Hunger like I have never experienced. I stare at the ceiling and know that, if necessary, I can fight someone for food and I can rummage through garbage looking for titbits. It is something I did not know about myself. The baby is a parasite, the pregnancy book says, the baby will take from you all that he needs. Well, the baby seems to need eggs with ketchup, beans with ketchup, crisps with ketchup … so this is what a craving is, I realize, this passion for tomatoes, their redness and taste. Yesterday it was stale bread with ketchup, and when the bread ran out, just one spoonful after another.

This is the most difficult challenge, getting out of bed. Not getting up to vomit and coming back, but getting up to have a shower and dress. If I am going to cry it will be now, first thing in the morning, with the nausea in my chest and the day stretching out ahead.

It’s not fair, is it, that Saif has taken me away from my career, my friends, my family and brought me here only to leave me and go offshore? But I am being irrational. It is his work and I should be supportive. I had walked into this marriage with eagerness, with eyes wide open. My parents were becoming stifling, my friends boring and my womb, fertile and unattended, was eager to flourish and enclose. I did not want to sink into my thirties, to reach the desperate stage and acquire that expectant, stalking look.

Saif was the nicest of them all, fresh and honest in an irresistible way. Marriage was a good move, coming here the right choice. It’s not a raw deal; it’s actually a good package. Yes, there is the bad weather, the loneliness when Saif goes offshore, but when he is here it is like a holiday, one honeymoon after the other. In the two weeks that he is onshore we stay up late, we have breakfast at lunchtime, we go to the cinema, we go out shopping. It is nice to be able to afford things, and not have to skimp and save. He is generous really, when he is freezing on the wretched rig working night shifts he keeps himself going by repeating, ‘Think of the bonus, think of the baby, think of the bonus.’ I have a lot to thank Allah for, instead of crying.

I bribe myself with breakfast so that I can get through the shower. I toast bread and make an omelette with feta cheese and the necessary tomatoes. I put more tomatoes than eggs, more tomatoes than cheese. It is mysterious this craving, too intense to be explained away by a need for Vitamin C. Even the pregnancy books are unsure. They say it is hormones that will only settle at fourteen weeks but that doesn’t explain why I have suddenly gone off coffee and can’t live without tomato juice.