All hanging about, getting in her way, preventing her from coming downstairs. What had happened to privacy? What had happened to getting out of the ship that was listing badly? She’d only added more cargo, more precious jewels that could not be lost, that had to be delivered. She moved like a cow from bed to floor to door to passageway, udders swinging, belly shouting at her to lie down, but nowhere was comfortable. The new doctor had cautioned against hot baths, but Enid didn’t care. At least slopped into water she could feel weightless, a little.

She’d forgotten the impossibility of it, that this enormous mound would have to come out of the gap that resisted even the absurd protuberance of Douglas, that it would force her to stretch and gape and tear; that having carried it for nine months, fussed over by the stream of people in her house, she no longer mattered. It had reached the state of tyrant – any day now it would decide to come and wreak havoc on the warm body that had housed it.

In the bathroom, she turned the taps on full blast. Maybe she could boil them both alive. She leant her hands on the windowsill and stretched her back while the room filled with steam. She couldn’t do it. She wasn’t ready. It had all been a terrible mistake. For this past month she’d felt the alien kick of terrible life and had wanted to get a knife and cut the whole thing out, cut herself out, not be any more at all; and yet here she was, about to be, all over again, the bearer of God knew what.

Her waters broke as she stepped into the bath – warm, gushing liquid from between her legs met scalding bath water. She had one foot in, her hands on the edge of the tub, the other leg stranded on the bath mat.

“Everett,” she shouted. It was confusing – the heat rising, the warm falling – she didn’t know whether to get in or out. “Everett,” she shouted again.

They filled her bedroom. They kept the curtains closed. They wouldn’t let her off the bed to crawl on the floor and scream. They made her put her feet up in a harness that dug into her back. When they laid his slithering body on her chest, all wrapped in cloths, his hair damp, she cried.