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By Root 1412 0

but trust me, if you think of it that way, it really helps). I also seem to remember that there was quite a lot of gas and air involved. The woman in the next bed kept screaming, asking the doctors if they’d found her coil yet, and the gas and air made me think that was hilarious. I had these visions of the wretched thing being implanted in the scalp of her poor unwanted babe, like a satellite receiver. We’d moved by then, so I didn’t have Maria anymore. And the times had moved, too, so you didn’t get to stay in hospital for very long. One night, two at the most. It was tougher. Going home on my own, with a baby. Your big sisters were ridiculously excited and a great help during the day—it seemed like I never had to change a nappy—but I remember the nights feeling quite long. I think I was in a light coma for about twelve months. You sat up early, you crawled early, you were mountaineering on the sofa early. We had those stairs with the open tread (I know, very ’80s Ikea), and you used to skid about on them, in tights—I was convinced you’d never make it to your first birthday. But by then you were running around. Always in a hurry, Amanda. Matter of fact, you could hold your head up almost as soon as you were born. I know all mothers like to exaggerate about their own children—make them sound just a little bit more special than other people’s children—I used to hate that, in the playground—but you really were strong, even then. The midwife said so. It was like you wanted to look around and see what you were missing. When I watched you, I remembered Jennifer’s staring, quiet eyes, and I thought then that you were going to grow into very different people. And you did, didn’t you?

Now—Hannah. They call you an elderly mother, when you have a baby over the age of forty. Depressing, or what? They like to fill you up with gloom and doom talk and do nuchal scans and explain your increased risk of Down syndrome and the need for amnio tests. Actually it starts before that, when you make the foolish mistake of going to the doctor to talk about even the possibility of having another baby. They want to tell you to think about how tired you’ll be. How your body isn’t capable of doing what it used to be able to. How your fertility will have fallen away to such an extent it may already be impossible anyhow. I came out of the GP’s feeling like a dessicated old prune, I tell you. Forty-four years old. Forty-four and a half, to be precise. I didn’t feel old. You never do, I don’t think. Even now, in my head, I feel eighteen years old, despite major evidence to the contrary. Your brain doesn’t age at the same pace. And your dad—my toy boy—had made me feel younger in that first year together than I had in…well…ages. Younger and more fun, and more alive and sexier (sorry!). And he wanted you so badly. Turned out the GP was an idiot and I got pregnant the second month we tried, so that was that and you were on your way. Your dad took such incredible care of me. We were living in a caravan, while the house was being built. He flogged himself—and the poor Polish builders—to get it finished before you came, but made me take it easy the whole time. He would cook dinner, bring me tea in bed. Kept offering to get me coal, or pickles, or ice cream in the middle of the night. He also read “the book” and became an expert. I refused point-blank to go to the childbirth classes with him, on the basis that I would almost certainly be old enough to be the grandmother of most of the other babies, so instead, he would read out things to me every night. Visualization exercises, breathing techniques, the need for a birth plan. It was hard not to laugh at him, knowing what I knew. I tried hard not to remind him all the time that this wasn’t new to me, because it was so new and so exciting to him. I tried to explain the cabbage technique, but it wasn’t in “the book.” He bought wooden letters spelling out our boy and girl names and said I should bring them to hospital and line them up on the windowsill while I labored. Right. Do you know what your name would have