world. twenty-five It was hurricane country.

They were born somewhere to the east of Barbados, and though they could come at any time from June to November, they usually passed by far to the north of the island. But not always.

Megan parked her Vitara on a hill above Holetown. She had just picked up Poppy from the Plantation Club Nursery, and the child was now happily playing in her car seat with a purple dinosaur called Barney. Megan looked from her daughter to the skies out to sea, and watched them turning black.

The clouds rolled and churned towards land, and already the rain lashed against her window, and the winds whipped and howled through the bending palms.

'I don't know what to do, Poppy,' she said under her breath. 'I don't know if we should try to get home.'

The streets were already emptying. The Bajans were gathering their children, putting up their storm windows and taking cover. An old woman with a small child under one arm and a baby goat under the other tapped on Megan's window.

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'You want to stay with us, miss? You and the little girl? Until it passes? This one looks like it's coming our way.' 'Thanks, but I think I'm going to try to get home.' The woman nodded and turned away.

Megan stuck the car in drive, and slowly made her way down to St James, afraid she would skid on the torn palm leaves and sugar cane scattered across the road. The wind in the trees took on a shrieking pitch, and for the first time she was frightened, realising there wasn't much time to make it back to Bridgetown.

She glanced in her rear-view mirror and saw Poppy chatting to her dinosaur. Maybe if she was alone she would have pushed for home, but not with the baby in the back. Megan decided they would take refuge in one of the hotels until the hurricane either hit, or missed them and headed on to Martinique and Dominica.

She was nearly at the hotel when she saw the dive boat. It had been caught unawares by the storm, or perhaps had been at one of the further dive sites, and now bobbed uncertainly towards the shore, its red and white flag madly flapping. Was it his boat? Megan felt her heart shiver.

She parked her car and quickly unstrapped Poppy from her seat. The hotel lobby was almost deserted but there was a young woman Megan knew on the reception desk. 'Take her for five minutes, will you?'

Megan placed Poppy in her arms, and the child started to complain, but began smiling when the woman began extravagantly admiring the purple dinosaur.

Megan ran and slid over the wet stone floor of the lobby towards the beach. The wooden shutters were already up on the tiny poolside bar. A blue beach umbrella tumbled past her and suddenly took flight. She looked out to sea, filled with panic when she saw that the dive boat had gone. Moving slowly now, Megan trudged away from the hotel, towards the dive centre, the wind bringing tears to her eyes and the sand stinging her bare legs.

The dive centre looked abandoned. The jet skis and sea kayaks and the bright sails of the windsurfers had all been pulled up the shore, away from the storm. But it wasn't locked, and there was some kind of movement inside, and that's where she found him with the Swedish tourist, the same girl she had seen before, in the unlit back of the dive centre among the clutter of empty tanks and wet suits and the tangled rubber tubes of the regulators.

They were finished by then, and back in their T-shirts and shorts, and not even holding each other. But Megan couldn't kid herself. She knew what this meant. It meant that she was all alone again, all alone with her daughter.

And, Megan thought, there's nobody more alone than someone who is alone with a baby. In the showroom window of Baresi Brothers, in full view of the busy north London street, two youths in hooded tops were working on the door of an Alfa Romeo.

Paulo stood on the pavement, dumbfounded, waiting for his brother to appear with a baseball bat in his hands, or at least a mobile phone, and a call to 999. But there was no sign of Michael, and the two hooded youths went about their business uninterrupted.

Paulo hammered on the plate glass. But by now they had the door open, and the sound of the alarm drowned out his protests. By the time he entered the showroom, they were in the car, and the one in the driver's seat was trying a selection of keys in the ignition. 'Hey! I've called the law, you little bastards!'

They peered at him from under their hoods, malignant creatures from Mordor, and suddenly bailed out of the car.

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Paulo had been cautiously edging towards them and now he lurched backwards as they charged at him, the one with the jemmy taking a wild, warning swing at his head. Then they fled, and he let them go, happy to see the back of them, and he was all alone in the plundered showroom.

There were only two cars left. The vandalised Alfa Romeo, and an old Maserati. Two Ferraris and a Lamborghini Gallardo were gone. Half their stock was missing. The good, extremely expensive half. It had either been sold or stolen. They were either rich or ruined.

He found his brother in the office. Flat on his back, an empty bottle of grappa still in his hands. Paulo got down on his knees and shook him. 'Where's the stock, Michael?' 'What? Eh? Paulo?'

'Tell me you sold it. You sold it, right? Everything we have worked for was in that stock.' Michael sat up, groaning. 'We had a bit of a break-in.' Paulo picked up the bottle and dashed it against the wall. 'You stupid, stupid bastard, Michael.' 'Relax. We're insured, aren't we?'

'You think they'll pay for this? You pissed out of your head, and half of the wide boys in Holloway in our shop window? The insurance boys will think we're in on it. We'll be lucky to stay out of prison.' 'Well,' Michael said. 'Well - what?'

'Three months you've been gone. Three months in China. Three months on my own, with one fleeting visit, and that was just to make yourself feel better about being away.'

'You told me you could handle it. You told me you could look after the business while I was gone.' He stood up and paced the room, tearing at his hair. 'Jesus, Michael, what's going to happen to us? Fve got a family to support.' Michael's eyes were mean, jealous slits. 'Lucky you.'

They had nothing when they started this business. A black cab driver and a minicab herbert, trying their luck with a loan from the bank. And now they had nothing again. He had wanted the best for his daughter. That was the plan. A lifetime of the very best. And he had let her down before they had fully unpacked their suitcases.

There was a sound in the showroom and Paulo stepped outside the office. A heavy-set man with close-cropped hair and a thick pink neck was looking at the damaged door on the Alfa Romeo.

'We're closed,' Paulo said, raising his voice above the alarm. 'Michael Baresi?'

