Amy Crane is in crisis. Six months after giving birth, she's still struggling with the transition from independent thirtysomething to muffin-middle mum. She can't remember the last time she had a wax. Or an orgasm. And she suspects her boyfriend is cheating. Enter Alice - her glamorous nemesis - on a mission to transform Amy's body, self esteem and love life. As Amy swaps breast pads for Botox and clambers out of a vortex of self doubt, her libido awakens from its long nap and things get rather more complicated...

Prologue

As catastrophes go, it was a quiet one. You wouldn’t have known my world had imploded. I didn’t talk about what happened, stitched it up inside. A single girl might have sulked over a few cocktails before dieting defiantly and declaring ‘Next!’ My affairs were more complicated. I was eight months pregnant. And Joe remained the proud expectant dad. He’d still trace my hard bump with fascinated fingers, kiss the heat off my bruised breasts. I was his, impregnated, fat and cosseted. But I wasn’t enough.

It was an unseasonably warm autumn. An ‘Indian summer’ the breakfast TV weatherman crowed as if he’d divined it himself. That particular September morning, I was awoken early by the baby pushing out its tiny palms like pastry cutters under the skin. Too tired to feel enchanted, I gracelessly levered myself out of my enormous bed. (Bought for sex when I single. Look where it got me.)  Pulling up the blind, residential Kilburn revealed itself in slices. The taste of next door’s bacon slivered in through the gap in the window frame.

Another day, hungry, drunk on hormones. Another day being Amy Crane, celebrated Pregnant Person. Strangers smiled at me then. Needless to say, they don’t anymore. My mother says this is because I sport a scowl. I say I’m just squintily short sighted and don’t like wearing glasses. And, in any case, mum knows how to extract a scowl better than anyone.  

Joe smack-kissed my tummy. Must go, he said. Meeting. Out of the office. You have a lovely day. He was dressed in a tan linen suit, an artfully crumpled good one. Birkenstocks. All dangerously Soho. But his great size and unselfconscious lollop - his head arrives a few inches before the rest of him, not because of a stoop, but rather due to an eagerness to get behind his Apple Mac – stops him looking camp. The door slammed. Clump, clump down the steps – he used to jump every other one, doesn’t now - and then the dry drag of his sandals on the pavement. Why is it that things sound different in the sunshine? You can hear the weather. I lay back on the bed but a pile of bricks weighed down on my spine. Besides, croissants called.

Five, perhaps six. Barely touched the sides. The best thing about being pregnant was the licence to eat with complete impunity, like a naturally thin person. Once I gave birth it transpired that the baby only accounted for a fraction of my pregnancy weight. Only Joe thought this funny.

Beep! A text. Joe.

‘mt regents prk boat lake caf 12’

Sweet. We hadn’t arranged anything. But it was the first week of my maternity leave and Joe guessed I didn’t know what to do with myself. After years of moaning about the nine-to-five I felt vaguely lost without its scaffolding. My intention to use that precious last bit of ‘free’ time productively - art galleries, foreign film matinees and girlie lunches - had yet to be realised. No, I preferred cool, private, unsociable baths. I needed to wash all the time that summer. Pregnancy made me secrete hot sticky female stuff, like sex juice, but not. That was the last thing on my mind.

Flumping in, I displaced half the bath water. A fleshy archipelago of lumpy islands broke the filmy surface, my shape barely human, nothing like those neat celebrity pods you see in magazines. After drying myself down – each pat indenting my water-logged skin like a footprint - I squeezed into a tube of maternity Lycra and covered the mud splatter of pregnancy pigmentation marks on my forehead with a thick foundation. Squirt of useless non-toxic deodorant, and I was off, thudding forth on cracked heels. 

The Tube made me anxious. I knew I’d be the last person to escape through the cramped emergency exits should an emergency arise. And I’d never felt so vulnerable. Protesting to the flood of adrenaline, the baby corkscrewed inside. The carriage smelt. The man sitting next to me scratched his scalp noisily. Then he sniffed his finger and I thought I might swoon with disgust. Surfacing at Baker Street I breathed deeply between cars to avoid asphyxiating my baby with exhaust and, following the loop of lake, walked through Regent’s Park, slowly, like I was wearing one of those Hollywood fat suits.

Chinese ducks with calligrapher-drawn faces, moorhens, drab brown females and a heron, one leg bent back as if assuming a particularly punishing yoga pose. For the city, bucolic. I waddled breathlessly up a small arched bridge to get a better view. To my right, through the horse chestnuts, rose the bronze dome of the Regent’s Park mosque. Behind the willow tree, to my left, was the boating lake, bobbing sky blue rowing boats. On the other side of the bridge, the cafe. My phone beeped.

