She clicks together the press-studs on Jake’s pale green babygro suit, buttoning him back up into a standard, cared-for baby with a standard, caring mother.

She wonders if the something that held her great-grandmother together, the something that kept her neat and tidy and allowed her to get out of bed each day and bake marble cakes, had been loosening moment by moment, pulling and straining, until one day her husband said or did something quite innocuous and it snapped: the real snarling, biting, furious Alice was unleashed with terrible consequences. Grace wonders if that propensity to snap had been encapsulated in a gene that is now floating around in her own DNA. She wonders if perhaps it would be more sensible to take action before that gene has a chance to hurt anyone.

After his bath, Jake falls into a deep drugged sleep halfway through his feed. She puts him down and looks at him dispassionately. He is a very good, obedient baby. He is doing everything as per the books that Thomas’s wife Debbie has lent her.

Before Jake was born, Grace had visited Thomas, Debbie and baby Lily at their spotless West Ryde home. There were children riding bikes up and down the street and the smell of freshly mown grass. Debbie served them home-made Anzac biscuits. Thomas showed her their new pergola. There was a tangible sense of relief emanating from Thomas. It was as though all his life these achievements–home, wife, baby–had been weighing heavy on his mind, and now he’d finally checked them all off he could relax and benignly observe the rest of the world still flailing about trying to reach their own little islands of security. ‘Sophie is still single, you know,’ he told Grace sadly, without a trace of triumph, just ponderous concern. ‘The chances of having a Down Syndrome baby increase every year after the age of thirty-five. She really needs to hurry up.’

Debbie began a hefty percentage of her sentences with the phrase: ‘I’m the sort of person who…’ Debbie was the sort of person who could instantly and accurately judge a person’s character and she could tell that Grace was going to be a wonderful mother. Debbie was the sort of person who believed knowledge was power, that’s why she had bought so many books on good parenting. Debbie was the sort of person who didn’t mind at all lending her books to someone like Grace, who was family, but she was the sort of person who would like to get them back in good condition. Debbie was the sort of person who had a very high tolerance for pain, but when she was in labour it was like being torn in two and she screamed so loud that she burst a blood vessel in her eye. Debbie was the sort of person who didn’t really like kids but the moment she saw her daughter Lily she felt the most euphoric feeling, the most intense love she had ever felt.

‘I fell instantly in love with her,’ said Debbie. ‘I’m the sort of person who doesn’t exaggerate, and honestly, truly, it was like nothing I’ve ever experienced before. I just adored her. I’d give my life for her. I’d throw myself in front of a semi-trailer for her. I just sobbed when she was born, didn’t I, Tommy? You’ll see! It will be the same for you. It happens to every mother.’

Three months later, at four in the morning, Grace saw her baby son for the first time. The midwife, a snappy skinny girl who Grace hated, put him on her stomach. Grace waited for the euphoria. Instead she felt the most intense sensation of nothing. She didn’t like or dislike this greasy creature. He was a stranger: nothing to do with her. All she could feel was relief that it was over, that it was out of her, that nobody was shouting instructions at her any more.

She has her own labour story now, but she can’t imagine cheerfully sharing it with anyone, like Debbie had done, in excruciating detail, over Anzac biscuits. It had been, quite simply, grotesque. She had lost all control of herself–her mind and her body–and she never wanted to again.

‘He’s so small!’ Callum was standing next to the bed in a white hospital gown, pale and red-eyed. There was some blood on his gown. He looked like a doctor on ER. Grace saw her husband’s face all scrunched and silly with joy. So, he was feeling it.

She thought perhaps the euphoria was running late and it would eventually hit her. One day she’d look at her son and fall in love with him like a proper mother. But Jake has been in the world now for three weeks and Grace is beginning to wonder, with a sort of tired inevitability, if she will never feel anything except the enormous responsibility of keeping his tiny heart beating, his tiny lungs breathing. It seems she might have to fake it for the rest of her life. She imagines him taking his first steps, dressed for his first day of school, playing his first soccer game, standing up, all awkward and gangly, to do a speech at his eighteenth birthday party, and all the while there would be Grace, his fraudulent mum, becoming greyer and wrinklier and still not feeling it.

She watches Jake sleeping and says out loud, ‘Well, Debbie, guess what? I’m the sort of person who can’t love her own child.’

As Grace is walking back down to the kitchen she begins to cry. She feels somehow separate from her crying, as if her body is experiencing a series of involuntary symptoms–a salty discharge from her eyes, a convulsing chest. It continues on and on until she is mildly astonished; she didn’t know it was possible to cry for so long.

Eventually she decides it isn’t necessary to stop functioning just because she is crying. She should just get on with what she needs to do.

She sobs as she does a load of washing and wails into the cold wind as she puts the washing on the line. She fries mince for Callum’s favourite meal, lasagne, and lets the tears slide off the edge of her chin and into the sizzling meat.

‘Oh, this is ridiculous,’ she thinks. ‘That’s enough now.’

She doesn’t want to be all puffy and red-nosed when Callum comes home. She wants dinner in the oven, a CD on the stereo, a sleeping buttoned-up baby in his crib and a nice bottle of red wine already opened. She wants everything calmly in place, like the way she imagined it would be before the baby was born.

She wants to be good at this. Being a mother is just like any other new skill, like driving a car or playing tennis. At first it seems impossibly difficult, but then, by gritting your teeth and trying again and again, you get your head around it. She just has to get her head, her stupid aching head, around this new skill.

When Callum had got home after his first day back at work he’d found Grace deeply asleep on the couch. He’d touched her arm and she had apparently said, without opening her eyes, ‘Look! All you need to do is add two eggs! It’s not rocket science!’ before rolling over and going back to sleep again. Callum had found this very amusing. She had heard him telling his mother about it on the phone, sounding very loving and husbandly. ‘Very tired, of course,’ she heard him say. ‘But no, she’s fine.’