Paulo suddenly knew the man was Ginger's husband. He thought of his brother drunk and broken on the floor, and his family scattered and gone, and he couldn't find it in himself to let one more bad thing happen to Michael. So Paulo took a breath, and then released it with a sigh. 'Yeah, that's me,' he said. 'I'm Mike Baresi.'

Paulo watched the fist coming and would really have liked to get out of the way, but didn't seem to have the time, and felt it hammer full flush on his mouth, something hard and metallic - a wedding ring? that would be funny, wouldn't it? - splitting open his bottom lip. The blow spun Paulo around and almost knocked him off his feet. When he turned back to Ginger's husband, the man was waiting to say something. It was almost a speech.

'She's back with me and the kids now. I don't know what you did to turn her head. But that's not her. This - all this - is over.'

When the man had gone, Paulo locked the showroom and managed to disconnect the alarm on the Alfa Romeo. He

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went back into the office, and found Michael quietly crying. Paulo put his arms around his brother, and kissed him lightly on the head. 'I've lost her, Paulo. Lost the love of my life.'

At first Paulo thought his brother was talking about Naoko, the good wife who had left him, or perhaps even Ginger, the bored wife who had fucked his brains out, and was now going back to her husband.

But of course not. The love of his brother's life? Paulo had her pictures in a drawer somewhere. It could only be Chloe. Cat stopped at the window of a charity shop, her eyes drawn to an old-fashioned-looking pram.

It was the kind of thing you saw in black-and-white photographs of uniformed nannies pushing their charges in Berkeley Square between the wars.

Not a stroller or a pushchair, but a real perambulator. A retro product, of course - a modern version of the original, the way they made contemporary versions of the Beetle and the Mini. But Cat thought that was no bad thing.

She went inside and admired the pram. It was reassuringly solid and secure. It was all the things she wanted for her baby, all the things that she felt were missing from her life. But it was huge - it would be like pushing your baby around in a panzer tank. Cat could envisage struggling with the pram firmly wedged in the doorway of Starbucks, the baby howling, everyone staring. 'Cat?'

Then Rory was by her side, a shy, surprised smile on his face, and at first she thought he must have been following her. But then she saw the two bags he was carrying, stuffed full of frayed white pyjamas. Karate kit. 'Just dropping these off. Stuff my students have grown out of. Sometimes kids are put off starting a martial art because of the uniform they need. You think of getting this pram?' 'Just looking.'

She could feel her cheeks burning. Shopping for her unborn child in a charity shop. What had happened to her? She felt like she had been pushed to the side of her own life.

'Stuff like this - I'm really happy to help. Whatever's happened between us. Whatever you think of me. I want to help. All you have to do is ask.' Rory stared dubiously at the giant perambulator. 'Maybe we could get something new…'

'I don't see second-hand stuff as a sign of failure,' she snapped. 'I've got two younger sisters. They grew up in my old clothes. Didn't do them any harm.' 'Of course not,' he said mildly. 'So - is everything fine?'

She touched her stomach, and it seemed like the strangest thing in the world, and yet also the most natural. This new life, joined to her, growing from her. Part of her that would live on long after she had gone. 'The baby's doing well.'

She saw the relief on his face. Someone who has been a parent, she thought. Someone who has some understanding of the thousand things that can go wrong. 'The scans have all been fine.' 'Don't shut me out of this, Cat.'

He was a good man. She could see that. It was why she had loved him. But it wasn't enough. Wanting to do the right thing just wasn't enough. Because what would happen when he left them? Her heart would turn bitter, and there would be one more fucked-up kid in the world whose parents hated each other.

'And I told you,' she said. 'I don't want someone who can't go the distance. They talk about women being too old

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to have babies, but I think there comes a point when a man is too old. Maybe not biologically. But emotionally. Psychologically. They don't have the puff. Know what I mean?'

She saw the exasperation and resentment flare up in him - it's my child too, written all over his face - but then it was gone, replaced by something that he was not prepared to give up on.

'I admit I had some doubts, Cat. I can't help that. But I don't think that's such a bad thing. I don't think anyone should have a child lightly. You want a lifetime guarantee. But nobody can give you that.' 'Go on, tell me to buy a toaster if I want guarantees.'

'You know what I realised? Families are messy. Even when they're good - they're messy. Even when they're good. Do you need money?' 'Can I help anyone?'

It was the old charity shop lady, peering at them through bifocals. T brought in these,' Rory said.

The old lady peered into the bags. 'Ooh, they look very with it,' she said, trying the expression on for size. 'Very bling-bling.'

'Actually they're clothes for karate,' Rory explained. 'I've had them dry-cleaned, but some of them are a bit worn out, I'm afraid.'

'Oh, kids are happy with anything,' chuckled the charity shop lady. 'That's the thing about kids - they'll take anything you give them.'

Cat thought the old woman's smile was sweet as a child's face on Christmas Day. 'What happened to your mouth?' Jessica said, tucking Little Wei under one arm so that she could touch his split lip. Paulo flinched under her fingers. 'A jealous husband punched me in the face because his wife has been playing uway.'

Jessica stared at him for a moment, and then she laughed. 'You're funny. He's a funny daddy, isn't he?'

Little Wei gurgled at him. She was carrying her usual three dummies - one in her rosebud mouth, and one each in her tiny fists. They were all luminous yellow, and when she was sleeping in her cot, which was pushed up tight against Jessica's side of their bed, the dummies would sparkle and gleam in the dark like golden fireflies.

She was a calm, happy child, and her addiction to dummies was the only sign of some nameless insecurity buried deep inside. It would go in time, Jessica believed. They would chase out the fear. T was about to put her to bed.'

T can see that. All dressed up, the pair of you. Little Wei in her pyjamas. And you looking like Suzie Wong.'

Jessica was wearing a black Chinese cheongsam with red trim embossed around the high neck and across one shoulder. It was as tight as a surgical glove, with a slit up one side that reached all the way to her hip. She had taken to wearing the dress when putting Little Wei down for the night. 'Do you think it's silly?'

