Lewa gently suggests that it would be better, for the baby, if she lay off the alcohol, at least those first months. Concern unfolds itself across the room and finds Noah, nodding. Simone sees this, and so she does cut down, but not stop altogether. She can’t now, she realises. She can’t stop. She didn’t know how quickly that could happen. She begins sometimes to drink in secret.

But Noah loves her. He writes songs about their unborn babe. He cleans the flat and paints it, he looks up on the internet how to tile a bathroom and he makes a good go of it. He takes on a job as a security guard, which they laugh at because of his skinny frame, and joke that with her expanding belly, she will soon be more threatening. He observes her carefully. It is Noah who notices her moods. It is Noah who delves deep to locate her desires. He goes one day, alone, in secret, to her parents’ flat and asks them to reach out to her. They tell him that he has no right to stand there, that he has corrupted their daughter, that they want nothing to do with him, or her, so long as she’s with him.

Nevertheless, when the baby arrives, they come to the hospital. They tell Simone that she cannot come home, but if she wants, they’ll take Dominic.

It is Noah who persuades Simone not to cut them off completely.

He is a good father. She watches through blurry eyes as he gets up in the night and mixes bottles. She sees him change nappies and run baths in the sink. She notices the way that a sound or a movement from the baby seems to make a smile spread from its origin in Noah’s mouth, into his eyes, and then all the way through him, dancing later in the notes of a new song, strummed softly on guitar next to the crib. She wonders how he has managed to capture such delight, for she does not feel it. She holds the baby because she has to, but she doesn’t experience the rush of love she had expected. Dominic is a slight, sallow child, with small eyes. To spite her parents further, she had hoped he would be unmistakeable in his darkness, but he bears little resemblance to his father. She cannot see herself in him either. Lewa tries to show her how to breastfeed, but it feels unnatural and repulsive, a foreign creature tugging at her flesh. When Lewa arrives at the end of her nursing shift, Simone pushes the baby gratefully into her hands and sinks onto her bed, unable to comprehend how her body has become so heavy that it feels weighted with iron. Perhaps she is lacking iron, suggests Lewa, noticing her lethargy, bringing her supplements, singing soft gospel to Dominic as she dances him around the room, scattering about her an interminable scent of nutmeg. Dinners arrive in Tupperware. Noah heats them up and while the baby sleeps, she sees him trying to talk to her, trying to recapture that expanse of understanding between them. She sees him doing this, building that same family closeness she had envied; but she cannot join him in it. She no longer feels like an insider to his life. She only wants to sleep, to escape. But in the day there is the baby. And at night her mind will not stop. One afternoon when Noah is on security, she leaves the baby with Lewa and takes herself across the Concourse to the alcohol shop where she buys a bottle of wine. She plans to drink it all before returning to the flat so that Lewa won’t judge her, but on the way back, somebody asks her if she’s after an upper, and of course she is, anything to lift that iron weight from her bones. And after that, wine seems an immature, foolish flirtation.