My day consists mainly of compiling the letters page for My Baby—which means I’m constantly knee deep in tearful epistles from cooing mothers or tirades from childless harpies, not unlike myself, who feel that the world has dealt them a lousy hand. I also commission and edit articles that are given whizzy titles by Monica, my editor, such as—‘Make Your Fallopian Tubes Your Friends’, ‘The Greatest-Ever Guide to Baby Poo’, ‘Feeling the Strain—All You Ever Need to Know about Constipation and Pregnancy’. There are also far too many titled ‘Great Expectations!’ Occasionally, when there’s no one else available and my desk isn’t swamped under a deluge of urgent copy, I’m allowed out with my trusty Dictaphone to interview ‘C’ list celebrities about their joyful, and often alternative, birth experience or their long and painful struggle with polycystic ovaries or similar.

Jake has, on one or two occasions, voiced the opinion that my current employment is doing little to quell my ‘obsession’ with babies. I just feel that when the time comes I’ll be fully equipped—mainly with toddler-type freebies—and confident in my knowledge of the wonderful adventure that is pregnancy.

I do admit that every now and again I tear up or toss a letter from some whining, sleep-deprived mother who is writing in saying she’s permanently tired from disturbed nights. Some women don’t know how lucky they are. I’m permanently tired from disturbed nights trying to bloody conceive!

I give the eggs another whack for good luck and toss the spoon onto the table. With my loved one gone, it looks as if that’s going to be a thing of the past.

Chapter three

Chapter three

Monica and Charlotte are smokers. I can see them as I stomp up the road from the Tube, scarf wound around my neck in an effort to keep warm. It’s only November and the temperature is barely above freezing already, but that doesn’t deter them from pursuing their chosen vice. I join them in their shivering huddle outside the front door of our offices.

‘Afternoon,’ Monica says. It’s not even eleven o’clock yet. Sometimes I wish I smoked and then I could join the select band of lepers who come out here on the hour, every hour, to damage their lungs despite what the elements can throw at them. Sometimes I come out just for the hell of it because I’m sure they gossip about the rest of us when we aren’t there. But we all know that cigarettes lower the birth weight of babies so I’ve resisted temptation. Next they’ll be telling us that trying to conceive by having sex is bad for unborn babies and we’ll all be in a dreadful mess.