He smiled. 'You look terrific. To be honest, I think maybe she's a little young to appreciate it. You know. This nod towards her culture.'

It wasn't just the dress. In the hall there was a scroll of Chinese calligraphy where there had once been a framed poster of Gustav Klimt's The Kiss. Masks from the Beijing opera adorned the kitchen. And on either end of the shelf in Little Wei's nursery, sandwiching the talking frogs and dancing dinosaurs and effigies of Winnie the Pooh, there

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were two red Chinese lions, watching over this child who had somehow found herself in a leafy London suburb. And Paulo's heart ached because he knew it would all have to come down when they moved, all those lovingly placed things would have to be put into cardboard boxes when they moved to some other place because he had failed them.

'Is it mad?' Jessica said, touching the high neck of the cheongsam. 'Maybe it is. But we don't know anything about her. We don't know who her mother was. We don't know when she was born. Today might be her first birthday. Or maybe it was last month.' Little Wei looked at Jessica, as if she was following the conversation. Jessica absent-mindedly stroked her daughter's face. 'We don't know, Paulo. And the thing is - we are never going to know. Neither is she. But one thing she will always be certain of - she's not really our child. She's Chinese. And I want her to be proud of that.'

Little Wei stared up at them with her wide-set brown eyes, and Paulo wondered, how the hell could anyone give her away? How could anyone give any child away? And how could I let her down so badly?

'You love her as much as any real mother could,' he said. 'More than her real mother. That's what counts.'

'I just want her to be proud of who she is, proud of her heritage, proud of where she came from. I don't want her to feel like it's second best. Because, you see, I know what it's like to feel second best.'

Paulo touched his wife's side, and felt her skin beneath the silk of the dress, and he knew that he would never stop wanting her.

'You've never been second best. Not in my eyes. No one else comes even close.'

'And after that, after we teach her to be proud of where she comes from, all we have to do is love her. Then it should work.' 'It will work.'

And he believed it now. They had travelled across the world to find each other. He couldn't believe that it was just a coincidence. It was meant to be. Born wrong stomach -find right door. If only he could have kept his side of the bargain. If only he could have done his job. Then everything would have been perfect.

The three of them climbed the stairs. The house finally felt like a home. It had taken so long, but at last they had found their place. And now it will all have to go, thought Paulo bitterly, feeling like a failure for the first time in his life. He remembered when he was a child, and had just lost his first fight in the school playground, and that crushing sense of shame that comes when you have been on the wrong end of a beating. Michael had attempted to restore some of his brother's pride by ambushing Paulo's tormentor at the bus stop. But now they were grown-ups and there was no one to heal his battered pride. Now he was on his own.

Little Wei began whimpering when they were in the darkness of the bedroom. Jessica made soothing noises as she rubbed gel on the baby's gums where the new teeth were pushing through, and Paulo quietly left the room because he knew that his wife would stay with their daughter until she was sleeping.

When Jessica finally came back to the living room, he was waiting for her. He wanted to get it over with. The terrible news that he had let their little family down. 'Jess, we may have to tighten our belts.' She nodded. 'Okay.'

'The business is not good. Michael - well, it's all gone wrong while I've been away. It looks like the business is over.'

'What about the house?' A moment of fear in her eyes. 'Can we keep the house?'

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With the baby, the large house and its huge garden had just started to make sense. But with the business gone, the mortgage payments suddenly seemed astronomical, a mountain to climb every month. Paulo hung his head. 'The house is going to have to go, Jess.'

Jessica nodded, letting it sink in. But she didn't look afraid any more. Paulo was the one who was scared.

'The mortgage - I just don't think we can do it every month. Not on what I'm going to be earning.' 'I understand. What are you going to do?'

He shrugged, the sour taste of humiliation in his mouth, as if he were undecided. But he knew what he would have to do. He would have to go all the way back to the start. 'All I know is cars. If I can't sell them, then I'll drive one.' She reached out and touched him. 'It's okay. Really. You mean a black cab?' 'Yes. A black cab again.'

'What's wrong with that? London black cabs are the best taxis in the world. You told me that the day I met you. Remember that? You were driving one.' Paulo smiled. 'I remember everything.'

'Don't worry,' she said, her voice full of feeling. For so long he had been the strong one - encouraging her, urging her never to give up, to keep fighting. And now it was Jessica's turn. 'We'll get a smaller place. Move back to the city. Be closer to our families.' 'But the baby would love the garden.'

His voice was calm, yet there was dread in his eyes, real despair in his words. The fear of being poor again, of doing a job he hated, and coming home from work so tired that he fell asleep in front of the television set. Then getting up the next day and doing it all over again. The fear of turning into his father. 'She can play in the park,' Jessica said. 'But Jessie - you love the house.' 'And I'll love the new one too.'

He looked at his wife and felt like he might come apart tonight. He heard his father's voice from long ago - you boys will never get rich working for someone else. The thing he wanted most in this world was to be a good provider for his family. He had been proud of making so much money in recent years. He had thought that's what made him a man. And now it was all over. Now he was going to have to find other ways to be a man.

'I've let you down, Jessie. You and the baby. What kind of man am I? You deserve better than me.'

She smiled. 'You could never let us down,' she said, taking his face in her hands, and he saw the thread of steel in her.

From the moment he first saw her, he had wanted to protect her, to take care of her. But perhaps all along she had been taking care of him.

'You think I love you because you're a good earner? Because we had a big house? I love you because you're kind, and you've stuck by me, and because you're not bad-looking, in a certain light. You've always been there, Paulo. All those years wanting a baby. All the tests and the disappointments. You never gave up on me, did you?'

He turned his face away from her, ashamed of the tears in his eyes. He had so much to be ashamed of tonight. But she held his face, and she wouldn't let him go.

'Why would I do a thing like that?' he said, his voice choking.

She came into his arms and he again felt the curve of her body beneath the silk of the cheongsam.

'You could maybe keep the dress on for a while,' he said, all the hurt and humiliation of the night giving way to

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something stronger. They looked at each other. 'If you're not too tired.'

