Discouraged, it took me a while to get back to it, after Abbie. Winter came. At home, the heaters hummed all day, and the warm air was met perfectly by the freezing air that came through the cracks in the floorboards, and nothing was changed. The rooms remained bearably, expensively cold.

For the first two years of Sylvie’s life, we lived in that crappy house, with its big empty lawn and some lovely old Greek neighbours who were always passing something over the fence to us, plates of miscellaneous meat, mostly. They could not believe that Sarah was a vegetarian. There was no such thing, as far as they were concerned. I ate it all for a while, Sarah’s share and mine, until I started dreaming of meat, of abattoirs, of thick stews of feet and gizzards, and then I couldn’t do it anymore. I felt nauseated just looking at it. I tipped it all straight into the bin. Delicious, I would say. Amazing. Thank you! Sometimes the little old husband would come through the rain to knock on the door and wake the baby with another plate of dead bodies. Thank you, thank you. But please, my god, if you ever wake the baby again I will fucking murder you.

Of course they didn’t know what was going on, that Sylvie would startle at the slightest noise, that it took hours to get her back to sleep, that she would cry and cry and cry, that we were mad. ‘Bring the baby,’ they would complain. ‘Why you no bring the baby?’ Of course. Of course, we would say. But the baby reeled away from them in horror, and we would snatch her back, and make some excuse, and retreat behind our fence again.

Walking the pram in the freezing dark very early one day, the thought hit me — a procession of thoughts really, though they felt at the time like a single, united blow, like someone slugging me from behind — what am I doing on this corner at the end of the world? Who am I? Who are you, for that matter, baby? And why do I live in this awful suburb?

Is this how my own father felt when I was born? I wondered. As lost as this? Like his future had been erased? Like his life had shrunk to the size of a blackened pea? I walked home and stood in the backyard and did not know what to do. Everything seemed alien, meaningless. The low sky. The backyard with its frosted lawn and plastic garden furniture. The garage stuffed to the ceiling with more plastic garden furniture and boxes of things I had forgotten about but couldn’t throw away, with tools that had belonged to my father, and which I did not know how to use.