We were on Assia’s sofa. She was sitting on a round cushion with a hole in it that the hospital had given her. Her face was puffy and coated with the very thin sheen of sweat that people have when their perspiration is due not to heat but to pain. The scrunched-up thing in her arms was making a squeaky, hiccuping noise. Assia was joggling it up and down in her arms, pulling a face. It was exhausting just watching my friend and her baby – the squeaking, the joggling, the wincing. Being alive seemed a monumental effort for both of them.

I had been there ten minutes and was still wearing my coat. I asked a few polite questions about the birth – how was it? Assia replied at length, with every anatomical detail. Then she said, ‘Anyway, how are you?’

I launched into an anecdote about some Year Tens setting fire to the science lab but I knew she wasn’t listening. I wondered whether, as she was in pain and exhausted, it was up to me to rise and take my coat off and offer to make a cup of tea or coffee. Probably, I thought. The present and card I had brought with me were still unopened on a coffee table. We had that to do at least.

Assia looked down at her baby as she spoke. ‘No offence, Lis’, but can you go in about five minutes?’

For a moment, I didn’t cotton on to what she meant – then I realised she was asking me to leave. ‘Oh, no problem,’ I said, rising, ‘I can go now.’ I was expecting her to say sorry, no, sit down, tell me more about how you are.

Instead she said, ‘Thanks. You’ll get it when it’s your turn, seriously, sorry, but you will.’

*

In the way these things worked, my cohort spent its twenties drifting into two groups: those who had children and those who didn’t. The second group thought the first group self-satisfied; the first group found the second shallow – the truth was less boundaried, more porous. In the second group, there were couples desperate for children. When we got together for barbecues or picnics, they stared at the babies as if they were grenades with the pin pulled out. In the first group, there were dads and occasionally mums who joined the childless gang on clubbing nights and behaved more wildly than they had ever done before becoming parents, waving their arms on the dance floor, semaphoring all the things they had to prove.