‘You must be,’ Ashling lied stoutly.

‘Well, even if I’m not imagining it, I’m pretending I am. I blame that bloody Red Bull,’ she exclaimed. ‘I’m never touching it again!’

After she hung up, Marcus kissed Ashling and asked softly, ‘Was I good last night?’

‘Well… no.’ Ashling was surprised. They hadn’t made love when they’d come in.

‘No?’ His voice was sharp with anguish.

Oh Christ! Too late, Ashling realized what he was on about. ‘On stage? I thought you meant in bed. You were fantastic on stage, I told you at the time.’

‘Better than Bicycle Billy, “one of Ireland’s top comedians”?’

‘You know you are.’

‘If I knew it I wouldn’t have to ask.’

‘Better than Billy, better than Ted, better than Mark, better than Jimmy, better than everyone.’ Ashling wanted to go back to sleep.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes.’

‘Jimmy’s gag about the football supporters was great, though.’

‘It was OK,’ Ashling said cautiously.

‘How OK?’ Marcus pounced. ‘On a scale of one to ten?’

‘One,’ Ashling yawned. ‘It was crap. Let’s go back to sleep now.’

43

Oliver’s visit had shattered Lisa’s fragile equilibrium. At work her eye was off the ball and her bitchy-remark quota was way down. What made things worse was that he didn’t ring her. She’d hoped that he would, if only just to leave a jokey ‘Thanks for the shag’ message. Especially now that he had her number. But the days passed and hope faded.

On day five the yearning got too bad and she rang him, but it went straight to message service. He was out, she deduced, having a good time, living the life she used to live. Full of irritating desolation, she hung up, too raw to leave a message.

She should have known he wouldn’t get in touch. It was over, they both knew it, and once his mind was made up, it stayed that way. Subdued and distracted, she couldn’t stop dwelling on questions that she should have considered six months, nine months, a year previously. What had happened to her marriage? What went wrong? Like so many relationships, theirs had foundered on the issue of children. But this time there was a twist. He wanted them, she didn’t.

She’d thought she wanted them. There was a spate when absolutely anyone who was anyone was up the duff: various Spice Girls; a plethora of models; several actresses. A bump was as much of a style statement as a pashmina or a Gucci handbag, and pregnancy was hot. She’d even included it in a list – Pregnancy was ‘Hot’ and Precious Stones were ‘Not’.

Shortly after that, the in-thing was to be seen wheeling a tiny little baba in a black jogging buggy – don’t leave home without it. Lisa, her gimlet eye registering the infinitesimal rise and fall of all things trendy, took in these developments.

‘I want a baby,’ she told Oliver.

Oliver wasn’t so keen. He liked their stylish, sociable life, and knew that a baby would put the brakes on it. No more partying until dawn, no more white sofas, no more spontaneous, last-minute trips to Milan. Or Vegas. Or even Brighton. Sleepless nights would no longer be courtesy of high-grade cocaine, but of a screaming child instead. All disposable income would be diverted away from Dolce & Gabbana jeans and reapplied to mountains of disposable nappies.

But Lisa got to work, and slowly she convinced him. Appealing to his macho pride, ‘Don’t you want your genes to be carried on?’

‘No.’

And then one day, lying in bed he said, ‘OK.’

‘OK, what?’

‘OK, we’ll have a baby.’ Before Lisa could exclaim with pleasure he had plucked her foil card of pills from the bedside shelf and ceremoniously flushed them down the loo.

‘No safety net, babes.’

In her fantasies, Lisa was already sporting a delicious coffee-coloured baby on her slender hip. ‘It’s not a doll,’ Fifi pointed out to her. ‘It’s a human being and they’re a lot of hard work.’

‘I know that,’ Lisa had snapped. But she didn’t really.

Then someone at work got pregnant. Arabella, a sharp, slightly dangerous woman, who was as smart as a whip and always immaculately turned out. Overnight she became as sick as a dog. One day she even puked into the wastepaper bin. When she wasn’t in the ladies’ either weeing or throwing up, she was slumped at her desk, queasily nibbling ginger, too exhausted to work. And the food! Despite her ever-present nausea, she ate mountains. ‘The only thing that settles my stomach is food,’ she mumbled, shoving another Cornish pasty down the hatch. In no time she looked as if she’d been buried up to her neck in a sandpit. It got worse. Her once-glistening hair became unaccountably frizzy and suddenly she was very prone to cold sores. Her skin yielded flaky patches of psoriasis and her nails split and broke. To Lisa’s supercritical eye she looked more like a plague victim than a pregnant woman.

Most disturbing of all, Arabella’s concentration disappeared. Mid-interview she forgot Nicole Kidman’s name, and could only come up with the office nickname for her: Nicole Skidmark. She couldn’t remember if her wraparound John Rocha velcro skirt was last season’s or the one before. And these things were elementary, Lisa noted in mounting alarm. The day came when Arabella’s ability to make a decision between a White Magnum and a Classic Magnum just went west on her. ‘Whi- No, Classi- No, no, wait. White. Definitely White. No, Classic…’ She could have dithered for England. ‘I’ve become lime-jelly-brain girl,’ she moaned.

Thoroughly spooked, Lisa went to see another woman who’d had a baby. Eloïse, features editor at Chic Girly.

‘How are you?’ Lisa asked.

‘Psychotic from sleep deprivation,’ Eloïse answered.

It got worse. Though it was six months since Eloïse had had her baby, she still looked as though she’d been buried up to her neck in a sandpit.

And something else. She no longer cared, she’d lost her hardness. This was the editor formerly known as Attila. She sacked without fear – or at least she used to. But now she was afflicted with a faint but unmissable air of goo.

Lisa began back-pedalling like there was no tomorrow. She didn’t want a baby, they destroyed your life. It was easy for models and Spice Girls. They had teams of nannies to ensure you got your sleep, personal trainers to insist you regained your figure, private hairdressers to comb your hair when you hadn’t the energy to.