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breathe again. Truly together for the first time ever and he carried me over the threshold. We were proprietorial, understandably I suppose, and kept an eye on the couples who came to see over the show lodge, the last house to be sold in the frying-pan-shaped close.
    We weren’t in longer than a month before the red SOLD sign went up on numbers two, three and four, even though the men were still working inside. We saw this as a good sign: we’d be able to sell quite quickly when we came to move on, we believed. I was already pregnant. Poppy was due the following spring and I had already resigned from the bank, having no real interest in the job.
    ‘I know him,’ said Graham, shamelessly spying on the couple coming up next door’s path with the keys to number two in their hands.
    ‘Oh?’ I stared as rudely as he, fascinated by the blowzy woman with the wild mane of hair, more pregnant than anyone I’d ever seen and wrapped in an emerald curtain. She was big. No shame. She flapped along penguin style in large ethnic sandals, her hands kneading her back as if she was about to give birth. Her coarse guffaws of laughter were unreasonably disturbing; after all, she was the stranger, I already lived here – me, Graham and a few sick saplings.
    ‘Sam Frazer, he runs his own advertising company and goes to the Painted Lady for lunch. I’ve seen him in there with his mates.’
    ‘What’s he like?’ I felt uneasy but didn’t know why.
    ‘Seems like a decent kind of guy.’
    ‘Perhaps we should make them a cup of tea… and go round… be friendly, you know.’
    Sensing my tension, Graham held my hand. We stood together warily in our house of brand-new wood, breathing sawdust and turpentine, paint and putty. ‘Jennie, no more “shoulds” for us, this is our house, we don’t do anything we don’t want to and we can be as unsociable here as we damn well like.’
    Martha would have been the first to echo this sentiment. She might even have raised a smeary glass in a toast, had she heard it.
    Dear God, how I wish that I’d never met her.

TWO
Martha
    D EAR GOD, HOW I wish that I’d never met her.
    So there we were, in our superior executive lodge. I must say I never expected to end up on a half-finished estate in bloody Essex.
    But then I had never expected to get married or have my own baby. Nor did I think I would ever reach twenty, or grow breasts, menstruate, throw away my black leather skirt, die, or stop watching Neighbours.
    Unlike the co-ordinated house next door ours was a jumbled mixture: tumbledown sofa strewn with throws, assorted chairs with various cushions, lamps and pieces of twisted oak, because we’d been meaning to buy an old cottage over the border in Hertfordshire.
    Piglets Patch was my dream house. Honeysuckle, thatch and roses.
    It fell through when I was eight months pregnant. We had sold our flats and we needed a home, we had buggered about long enough. So we bought the house and its dandelion lawn in a state of panic. We hadn’t intended to stay for long, but life is full of little surprises.
    I didn’t expect to settle down here round a fading mulberry bush but, dear God Almighty, far more extraordinary than that was being knifed in the back by the woman I came to call my friend.
    It was a wet and blustery March when Jennie and I entered the dark world of breeding.
    All night long the women in our ward were kept awake by pitiful cries from the adjoining delivery suite.
    Sam rushed me to St Margaret’s when the pains came every five minutes and within an hour Scarlett was born.
    Nature’s disgusting.
    Nature hurts.
    That animal smell, blood and Johnson’s and the visitors’ freesias.
    Sam stayed and watched and afterwards we stuffed down chicken sandwiches, holding Scarlett in our arms and getting used to the words ‘our daughter’. Oh, the glory! Kissing her black, bloody hair. I had to use half a box of tissues to wipe Sam’s proud tears away.
    Perversely I had the natural birth