'I'm not tired at all,' she said, getting that sly, sleepy look in her eyes.

It was good to make love again just as they had all those years ago, with their blood up and the lights on and their clothes all over the place, relaxed and excited all at once, and not worrying a damn about the future of the human race. twenty-six Kirk paced the floor of their bedroom, watching Megan pack her bags.

'Don't go,' he said. 'Don't leave me. Please don't take my daughter away from me.'

Now she had seen the ending, Megan felt strangely calm. She looked at Poppy's collection of swimsuits. She wouldn't need all those in London. One would do. She threw a frilly pink number in the case, and left the rest.

'You knew what I was like,' he said, his mood suddenly turning. 'Look how we met. Hardly a long courtship, was it? What do you expect from a guy you fuck on the first date?'

And then there were all her clothes. Her wardrobe hail taken a decidedly tropical turn over the last few months. She wouldn't need all these T-shirts and shorts. Not m London.

'You can't support yourself and our baby,' he said. 'On the peanuts the NHS pays you? Even the poor cows drawing benefits on the Sunny View Estate will look down on you.' We'll survive, she thought. I'm qualified and I've got my

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family and we will survive. Although I'm not quite sure how. It was all going to be different, living on her own.

But she didn't feel the need to explain any of this to Kirk. There was an aching sadness in leaving, but this was a good thing. She didn't feel the need to explain anything any more.

'You would give up this life for that clapped-out city you come from?' he said, shouting now. 'You would give up the sunshine and beaches for those miserable streets and the rain and the bloody tube trains?'

There was so much that she could leave behind. Once she had accepted that she no longer had to carry all this surplus luggage, the sensation was actually quite liberating. All these summer clothes. All these swimsuits. And this man.

'We haven't had sex for months,' he said, pleading again. 'You and me, Megan - a couple whose entire relationship was built on what we did in the sack. And I'm sorry, I'm so sorry - but I missed that human contact. You can understand that, can't you? Some people can live without it. And some people can't. She was Swedish, in her twenties, and wagging her little tail at me. What was I meant to do?'

Megan closed her suitcase. She didn't need all this stuff. They could travel light. It was the best way. She turned to face him, trying to explain it.

'I just think we should have loved each other,' she said. 'You're basically a good guy, and you've been a good friend - despite your Swede. But that was what was wrong, and it was wrong all along. If two people are going to have a child together, then they should love each other.'

Then Megan went downstairs and took her daughter from the nanny. 'Everything all right?' said Jack Jewell.

What could Cat tell her dad? Could she reveal that the only knickers she could now squeeze into resembled a circus tent? Or that she was so constipated she felt that she had a plug up her bottom? Or that she had a few concerns about vaginal tears? You can't tell your father all that stuff. 'Everything's fine,' she said. 'Really? You look tired.'

'The baby takes a salsa class every time I nod off.' She smiled. 'But I'm fine. The baby's fine. So everything's great.'

Jack staggered into the flat, loaded down with bags containing new baby clothes. They opened them up on the coffee table, laughing at all these strangely mature numbers like a little denim jacket embossed with hippy flowers, and tiny white Nike trainers, and doll-size camouflage combat trousers, and Cat felt her heart fill up because the moment seemed as though it needed more people. Cat and her father didn't feel like enough people to enjoy the baby clothes.

'Are you okay, darling?' Jack said, his handsome old face creased with anxiety.

She nodded, accepting his handkerchief. Was her father the last man in the world to carry a handkerchief? Look at him, she thought, smiling at his blazer and tie, loving him for the formality of the clothes he put on for a casual visit to her flat. 'You look very smart, Dad. As always.'

He ran the tips of his fingers down a few inches of silk tie.

'Hannah's been trying to get me to loosen up a little. Dress more - well, like this.' He indicated the funky baby clothes before them. 'Maybe the baby can give me a few style tips.'

'I like the way you look,' Cat said. 'The only Englishman who would never own a baseball cap.'

Jack winced theatrically. 'Can't stand the bloody things. Make me look like Eminem's grandfather.' Cat laughed. It had always amused his daughters that Jack

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Jewell dressed like Edward VIII, and yet could always come up with the appropriate cultural reference. 'How is Hannah? Still seeing her, are you?' He seemed embarrassed. 'Oh, yes. Still seeing her.' 'I like Hannah.' Cat kept her tone neutral. 'She's nice.'

'Yes - well. I like her myself. Like her quite a lot. She's a very special girl. Woman, I mean.'

Cat watched her father carefully, as the penny slowly dropped. 'Well, that's great, Dad.'

He nodded. It was almost as if he was working up the nerve to ask Cat for her consent. Would he do the same with Megan and Jessica? Or was it only her?

'I wonder how you would feel if we, you know, got hitched?'

Cat didn't know what to say. Ever since the break-up of his marriage, there had always been women in her father's life. Lots of them. She knew that. But over the last twenty-five years she had grown used to the idea that he would never marry again.

'If you think it will make you happy, Dad,' she said, choosing her words carefully. 'You didn't land us with a stepmother when we were growing up, and we were always grateful for that. But we're off your hands now. You deserve to be happy.' 'Hannah makes me happy.' 'But - no, it's none of my business.' 'What is it?' She leaned towards him, and she felt the baby stir inside.

'Aren't you afraid that it could end again? Doesn't that frighten you? Your first wife left you, didn't she? What if the new one does the same?'

He shrugged. 'That's the chance you have to take, isn't it? That's the chance you take every time. If we were always afraid of being hurt and humiliated, we would never love anyone.'

Cat smiled, folding up the clothes her baby would wear. He will look like a little man, she thought. Like a little man before he can even walk. 'You're braver than me,' she told her father. Jack Jewell looked shocked. 'Nobody's braver than you, Cat.' She laughed, shaking her head.

'It's true,' he insisted. 'I remember coming back from a shoot when you were about twelve. A year or so after your mother left. Jessica and Megan were in the street. Some boys had been bullying them. Making fun of Jessie.'