‘Snt messge 2 wrng phone. srry. wrk thing. canclled. spk ltr’ 


Sent while I was underground. Great. I leant my cargo against the wooden handrail and considered a compensation prize from the café. Bagels? Magnum? A flapjack would be nice. Suddenly, I heard a laugh, nasal, screechy, like a parakeet. I looked to my left. And that’s when I saw him, from behind, in the umbrella of shadow cast by a willow tree. If I’d looked two seconds later or shut my eyes in rapture over flapjacks, I would have missed him. I really wish I had. But he is unmistakable from behind. Who was he with? Cursing my short sight, stomach on spin cycle, I gripped the handrail of the bridge. Damn my impressionist vision!  Then they walked away, into the light. And what I saw ruined everything. So I ran. Not terribly fast, obviously.

One

It’s just as well that I stopped caring whether men looked at me after that. Because they don’t, not even a quick double-take. Now I can weave through crowds without the slightest sexual ripple. Like a woman in her sixties perhaps, or in burka. Of course, there’s no reason why anyone would look. I’m no longer a blooming Pregnant Person. Nor am I side-show ugly, comically obese or in any way beautiful or striking. No, I’m five foot four and a half inches, thirty one years old, ten stone six, with dyed blonde hair (two inch mousy roots) and washed out denim eyes. The lashes I used to get tinted are now pale as a pig’s. After years of blasting my salary on blow dries and beauty counters, now my monthly grooming budget – mostly products for thinning hair and breast pads – amounts to little more than the price of a Chanel nail varnish.

No, I’m not one of those women who pinged back to their pre-baby selves, not in any way. I’m irreparably changed. And I dress accordingly. Today: three year old Nike Airs, drawstring M&S khakis and a blue T shirt that slips off my shoulders to reveal feeding bra straps sprouting elastic. My other clothes, from my pre-baby life, no longer fit.

So no wolf-whistles and, a little more crushingly, no competitive size-ups by other women. (It’s funny the things you miss). Only the care-in-the-community loons and charity chuggers note my passing. Which made the following incident all the more extraordinary.

Last Wednesday, on the Salusbury Road, Queens Park, 3.15 pm. Handsome and surf-dirt blonde, he was wheeling a hand-painted rainbow-striped mountain bike along the pavement. Taut brown legs scissoring in neon yellow cycle shorts, he was muscular, short, built like a hammer. I’d just nipped into the pub, pretended that I was looking for someone so that the landlord thought I was a customer before stealing into the Ladies. My bladder isn’t quite what it was. On my way out, I walked straight into him, grazing my knee on his pedal. I said sorry. He said sorry. He flirted his eyes up, then down and grinned shyly. Jolting with embarrassment, I walked away, a sharp trot, past the Queens Park dads – accessorised with baby slings and expensive trainers - browsing the estate agent windows, the cappuccino drinkers at the pavement café and the low plateaux of jostling heads that made up a crowd of school children. I was aware, even then, that the fleeting flush of attention changed the way I walked. My spine lengthened in a supermodelish kind of way. My head craned up so that I looked straight ahead, on an eye level with others, rather than at the unfolding grey landscape of pavement. Of course, with hindsight, this exacerbated the situation. It took me until I passed the third avenue (about six minutes) before I realised I had four sheets of white loo paper flagged to the sole of my left trainer.

No such delusions today. A twig is caught in the back right wheel of the pram, ticking time with each rotation, as I walk along Brondesbury Road (unnoticed). It’s breezy but unusually warm, like the low setting on the hair dryer I haven’t used for months. Blossom dense as broccoli on the trees. Shit, there I go again, already thinking about food and it’s only six o clock. There’s a buzz of people escaping work, impatient to get home before the last of the sunshine slopes off into the chill of the May evening. I love London like this. It reminds me of when I was single. That exciting smell of spring – cigarettes, beer, camellia blossom, low-hung pollution – is the smell of libido rising, the promise of skimpy dresses, damp knickers and brown feet. It means everything when you’re single. Now what does it mean? A parasol on Evie’s pram. A tooth. Solids.

‘Honey you’re home!’  Joe’s attempt at an American accent. He opens the door as I twiddle the key, so I fall forward. He catches me. Whoa! I get a double-take flash – I’ve been getting these a lot recently, still a little startled that this life is mine – and see Joe distinctly, as if for the first time. Not bad looking, not at all. A big man. Over six foot, coat hanger shoulders, a smile wide enough to glimpse the mercury fillings in his molars. Eyes, Atlantic blue, feathered with ink black lashes. He’s by far the most attractive one in this relationship now. The power has shifted. 

