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my life; sharemilkers’ cottages that were never cleaned out properly by the last tenants, and later my grandparents’ house which became ours. That house still makes me think of floral carpets and dark passages, although it is so different now. Then there was the student flat, where I met Paul.
    ‘Actually, I don’t think he’s quite right for you,’ my mother said.
    Actually, I didn’t care what my mother thought. I haven’t cared much for a long time. Ours is an excellent match. Sometimes I wonder if we have done as many things together as we should, such as travelling more, before settling down like this. But then I think that a baby will fill up the spaces, and then the next one will come along and so on, until life itself is filled up, because that is what children do for you.
    I expect to have more than one child. When I became engaged to Paul, my Aunt Dorothy, on my father’s side, who lives in a resthome, sent me three crocheted milk covers weighted with beads round the edges. Normally I would have expected my mother to say something scornful, such as, ‘Doesn’t she know we’ve got refrigerators?’, especially as the gift was from Aunt Dorothy. But three children, same as me, is what my mother said, quite casually, that’s what that means. I’m more superstitious than I would ever let on to Paul and his parents. It must be the old Irish Catholic past that haunts my mother, haunts me. We try to pretend it isn’t there, all that mystery and repression.
    And Paul likes the smell of fresh paint after all. He has taken to the house and planted vegetables behind the trellis fence and built a barbecue out of old bricks. The curly numerals cut from copper on the letter-box are his handiwork. We meet in our lunch-hours to choose curtains and floor coverings that blend into our colour scheme of pale turquoise and old rose. The second bedroom is being brought to life with the addition of mobiles hanging from the ceiling, little giraffes, comic characters, brightly coloured numerals. Our baby will have all the right things, the proper sensory stimulation, from the outset.
    I draw the curtain gently aside. Outside, the moon is bouncing over the harbour, huge, luminous and full. The sea is like an immense glittering lake with barely a ruffle on its surface.
    I talk to my baby at nights. I’ll love you, I say, I’ll do my very best for you. I can’t promise to get it right, but at least I’ll try. I’ll protect you. My hand lies on his head. He lies perfectly still inside me, and I know he is reassured by what I have told him.
    When I first came here, I would have said that nothing goes on in the suburbs at this time of night. But I have begun to pick up on surprising things since my night vigils by the window. There is a youth who stumbles home with a guitar case under his arm; a man, once, who shifted house under cover of darkness; a woman who cries in a steady, rhythmic drone in a house I can never locate. The plaintive sound fills me with grief. In the weekends I watch the faces of women who push prams around the neighbourhood and I can’t pick out anyone who appears to have spent the night in such a persistent state of desperation. Soon, like it or not, I will know all these people, when the baby arrives. Mothers’ groups and play groups and school stretch before me. Does this mean that I will also come to know their secrets, or will they be hidden like those in my parents’ house?
    Another of those ripples of dread runs up my spine. I recognise it as dread, an old enemy that lurks at my shoulder. It was something I felt when I was still a young and promising gymnast poised on the beam, facing the space between me and the ground. Although I had been taught to fall without hurting myself, there were moments when I was not always convinced by my training and in the end that’s what finished me. One evening, my father came to collect me from practice at the local gymnasium. He stood watching me; I rose on