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filled her to the brim. She cried. And as soon as she cried, Robbie stopped crying. Just stopped and looked at her, as if to say, ‘It’s okay, it’s okay. I’m here now.’
    They say you really fall in love for the first time when you have a baby, that you’re breathless and crippled with love. That would have been how Sarah felt – an overwhelming peace and warmth, a tingling ache of fulfilment – if she hadn’t had to hand Robbie to Krissie to be breastfed.
    Sarah watched the two of them for a moment. But her lip began its signature quiver, and she couldn’t take it. It was so unfair. She had to go.
    When she got home, Kyle was reading the paper.
    ‘How’d it go?’ he asked. ‘Boy or girl?’
    ‘Who gives a shit?’ Sarah said, and went to bed.
    *
    Kyle couldn’t recall exactly when it became normal to be spoken to like this. There was a time when it would have seemed odd for his partner to call him‘useless’, for her to hide in her room and surface only to groom or feed.
    If ten years ago someone had said to him, ‘Kyle, in ten years you will live in a very tidy house with a wife who seems to despise you and who comments frequently and sometimes in front of people that you have left sticky skid marks on the side of the toilet again ,’ he would have found it hard to believe. After all, he was Kyle McGibbon, who got on with just about everyone. He was a doctor. A catch. He had hair and, genetically speaking, a good chance of keeping it. He was slim, and almost always managed an erection.
    ‘No way!’ Kyle would have said to this unlikely prediction. ‘If anyone treated me like that I’d trade her in so fast she’d still smell new!’
    But he didn’t trade Sarah in, mostly because of the great years they’d had before trying to conceive. Years of going to the movies; of waking still linked in bed and smiling. Kyle wondered if the smiling would have continued if his poor wife hadn’t turned mad with the need to reproduce. He’d watched her disappear in front of him, like a dying patient, and all he could do was provide the palliative care of income and shelter.
    Year one of the bid to have children, Sarah’s voice changed from soft and loving to snappy and not. Kyle tried to respond with patience. ‘Sarah, please don’t speak to me like that, darling,’ he’d suggest politely,after his premenstrual wife had pointed a stiff threatening finger at him and said, ‘I hate fish cooked in tomatoes! You know that, you idiot!’
    Year two he attempted relapse prevention strategies , organising a mystery mini-break for the weekend before Sarah’s birthday. It was Prague and it went very well, but the actual birthday a few days after their return was terrifying.
    ‘Nothing’s wrong, Kyle,’ Sarah had said, ‘except it’s my birthday and I’m watching the X Factor with a glass of stale Morrison’s merlot and YOU MEAN TO SAY LAST WEEKEND WAS IT ? NOT AN ENTREE BUT IT ? WHAT DID I DO TO END UP WITH THIS LIFE? I’D RATHER BE THAT FAT BIRD WITH LEARNING DIFFICULTIES STANDING IN FRONT OF SIMON COWELL THAN MARRIED TO SOMEONE WHO DOESN’T EVEN LOVE ME ENOUGH TO GET ME A DECENT PRESENT!’
    Year three Kyle tried to fight because his mate Derek had started to call round regularly, and as it turned out he was also married to a psychotic bitch. ‘Don’t put up with it!’ Derek said. ‘They’re all bampots with their own agendas and you have to nip their control freak antics in the fucking bud!’ So one night Kyle told Sarah not to put his papers out for recycling till he’d finished reading them. Then he poured himself a beer and put football on in the formal living room and when she switched it offhe got up and turned it back on, and when she turned it off and looked at him with those eyes he decided that it would still be fighting back to go and drink his beer and listen to the match on the radio in the shed.
    Year four he just stayed in the shed as much as he could.
    ‘I’m turning that