'I remember that,' Cat said. 'Jessica was wearing a tutu. Wearing all her ballerina clothes, and crying. She thought the other kids would be impressed by her tutu.'

'You came storming out of the house in an apron and yellow gloves, and you chased those lads from one end of the street to the other. I thought you were the bravest person I'd ever seen. And not just because of that. Every day when the three of you were growing up.'

'That's not bravery, that's just getting on with it. And I liked taking care of my sisters.' How honest could she be with him? 'It made me feel stronger.'

He watched her folding the baby clothes he had bought for her unborn child.

'I'm sorry it wasn't easier. I wish it had been more settled. I wish I'd chosen someone who would have stayed.'

She laughed, trying to raise his spirits. She didn't want him to keep living with all that old sadness.

'But if you had married someone else, then I wouldn't exist, would I? Neither would Megan or Jessica.'

'No, you wouldn't exist if I'd married someone else.' He smiled, getting up to go. 'And that would be terrible.'

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When they opened the front door they saw the brand-new pram parked in the hall.

It was a 3-series Mamas and Papas stroller, a metallic-blue three-wheeler. Cat thought it looked like something that Paulo might sell. Sleek and low slung, with the promise of speed. Cat pretended that she had been expecting the delivery.

Then she kissed her father goodbye and wheeled the pushchair into the flat, parking it at the end of her bed where she could watch it gleaming in the darkness as she lay awake all night stroking her stomach, and waiting for her baby. Paulo had forgotten what it was like to live in a flat.

The bass of someone else's music. The smell of somebody else's meals. Footsteps on the ceiling. Laughter from under your feet. All these other lives seeping through the wall. The neighbours above liked Coldplay and lamb curry. Paulo had come to loathe Coldplay and lamb curry.

Jessica was bathing Little Wei, her sleeves rolled up to her elbows, building a mountain of bubbles for the child to play in. Little Wei waddled from one end of the bath to the other, her toddler's potbelly sticking out before her, carefully arranging her collection of plastic ducks and frogs and Teletubbies on the edge of the bath.

Paulo smiled for the pair of them, although he wasn't smiling inside, and kissed them goodbye. Night was coming and it was time for him to go to work.

The door of their home felt like cardboard. Such a flimsy protection against all the rubbish in the world outside. He double locked it behind him and came down the staircase hearing the sounds and smells of all those other lives that seemed to overlap with the life of his family. At the foot of the stairs was a discarded gas oven sprouting some kind of green fungus and a mountain of mail addressed to the tenants of long ago. We have to get out of here, he told himself as he unlocked his black cab. / have to get us out.

Not because I am a big-shot businessman who should be working for himself. Not because I am too good for this place and these people with their Coldplay and their lamb curry.

But because I am a father, Paulo thought. Because I've got a family.

He liked working at night. He liked it that there was less traffic on the roads, and you could drive, and keep going, and not be stuck in the fumes and the clogged city.

Paulo started the evening down in the City, cruising Cheapside and Moorgate for fares, picking up all the financial types heading for the stations or the suburbs, then he moved across to the West End, which kept going until the middle of the night, when there would be a dead period of a couple of hours before dawn when the first overnight flights started landing at Heathrow from Hong Kong and Barbados.

In that time when the night had stopped but the new day had yet to begin, Paulo would head for the cab drivers' refuge that was hidden under the Westway, a place as exclusive in its own way as any gentlemen's club in St James's. There was a car wash, a garage and a 24-hour canteen that wouldn't let you through the door without a black cab driver's badge.

Under the Westway, Paulo would clean out the back of his cab. Vomit. Beer cans. The odd high-heeled shoe. Condoms, both used and unwrapped. Brown scraps of kebab and pearly puddles of semen. Mobile phones, umbrellas and - once - a Mr Love Muscle vibrator. He never talked to Jessica about what was left in the back of his cab.

When the taxi was clean, Paulo would have a bacon sandwich and a cup of tea with the other drivers, smiling when they called him 'butter boy' - meaning a new cabbie who

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was taking the bread and butter from more experienced drivers - and he would listen to their banter.

'So I picks this working tart up on Park Lane and when I gets to her place she's sitting there with her legs open and she says to me, Can you take it out of that? And I says, Haven't you got anything smaller?'

There were times when Paulo thought it was a great life, and that it would always be enough for him. When his stomach was full of steaming sweet tea and bacon sandwiches smeared with HP sauce, and his cab was newly cleaned and the laughter of the other drivers was ringing in his ears, Paulo would get in his taxi and feel like the city belonged to him. London was beautiful. He saw that now.

To see the moon on the great parks, or the sun rising over the docks, or the early-morning mist on the river, and to witness all these things when there was no one else around to see them, to have it all spread out before you while you were driving alone through the empty city, was to feel completely alive.

That's when he was happy to be driving again, happy to be constantly moving, happy to be living a life that was free of VAT men and tax inspectors and all the soul-numbing bureaucracy of the small businessman. Paulo worked all night, and there were moments when he forgot everything and he felt completely free.

It lasted until he made his way to the airport for his final fare. The tourists and businessmen would stagger from their planes, grey-faced and hungover from the free booze, their minds still in some other place, emptied out from being spirited halfway round the world, and Paulo would deposit one of their number at hotel or home.

Then, with his yellow For hire sign finally extinguished, he would travel back to their little flat where Coldplay and I.ii?? curry crept through the wafer-thin walls, and for a long time he would watch his wife and daughter sleeping, iluir faces his two favourite things in the world, wishing he never had to be away from them, his eyes spilling over, and Uvling almost drunk with exhaustion and love.

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twenty-seven Megan went to see Dr Lawford, and it was as if years had gone by, not months. What was he? In his fifties? He looked like an old man, as though the sickness in this neighbourhood had started to seep into his bones.

'Go private,' he told her, sitting on his desk during a break between patients. 'Go away and don't come back.'

