I think you’re just a very weak child. And the nose running on you again. Wipe it up, you amadán.

My book was James and the Giant Peach, Joshua’s copy. It was dog-eared and wet as he was far too young to read anything properly, preferring to suck pages. I was alone in the room then. You get an Alone Room with a couch and a telephone and no TV when you have a dead baby inside you. Just when you need a distraction, they leave you all alone, with a telephone. You can’t call anyone at that moment because they’d shower you with advice about trying again, even with the dead inside you. God is Good. What’s for you won’t pass you. God is Good. God, I wonder what happened? Did you wash windows? That can sometimes kill them. Did you eat shellfish? God is Good. Did you rub a cat?

God is so overfuckingrated.

Myself and Contents and the two aunts, Spiker and Sponge, were all rolled up fetal in the bed. Howling. That’s what they called it now, Contents. And they didn’t probe it or talk to it with their useless machine, now that the machine no longer answered back. How terrific it would be to escape to the middle of a peach, right into the core where a brown stone sits heavy, waiting to come out. Waiting. No heartbeat. Never listen. Nothing is real before you first hear its sound. And just like that, I lost my daughter. As though I weren’t fit to mind her. As though I had left her down at the Salmon Weir Bridge or behind the barbeques in Woodie’s or at a train station. Lost. I lost her.

The heart is for a doctor and a Valentine card.

Alex had a mouse-like heart murmur. Though, I must confess, I’ve never actually listened to the heart of a mouse with a stethoscope, but once, full to his fat chin on poison I’d laid down, one sat in my hot-press, ever so bloated, and I watched his big heart beating to the rhythm of his tiny breaths. He was perched on a white and silver Just Engaged xxx towel and he died like this, staring at me with his pretty beady eyes. I buried him in the towel underneath the Leylandii trees in the back garden, proficient as I was at killing and burying little things of great beauty.

Chapter 2

Hospital evenings on the Ward brought a tea of green offerings, soggy scallion-streaks like solidified washing up liquid strewn across lumpy potato-salad and coleslaw dollops in low mountain ranges, knife marks slashed into the beige plates, vile green-pink tomato quarters, and a slice of ham rolled up, pumped with water. Its jelly eye stared at me.

‘More soda bread?’ said Michal.

The soda bread tasted good like my grandmother’s baking. I remember nestling into her skin and the beads of sweat on her forehead in the tiny hot kitchen, back when I used to hang around her neck and lay my head into her warm freckled cleavage.