A few days before Claire’s due date, I happened to be in London for one day’s work. It was months since I’d seen her, what with me living in Chicago, and when she collected me from the tube station I barely recognized her. She was enormous, easily the most pregnant person I’d ever seen – and she was proud, excited and mad keen to involve me in the whole process. The minute we got back to the flat, she ordered gleefully, ‘Look at me, I’m HUGE!’ Then she whipped up her sweatshirt and gave me a full frontal.

I was delighted for her happiness, but as I looked at her gigantic, blue-veined belly, I felt a little squeamish at the thought that there was a human being in there. But what made me even more squeamish was that it had to get out, through an orifice which it was clearly far, far too big for.

I found myself wondering just what had Mother Nature been thinking of? The process of gestation and giving birth was definitely one of her poorer ideas – the biological equivalent of being painted into a corner.

However, one of the plus sides of being around a heavily pregnant woman was that her flat was full of food. Cravings food – an old biscuit tin was an Aladdin’s cave of different chocolate bars, and there was a freezer crammed with ice-cream.

We parked ourselves before the biscuit tin and ate our fill (this took some time), then we were ready to lie on her bed and watch telly. But before we did so, Claire pulled off her sweatshirt. And why not? It was her home. And why should she have a problem undressing in front of me? I mean, I’m her sister. But as I stretched my neck to see over her bump to the screen (put it this way, if it had been a subtitled programme we’d been watching, I wouldn’t have had a clue what was going on), I tried to blank out the colossal belly which rose, like Ayers Rock, from her body. I began to wish we lived in Victorian times. Modesty, there’s a lot to be said for it.

‘I shouldn’t have eaten that second-last Bounty. The baba’s got the hiccups,’ she said tenderly. And indeed, before my aghast eyes, her bump convulsed with rhythmic twitches. ‘Do you want to feel?’ she said. If she had asked me if I’d like to stick my hand in a blender I’d have been as enthusiastic – more, probably – but I couldn’t think of any way to refuse without giving offence.

I produced my hand and let it be guided, and when she placed it on her stomach a shudder shot up my arm to my scalp. I couldn’t help it. I’d have preferred to take the giblets out of a turkey.

She passed my palm over something bumpy. ‘Feel that? That’s her head,’ Claire said, and it was all I could do to suppress a whimper.

Then, as if I wasn’t finding things hard enough, Claire remarked idly, ‘She could come at any minute.’

Sweat popped on to my forehead. Not tonight, God, I prayed. Please God, don’t let her come tonight.

Claire had always sworn that if she was ever ‘unlucky enough’ (her words) to have to give birth, she’d start mainlining heroin the minute her waters broke. But when I tentatively enquired how many lines of defence she’d prepared for her fight against labour pains – Pethidine? Epidurals? Heroin? – she shook her head and said, ‘Nada.’ My horror must have been stamped on my face, because she roared laughing and explained, ‘Having this baba is the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to me! I want to be fully present for it.’

Clearly she’d gone over to the Dark Side – which I found strangely consoling. If someone like Claire could be contemplating a natural birth, then there was great hope for a scaredy cat like me.

All the same, the following morning I was awake and dressed a full hour before I needed to leave, and not even the charms of the biscuit tin could persuade me to linger. Claire wandered around the flat yawning and muttering to herself, ‘I’m ready to pop.’ Eventually, she lumbered to the car to drive me to the Tube, and when I saw the underground station, relief made me light-headed. Long before the car had come to a halt, I had the passenger door open and my foot on the road, sparks flying from my heel.

As I leapt out, I blurted, ‘Thanks for all the chocolate and good luck with the excruciating agony of childbirth.’

I hadn’t meant to say that. I tried again. ‘Er, good luck with the labour.’

She had the baby two days later, and no matter how hard I tried, she wouldn’t admit that it had hurt that much. It was around then that I realized there was some sort of conspiracy afoot. Whenever I tried pumping any woman who’d had a baby for specifics on agony, pain relief etc., they wouldn’t play ball. Instead they just said dreamily, ‘Ah yeah, I suppose it stung a bit, but afterwards you’ve got a baby. I mean, a BABY. You’ve created a new life, it’s miraculous!’

I expected that the passage of time would take care of my fear, that I’d grow out of it. So what I did was I told myself I’d have a child when I was thirty. Partly, I suspect, because I thought thirty was so far away it would never come.

21

‘As the crisis in Santa Monica moves into its second day… ‘I woke with my usual horrible jolt to the sound of Emily talking to herself, ‘… conditions inside the house are bad. Morale is low among the hostages…

So I could take it that Mort Russell hadn’t arrived in the middle of the night, with a contract under his oxter.

But shortly after I got up, someone rang. Someone who caused Emily to giggle a lot and wind her finger in her hair while talking to him. It was Lou, the guy she’d met at the dinner party where the organ-collecting bloke had been her date.

‘I’m going on a date with him tonight,’ she said, when she finally hung up. ‘He’s taken nearly two weeks to call, he’s given me no notice, but I don’t care. I’m going to go out with him, have sex with him, then never hear from him again. That,’ she said with satisfaction, ‘will take my mind off Mort Russell not calling!’

I was staring out the window.

‘What are you looking at?’ she asked.

‘Curtis. He’s after getting stuck again.’ I stared a while longer. ‘They’re calling us to help.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake!’

After we’d helped dislodge Curtis – this time he’d been trying to get out of the car, not in – we returned home. I’d half-planned to spend the morning taking a turn around the Santa Monica mall – my knees still looked funny in the denim skirt – until I saw Emily producing an armload of cleaning products from under the sink and pulling on rubber gloves. Housework! What with staying with her rent-free and all that, I felt obliged to help. Or at least to offer and hope she said no. But to my disappointment she said, ‘If you wouldn’t mind, the floor could do with a wash.’