At first she thought he was joking. And then she saw that he wasn't joking at all.

He still smelled the same - that cigarette smell mixed with cheese and sweet pickle. Once that smell had repulsed her, and now she realised she had missed it. And missed him, and the generosity and wisdom he concealed under his cheap suits and fog of fag smoke.

'Go private?' she said, dumbstruck. 'Why would I do that?'

'Because nothing's changed around here.' He took a sip of something brown from a polystyrene cup. 'Too many patients. Not enough doctors. Not enough time. The reasons you ran away are the reasons you should go private.'

Megan felt her cheeks burning. 'Is that what I did? Ran away?' _ 'It's not a criticism,' Lawford said. 'I don't blame you. I hat pumpkin would have killed you.' Pumpkin - doctor I.ilk for, the lights are on but nobody's home. 'You had your child to think of. But the reasons you went away are the reasons you should stay away.'

It had never occurred to Megan that Lawford would tell her to work in the private sector. Going private was one of the great dreams of the patients they saw at this surgery. It was like winning the lottery - something they would do one day, to escape the queues and frustrations of the overwhelmed NHS. If the doctors dreamed of going private, they had never mentioned it to Megan. It would have been a kind of blasphemy.

'You'll still be helping people,' Lawford said. 'Who knows? Maybe you'll actually help more people. How much good do we really do around here? Dishing out the antibiotics like sweeties. You were never very good at the assembly line medicine, were you? Wheeling them in and wheeling them out.' He smiled at the memory of the keen young GP registrar she had been. 'You always insisted on treating them like human beings.'

Lawford was scribbling something down on a prescription pad, as though the name and telephone number were just what Megan needed for what ailed her.

'I suggest you try your luck as a maternity locum. Stand in for all those clever lady doctors on Wimpole Street and Harley Street who take three months off to have their babies.' Megan took the piece of paper.

'You don't want me to work here,' she said, trying and failing to keep the hurt out of her voice.

'I want you to have a happy life,' he said, making his voice hard to cover the softness and feeling in the words, and she thought, he likes me. Then he looked at his watch, and downed the cup of brown stuff. 'But now it's time to crack on.'

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Megan briskly shook his hand. Any other form of physical contact - a hug, a kiss - was unthinkable. Then he was expertly ushering her out of his surgery and calling the name of his next patient. She wanted to thank him, to tell him that she could not have qualified without him, that she owed him everything. But Lawford had already turned his back, and was following a shuffling old man into his room.

The surgery was full and among the throng of faces someone was smiling at Megan. A woman with a young child trying to break free from her handcuff grip stood up to greet her. 'Hello, doctor!' 'Mrs Summer.'

The woman proudly stuck out her stomach. She must have been six months pregnant.

'Heard you were away,' she said. 'Glad to see you again.' Rubbing her stomach now. 'You can help me with this one.'

'That would be wonderful,' Megan said, before explaining that she was moving on, and this was just a quick visit. Mrs Summer looked crestfallen, but she smiled bravely and wished Megan all the best for the future, and Megan had to turn away.

There was decency and goodness here, she thought. Mrs Summer. Daisy. The boxer. And Dr Lawford. She wished that she could abandon the Sunny View Estate with a clear conscience, but ghosts tugged at her sleeve, and told her she was running away from everything she had once believed in.

I can't save these people, Megan thought. Just look at me. I have enough trouble looking after my little girl.

And as she left, she saw another face that she recognised, a man coming up the steps of the surgery as she was going down. Warren Marley caught her gaze, and she saw the hate and violence in his eyes. Megan hurried out into the traffic, horns blaring all around her, to where Jessica was parked on the other side of the street in a battered old Punto. She quickly got inside, glancing at the back seat where Poppy and Little Wei were dozing in their baby seats. As the car pulled away, she saw Warren Marley standing on the steps of the surgery, the traffic between them like a river he couldn't cross.

Megan pushed herself deep into the passenger seat, feeling the prescription paper in her hand, and she didn't look back. Her sisters were bickering.

Cat could hear them in the living room, their voices rising and falling, talking across each other as she leaned across her bed and zipped Poppy into her Grobag.

Little Wei was next to Poppy, already zipped up and on the threshold of sleep, and her three luminous yellow dummies - one in her mouth, one in each of her fists -glowed in the darkness.

Something inside Cat felt warm and shining as she watched her two nieces sleeping in her bedroom. It made her feel as though their little family, so long broken and different from everybody else's family, was finally renewing itself.

After returning to London, Megan and Poppy had moved into Cat's flat. It was unspoken but clear to both of the sisters. Cat had not given them a place to stay. She had given them a home.

Now Cat placed pillows on either side of the bed, a goose-down safety barrier to prevent anyone rolling onto the floor, even though Megan and Jessica had both told her it wasn't necessary, the babies were not going anywhere in those Grobags. Cat murmured soothingly as she stacked the pillows,

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telling them it was all right, and it was lovely to be in bed, and it was time for a nice nap, trying to distract the girls from the fractious voices of their mothers coming through the half-opened door.

'But you said you would look after her for me,' Megan was saying, and Cat thought she sounded every inch the much loved youngest sister, outraged at the unfairness of the world. 'You said you would.'

'But our boiler's gone again,' Jessica was saying, and her voice seemed to sigh with irritation that yet again she needed to explain the patently obvious. 'Nothing works in that flat. We've got no hot water, no heating, and tomorrow I have to wait in for the plumber, whenever he decides to show up.'

Nothing changes, Cat thought wearily. How many times had she heard those two squabbling when they were growing up? How many times had she played the mediator, the peacekeeper, the big sister? Except that once Megan and Jessica argued about who had pulled off Barbie's leg or Ken's head, and now they had other things to fight about.

Because everything changes, Cat thought, as she retrieved a dropped dummy from Little Wei's right fist, and gently placed it back in her hand, knowing she would go crazy if she woke up and found one of her dummies missing. Everything changes. Look at these two.

