No, no, you did. Have you ever seen Flashdance?

What’s Flashdance?

Never mind.

Well, my mum said brightly, so how are you?

Good, I said. He’s very sweet, isn’t he?

Oh, he really is. I remember you at that age, when you suddenly started crawling. Just suddenly, out of nowhere. It was Christmas Day. You couldn’t even sit up properly, but there you were, hauling yourself across the floor to get to some shiny wrapping paper.

She laughed. Then she said:

You’ll never be loved so much again.

Sorry? I said.

It goes so fast, she said. Then she said, brisk now, Well, I’m at the car, and it’s starting to rain, and I’ve got to get the dinner on.

Mum? I said.

Sorry? she said. Hello?

No, nothing, I said.

Keep sending the photos and videos. We love seeing him.

I will, I said.

My mum, in the Tesco’s car park. Starting the engine so 52the heat would come on, then sitting there for a minute, before edging out of the parking space and joining the traffic on the slip road to the Sydenham bypass. The clouds over the Holywood hills would be thick and lowering in a waterlogged sky. The Stena Line ferry chugging in over the lough; the Irish Sea.

You’ll never be loved so much again. It was no more than I’d been thinking myself, since my son had woken. But I felt the ache all over again, the inevitable and necessary complication of that love. Something my friend and I discussed almost every time we met: was it harder, these days, raising sons or daughters? And how were we not to fuck it up?

What do you think of, I said to my husband that evening, when you think of Monica Lewinsky?

It was Friday night so we were having a glass of wine while we looked at our phones.

My husband didn’t miss a beat.

I did not, he said in a hick voice, while continuing to swipe at his screen, have sexual relations with that woman.

But he did, though.

My husband looked up at me.

Course he did. Did anyone ever doubt it?

Well – yeah. Or at least – they wanted to.

Plausible deniability.

The baby monitor squatting in between us crackled ominously. We waited to see if it was something or nothing. It was something. 53

I’ll go, my husband said, even though he’d gone the time before.

Thank you, I said. If parenthood was seventy per cent trying to get a baby to sleep, twenty per cent trying to keep it awake, and ten per cent texting each other lists, then maybe this was true love.