‘So I’m fat, and I don’t want to have sex even after it’s out because I’m all cut up and sore with it. That’s what they do, you know. That’s OK, though, because you’ve got this baby. It’s probably a boy, he’s your son, and you think he looks just like you, apart from when he looks like me. And for a wee while, that’ll do us. Even though he’s screaming all the time and we’re not getting any sleep, and the house – oh, your mum has helped us get a house, by the way, because even though she still doesny like me – no, sssh – she’s no having her grandchild, grandson, the heir, grow up in some damp wee tenement just cos you want to carry on playing bohemian with your muck-common ginger singer wife. It’s a nice one in the Grange, near hers; she’s not cheap, your mum. It’s got a back garden with grass and flowers and everything. Anyway, it’s a shithole because I don’t clean it, because I’m spending all my days looking after the baby and crying. But when you come back from tour, and you roll a joint and toke up in the garden before coming in and sitting on the stairs – cos this isn’t none of your basement flats, this house, it’s got an upstairs – and you sit there on the stairs and you listen to me singing your son to sleep, singing Gaelic lullabies, you think it’s beautiful and we’ll work through it. You think that because you’re an optimist, but every day you stay in that lovely shithole, with those great high ceilings, big windows letting in all that light so you can see the dust piling up on the mantelpiece, you start to feel trapped. Maybe there’s a stain on the sofa where I pissed myself because giving birth to the son, the boy, ripped my fanny open and now I can’t feel the muscles down there, and you notice it every time you walk into the living room, remember how you just noticed it dripping down out of my leggings as I sat there feeding the baby, how I burst out crying (again) and swore at you when you pointed it out, how you had to scrub your own wife’s pee out of that lovely sofa your mum bought. That happens. I’ve heard that from more than one person. No. Stop. I’m talking. I’m talking. Anyway, you think about that piss stain every time you go into work and see Sadie or Francesca sitting there behind the desk; she’s not your secretary, pal, I’ll give you credit for originality, but she works in admin or something. Let’s be frank, you’re not making the whole shagging-an-artist mistake again, are ye? She was maybe in first year at your school the year you were leaving. She remembers you playing guitar in the final-year assembly and is disappointed that you aren’t still making music, but she totally gets that you’re doing what makes money, and my God, Danny, she really admires you for it. Or maybe she’s a Home Counties girl, fresh out of uni and just sometimes it crosses your mind that she probably wouldn’t be swearing at your mum or refusing to come to family parties, which we both know is what I will have dissolved into by that point, eh? When you’re in the house, and those gig nights are getting later and later, but when you’re finally there, and you’re trying to help, what you don’t realize is I’m swearing at you behind your back. Seriously, you go downstairs to our scummy-as-fuck designer kitchen and you’re thinking that you’re helping, you’re actually telling yourself, what a great guy I am for helping, and if you turned back for one second you’d be terrified. You’d turn round to the woman holding your baby, your son, the heir to the Mansfield fortune, and you’d see her face creased into this ugly thing, all spite and hate and fire. You’d see the words she mouths at you, you cunt, you fuck, you useless shit. It would scare you. Your bones would be properly chilled, pal, especially as you’d watch your baby pat her face and laugh at first at the funny shapes it makes, while she pushes all those hard words out. But he’d learn them after a while. Your baby would learn that these words were normal, that they were how human beings communicate. He’d make those faces himself, going through life, to the other boys and girls in the class, to his teenage girlfriend, to whichever luckless cow he manages to convince to marry him. You fuck. You useless shitty cunt.’