They were sleeping now. Poppy was still a bit underweight for her age, but with a long body, much more like Cat's gawky frame, all legs and arms, than Megan's cuddly roundness, her baby sister's body of circles. Like Cat, Poppy seemed to have a tiny head which made many children her own age look like the Incredible Hulk when they were next to her.

But after the scare of her early birth and the weeks in the Intensive Care Unit, they were not worried about Poppy now. So what if she was always on the light side? The entire Western world wanted to lose weight, didn't they? Cat could already tell that Poppy was going to be tall and slim and gorgeous. Like a pretty version of me, she thought.

And Little Wei had settled into her new life better than any of them could ever have hoped. There were still signs of the insecurities of the past, like those three dummies during the night, and the way she organised her stuffed monkeys and talking frogs and Leapfrog musical toys with an obsessive love of order that seemed out of place in a child so young.

But Little Wei was bright and smart and happy, spending ages poring over her Maisy the Mouse books and contemplating her Baby Einstein DVDs, starting to show some affection - although her kisses were strictly reserved for Jessica - and she had learned to cry. Jessica and Paulo had done a great job with her, Cat thought. They had taught Little Wei that she was home.

'What's more important to you?' Megan was demanding, starting to play dirty, the last refuge of the youngest child. 'A plumber or your niece?'

'That's really unfair,' Jessica said, sounding on the edge of tears. 'After the days I spent sitting with her when she was in the incubator while you were moping in your room. After all the times I looked after her when you were working.'

The two babies were so different, Cat thought. Little Wei had dark eyes that looked like melting chocolate, and Poppy's eyes were icy blue, like the eyes of her father. Poppy's skin was so fair it looked as though it had never seen the sunshine, while Little Wei was the colour of honey. Even sleeping they were different - Little Wei throwing her arms above her head, her face in profile, a baby weightlifter ready to claim her place in the world, while Poppy curled up like a pale-faced comma inside her Grobag, sucking

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busily on her thumb, as if still missing her mother's body. So different in every way, Cat thought, and yet she had no trouble in believing that the two girls were part of the same family.

'You can't start crying just because you lose an argument,' Megan was saying, a note of mocking triumph in her voice.

'Only thinking of yourself,' Jessica said, her voice shaking with emotion. 'Bloody typical.'

Cat felt a double blow from inside, a baby-sized combination of foot or fist that said, don't forget about me. Stroking her stomach, Cat left the sleeping children and joined her sisters. / could never forget you. Megan and Jessica fell silent when they saw Cat.

'What's the problem?' she said, not knowing whether to be annoyed or amused. When I am seventy-five, she thought, I will be separating these two while they bitch about who stole the other one's walking stick, or whose turn it is to use the zimmer frame. Jessica and Megan avoided her eyes. 'Come on, let's have it.'

'It's nothing,' Megan said, all haughty and authoritarian. I'm not baby Megan any more. Jessica turned wet eyes towards her big sister.

'Megan's got these job interviews tomorrow,' she said. 'On Harley Street.'

'Wimpole Street,' Megan said, her eyes flashing angrily at Jessica, who could never be trusted to keep her cake hole shut. 'Maternity locum posts.'

'More interviews?' Cat said. She knew her sister must have had a dozen already. They had all told her that she was up against doctors who were older and more experienced. 'Once I get my foot through the door, they'll all see,' Megan said bitterly. 'But Jessie's plumber is coming round. So she can't come and pick up Poppy.'

Cat could see the frustration burning in her youngest sister. All those years skating through exams, all those years being the star of every classroom she entered, and now the real world was unimpressed. Just when she needed it most.

And Jessie had problems of her own. Although she tried to keep it from Paulo, their new little flat was wearing her down. Just as she had to worry about money for the first time in her life, she was living in a place that seemed to hate her. She had rolled up her sleeves and dealt with the overflowing toilet, the leaking washing machine and the whims of the prehistoric cooker. But the lack of hot water and heating was too much.

'I'll take Poppy tomorrow,' Cat said, not even needing to think about it.

'But you've got to see the midwives tomorrow,' Jessica said. 'What's that?' Megan said. 'Fluid retention check?'

Cat nodded. 'I'll reschedule it. The day after. Whatever. It's okay, I don't mind staying home. I can hardly get my shoes on anyway. My feet act as if I've just got off a long-haul flight.' 'You should really keep these appointments,' Megan said.

'I'll keep them,' Cat said. 'When you've got your job back, and Jessie's got her boiler back.'

The telephone rang. Cat moved slowly across the room to pick it up, as if her legs could no longer carry the weight of both her and her baby. By the time she reached the phone, Rory's voice was speaking on the answer machine. Abashed, hesitant. No trace of the humour and warmth that used to be there, Cat thought. But then whose fault was that? She made no attempt to pick up the receiver. 'I know you don't want me to keep calling you… bill

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I just wanted you to know that your father has kindly invited me to his wedding… and I'm going to go… unless you ask me not to… so, er, I guess that's it then… well… hope everything is okay.'

When his voice had clicked off, Cat looked up to find her sisters staring at her. Jessica's pretty face all pained, Megan shaking her head knowingly. 'What?' Cat said. 'He's such a lovely man,' Jessica said. 'Don't try to do it all alone,' Megan said. Cat laughed. 'Look who's talking.'

'That's right,' Megan said defiantly. 'I know what I'm talking about. It's hard doing it by yourself.' She looked at Jessica, softening. 'I know I'm not alone. Not when you two are there. But still - there's no father around, is there? There's no partner.'

'What else could you do?' Cat said. 'You couldn't let him walk all over you. That's not who you are, Megan.'

'But it's not just me any more, is it? There's Poppy. And I tell myself, I need to be happy, so my child can be happy. And I keep telling myself that, but I don't know if it's true. Maybe I should have stuck it out, for at least a bit longer. For my daughter. For both of us. There's no back-up when you're on your own.'

'You did the right thing,' Cat said. 'Leaving him. Coming back.'

