I tried breathing out slowly, thinking all the time that if I could just get this breathing over with, I could get on with something important. ‘Do you think there are therapists to treat people who don’t get angry enough? Telling them they need to breathe in more and not out.’

‘If there are such people, I don’t think therapists bother with them. I think those are the people who make society work.’

‘In that wonderful way it does. Do you really want to become one of them?’

‘Breathe out. And pause. Now breathe in deeply, then out slowly.’

‘I can’t. We need joss sticks. The ambience is wrong.’

‘And pause. Now breathe in deeply.’

‘What if being angry is the only thing that keeps me going?’

‘Breathe out slowly. Then you’d better find something else to keep you going.’

*

‘Wright?’ called a Spanish voice. ‘Amy Wright?’

We followed the nurse through to meet the sonographer, a kind, reassuring woman with technical expertise and an Italian accent. It took some doing to cast her as the enemy.

I looked away and towards the screen as she squirted lubricant over Amy’s belly and went to work with her machine.

And there it was. A blur at first, an untuned TV, and there was its head, the length of its body.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘There’s definitely a baby there.’

The baby was moving. Jiggling around.

‘You’ve got a busy one,’ the sonographer said.

Amy and I looked at each other. It took the sonographer a while to get the head measurement she needed.

‘You’ve wound the baby up,’ said Amy. ‘I’m coming with someone else next time.’

The sonographer switched something and suddenly the room was filled with noise – a hard, squelching beating, like something they’d play downstairs at Berghain.

‘Jesus,’ I said.

‘I think that’s unlikely,’ said the sonographer. ‘Unless you’re a virgin?’ she said, looking at Amy. ‘What that is is a healthy heartbeat. Congratulations.’

Amy was shaking her head at me and smiling. We listened to its heartbeat, furious already: one of us.

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‌Part Two

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‌Twelve

Your office is a white room in a house, with two low armchairs and a small coffee table between us, and a box of tissues ready for when you make me break down. Good luck with that. There is a fireplace to my right with a tasteful arrangement of dried flowers in it. The room is neutrally prepped, the way a real-estate developer might deck out a show flat. Ikea art on the walls. Nothing as messy as a book in here. A clock is angled towards me so I won’t be surprised when you ask me to leave.

‘Why do you think you’re here?’ you say in an American accent, after we’ve said hello and sat down.

Because I can’t afford a psychoanalyst, I’m tempted to say.