It was her last day at work. Marjorie was finishing up early and handing over to her colleagues before shopping with her mother and then meeting Davey to sign contracts for a large four-bed semi-detached house overlooking the sea in Clontarf. She was living the dream – someone else’s dream, but still, it was a dream. She was way too pregnant to enjoy it, though; she was a tiny woman with a ginormous bump. Her stomach looked like a balloon about to burst, and she felt like she had burst, about two weeks to go. I can’t do this. She pulled a wonky eyelash out and it felt like she was being stabbed in the eyelid and she screamed with pain. Everything hurt. And she was tired, so incredibly tired. She couldn’t sleep, hadn’t slept properly for weeks; the baby kicked and punched and played soccer with her bladder and did unforgivable things to her bowel. Her indigestion was off the charts. Food became her enemy. She’d always loved food. She missed it. Towards the end she lived on crackers and cake.

Her flat had sold within three weeks of going on the market and, after a bidding war, she made a nice profit. The recession was over. She’d bought the place at a rock-bottom price; the economy was on the rise. Davey had rented a place for the three of them. For the first few months she and he slept in the same room. That was weird but it was also nice; then she became so big that she needed all of the bed. The twisting and turning, the overheating and getting up every five minutes wasn’t conducive to sharing space or intimacy of any kind. Davey moved into the spare room.

‘Trouble already?’ Juliet had said flatly the morning after the night he moved.

‘Marjorie just needs her space.’

‘This is a joke,’ she said, and she ate her breakfast in her room.

‘What’s the difference between a snowman and a snow-woman? Snowballs. That’s a joke,’ he shouted after her.

‘That’s a joke?’ Marjorie said. ‘You’re as bad as my mother.’

‘I didn’t say it was good.’ He kissed her. ‘She’ll be OK – believe it or not, she seems happier than she was in the States.’

‘That is not comforting,’ Marjorie said.

‘No.’

They held onto each other for a while. It was nice but also hot and sticky, and she battled an awareness of extraordinary pressure on a part of her body she’d never really taken any time to consider before – her perineum. If the baby didn’t burst out she worried it would fall out.