But Megan was no longer young enough to be so certain of everything.

'I don't know if I did the right thing, Cat. We expect these men to tick all our boxes. Romantic, sexual, emotional. Maybe we expect too much. Maybe we think about ourselves too much. Maybe we should think about our children.' 'You want Poppy to grow up with a father like that?' Cat said angrily. 'Where's Daddy? Oh, Daddy's out banging a Swedish tourist.' 'But Rory's a nice guy,' Jessica said. 'The world is full of nice guys,' Cat said. 'So why don't you get one?'

Cat shook her head with disbelief, collapsing on the sofa. 'You two giving me advice - I can hardly believe it.'

'I just think we should be kind to each other,' Jessica said. 'While there's still time.'

'When you go back to work, you can't leave a kid with your pride,' Megan said. 'You leave it with your family, or you leave it with strangers. I'm just saying - if you can avoid it, don't go it alone. Don't do it by yourself because you're afraid you'll get left again.' Cat bridled at that. 'You mean - like I was left before?'

'No,' Megan said gently. 'Like we were left before. And why shouldn't I give you advice? We're not kids any more,' she said, and there was a kind of sweet sadness in her words. 'Look at us. We're all grown up.'

From the other room came the siren's wail of a baby screaming. Little Wei, caught in a nightmare or possibly dropping one of her dummies.

'I'll do it,' Cat said, struggling to get up. 'Then I'll knock us up something to eat. I think there's some pasta in the fridge.'

Megan and Jessica swapped a look. The look said, look what she did for us. Without talking about it, both of them remembered the sight of a tired twelve-year-old girl clearing up their mess, and a debt that they could never repay.

So Jessica went off to settle her daughter, and Megan made Cat lie down on the sofa, placing cushions under her head and her swollen feet.

'Keep your feet above your heart,' Megan told her. 'That will reduce the swelling.'

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When Jessica came back, Megan took their orders for the local Thai takeaway, and it turned out to be like a meal from their childhood, consumed in front of the television, punctuated by their laughter, with no adults to tell them that they had to eat at the table.

Without saying the words, and for long after the children were sleeping, Megan and Jessica brought Cat tea and made her take it easy and in all these little ways tried to show her that, for now at least, their big sister didn't have to worry about being strong. twenty-eight His daughters were waiting for him, wreathed in smiles, wearing their special dresses, the confetti in their fists.

They pelted Jack Jewell when he emerged from the little Marylebone church with his gorgeous red-headed bride by his side, and Paulo noticed that the sisters all threw confetti in their own particular style.

Cat was methodical, taking careful aim, using her height and reach, and landing a fistful of confetti on their heads or chest almost every time.

Jessica had this cute underarm throw, giggling as she brought the confetti up under their guard, always getting in too close.

And Megan was just wild, pelting the bride and groom and anyone who was standing anywhere near them, then encouraging the children, Poppy and Little Wei, to pick up the fallen confetti and throw it again, until the confetti was getting mixed up with leaves and all sorts of stuff, and they had to stop.

When the laughter was subsiding and the car was waiting and the kisses had all been kissed, Jack Jewell's three daughters put their arms around their father, and prepared to let him go.

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He looked at them with tears in his eyes and Cat waited for him to give them one final thought, say a few last words, a summing up of all they had gone through together and what it might have meant. She thought about what he said for a long time. 'You've all got families of your own now,' he told them.

And as they waved and watched the car's taillights fading, Cat knew that she had been wrong about what she wanted when she was that child in an apron and yellow gloves, clearing up after her two younger sisters.

Cat had always thought that she wanted her freedom, but she saw now that what she had really wanted was for them to be a real family.

And now, as she stood there with her sisters watching their father go off to his new life, she saw that they had been a real family all along. Maybe not a perfect family, with all members happy and present, or the kind of family you would put in commercials to sell breakfast cereal.

But a real family all the same, who loved and supported each other, who even liked each other, capable of helping each other through anything, even the changes that came with the passing of the years. They were walking north towards Regent's Park when Megan took the call about their mother. The little wedding caravan ground to a halt while they watched Megan's face, knowing something bad had happened.

Jessica was carrying Little Wei, Cat was leading Poppy by the hand and Megan was holding her shoes, her feet sore from new, unaccustomed high heels. Paulo and Rory trailed behind them like two native bearers, lugging the pushchairs. The late afternoon sun glinted on their silver-wrapped slices of wedding cake. 'Mother's been busted,' Megan said, clicking off her mobile. It seemed that while their father was marrying Hannah in that small church in Marylebone, their mother was being arrested a mile away in her St John's Wood flat, during her weekly visit from Dirty Dave.

'She's in a cell down in Bow Street Police Station,' Megan said. 'Somebody's going to have to go down there.'

Jessica turned on Cat. 'You knew this would happen. You knew this Dirty Dave would get her into trouble.'

Cat shrugged. Nothing could spoil her mood. At forty weeks, she felt the melancholic joy that you get at the end of a beautiful holiday.

She was looking forward to meeting her son, but she could not remember a time in her life when she had felt happier. She touched her belly - one, two, three, don't worry, baby - and reflected how much she loved having her child inside her. It was a shame the experience ever had to end.

'Apparently the police followed this Dirty Dave to Mum's place,' Megan said. 'She was helping him flush his stash down the toilet when they kicked down the door.' 'Is she going to prison?' Jessica said.

Cat felt her abdomen tighten. Yet another false alarm, or maybe it was more accurate to call it a dummy run. She had grown used to the Braxton-Hicks contractions over the last few weeks. Soon enough it would be time for the real thing. Next week she had an appointment at the hospital to have her cervix decorated with prostaglandin gel, the hormone produced naturally during childbirth, designed to send a clear message to her son, and her body - we have lift-off.

The midwife had cheerfully told her that semen was rich in prostaglandin, if she would like to think about the love-making option of encouraging labour. Cat had to tell the midwife that there wasn't a lot of semen coming her way these days.