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fucking pit-hole into a gym!’ Sarah yelled. ‘How are we ever going to conceive if you shut yourself out there in the dark like a mole? Honestly, Kyle, you’ve gone all peely wally from the lack of light and you’ve got a beer belly. It’s disgusting! You’re going to have to take me from behind.’
    By year five – the seventh year of their marriage – the life had been sucked out of him, and he spent as long as he could at work or at the gym. The rest of the time he walked a tightrope, hoping only to make it to the end, to not fall off.

CHAPTER SIX
    At first I thought it was the baby blues. I’d heard that on day three (when your tits transform into granite boulders capable of hitting innocent passers-by with shots of warm milk), you can get a little teary. This is the perfectly normal baby blues. So when I cried because the breakfast lady had no apricot jam, I didn’t panic. This was the baby blues. Perfectly normal.
    But on day four I cried because no matter how hard I tried I could not find my pelvic floor muscles. On day five I cried because I was beginning to face up to the fact that one day I would have to do a poo. On day six I cried when I did the poo and on day seven I cried at a Cornflakes ad on the telly. On day eight I cried when I went home with my slightly-less- yellow child. He’d had jaundice, which had made him very yellow and meant we couldn’t go home till day eight.

    In the third week I cried every time my mum came over because I felt like I was the stupidest and worst mother in the history of the world.
    ‘Maybe you’re depressed? It’s quite common,’ she whispered nervously on one occasion.
    I was holding Robbie against my rigid, tense nipple and grinding my teeth at the time. ‘You go have a nap,’ she ventured, watching Robbie wail as he tried to extract juice from my brick. ‘Then afterwards , maybe we could ring the health visitor, or Kyle, together?’
    ‘I’m fine,’ I snapped.
    She didn’t give up, bless her. She left pamphlets about postnatal depression on side tables. (I threw them out.)
    She got Kyle and Sarah to visit me. (I talked about the weather.)
    She just happened to show up at the same time as the health visitor. (I talked about the weather, which was fine, like me.)
    I was always ‘fine, fine, fucking fine!’ God, if I wasn’t fine, then what kind of woman was I? The kind that’s a failure. The kind that doesn’t deserve to be a mother.
    When all else failed, she and Dad took Robbie and I to Italy for some rest and relaxation. I have never found anything so stressful in my life – filling in Robbie’s passport application form without touching box-edges; holding him up in a photo booth so hewas the right size, shape, colour; finding decent law-abiding citizens to verify his identity on the back of the photos; standing in an emergency passport queue somewhere in town while he howled; packing clothes for two not one – nappies and wipes and things I’d never had to pack before; standing in airport queues with my parents, who could not disguise their worried faces.
    We stayed in a five-star hotel with a pool and an award-winning restaurant that overlooked the breathtaking Lake Como.
    It was awful and I was awful. I argued with the hotel manager about the air-conditioning, with the bus driver for not helping me up with the pram, and with Mum and Dad about everything else. It was the opposite of rest and relaxation.
    After we got back from Italy, I took Mum’s advice and decided to invite my antenatal friends over. We were all around the same age, we’d all had jobs and lives, and being together had been a real giggle during our pregnancies.
    But when they arrived it felt to me as if something weird had happened to them since they’d given birth. They were not only not a giggle, they seemed to have changed into competitive witches.
    ‘I’d never let him sleep in the bed with me!’ said one of the mums.
    ‘The trick is don’t let them get away