Joe stumbles, tripping on a plastic brick. While this would make me curse, he tuts affectionately. He loves our baby’s imposition, the clues to her six month old existence.  A contented father. A good catch. Still, many of women would have confronted him, I know that. But if you absolutely can’t risk losing, you don’t play do you?

‘Got off early,’ he says.

‘That makes a change.’ Joe is usually late. He runs his business hours infuriatingly erratically. I never know where he is from one day to the next, which leaves me wondering.

He ruffs up his sleeves exposing wide freckled forearms. ‘Thought I’d come and see what mischief you two got up to when I’m not here.’

‘Now you know. Wild bacchanalian sex orgies, blizzards of cocaine...’

Joe grins shyly.  ‘Er, I’ve got something for you. A present.’

‘Oh fab. No birthday required.’ My last present involved a travel bottle steriliser and a recent photograph of me which he’d doctored on Photoshop, removing the bags under my eyes and my post-partum chins. (He didn’t understand why I was offended.)

Joe peers into the pram. ‘Asleep, good.’ He wheels it into a nook of the hall and swivels it to face the wall.

‘Amy…’ Joe lunges for my hand and folds it into his, digging his fingers into my palm. When we first met I loved his big hands, like the Green Cross Code man, the way they made mine looked so pretty and doll-like.  We haven’t held hands for a long time.

‘I just want you to know that…’ I brace myself. What have I done wrong now? ‘…you’re an amazing mother. Maybe I don’t say it enough.’

We stare at each other, slightly embarrassed. We don’t operate in this gear. We don’t do soppiness. Life with a baby requires practicality, organisation, a delegation of tasks. Romance is too time consuming and susceptible to awkward misunderstandings.

‘But there has to be more to our relationship than parenting.’ He looks down, slightly embarrassed by his own sincerity. ‘We must not forget about us: Joe and Amy the couple. It’s been tough. But a happy couple make the best parents…’

I recognise this line from the ‘the shock of the new’ chapter of his well-thumbed baby manual.

Joe whips out a bag from behind his back. ‘…so I got you this.’

The box is nipple pink and long and flat with the words Agent Provocateur scrawled across it in bordello writing.

‘Wow, thanks.’ Paroled from his grip, I open the box, peel away the layers of tissue paper. Oh. A froth of pale pink and black lace. A bra! After all my industrial strength maternity bras, I’m stunned by its gossamer lack of substance, its defiance of function. ‘Oh Joe, so beautiful.’

‘Obviously, you can’t wear it yet, it’s got under-wiring,’ he says authoritively. ‘Something nice for when you finish breastfeeding. I intended to just get you the knickers but it matched and the lady in the shop said…’

‘Shush, I’m impressed.’ Joe’s never bought me lingerie before. But it hadn’t been needed. Didn’t matter what knickers I was wearing, they came off. But that was before my life was measured out in fluid ounces. 

‘I did my homework,’ he says quietly, eyes fever bright. I try not to dwell on the nature of his homework. There is more! Rummage into the tissue paper. Lacy knickers! ‘How pretty!’ How alien. (I still wear my maternity knickers a lot. They’re very comfortable.) I hold the knickers up. Oh Christ! The gusset splits in two. A ribbon-seamed hole where my bottom should be hidden. ‘My bum isn’t up to this.’

‘Don’t be silly, you’ve got a great bum. Put them on. Go on. Evie’s asleep. ’ Joe’s big frame is silhouetted against the wall lamp. He is the shape of a men’s lavatory graphic.

‘Later, after supper.’

‘You always say that. Let’s seize the moment…’

I flip through my excuses. Tired? It’s only six thirty.  Period? Duh! I’m breast feeding. There are none. Apart from the obvious, and I can’t go there. So I carry my pretty pink box upstairs and peel off my big nude pants (where from? why?) and M&S maternity bra. Gawd!  My matted triangle of pubic hair is like an illustration from a 70s print of The Joy of Sex. I haven’t trimmed it since, well…can’t remember. I grab the sharpest thing I can find, a pair of blunt nail scissors, and snip manically at my pubic mop until it resembles a badly mown lawn and pull the underwear on in a fast, functional way, as if I were in a changing room full of lithe teenagers slithering into size 6s.

Lo! The bra manages to compensate for my lost oomph with some clever architecture but the knickers pinch the pancake of flesh that folds over my wonky caesarean scar, ‘my crooked smile’ as Joe calls it. (My bikini line clearly wasn’t the surgeon’s priority.) Pubes spike out of the lace. When I open my legs there’s a draft. And when I turn? Oh dear. A hole showing my bum cheek cleavage, tied with a bow! A bow! God. I don’t look sexy. I look ludicrous. I look like a reader’s wife.

‘What you doing in there?’

I can’t walk down the stairs like this, bottom wobbling, so exposed. What if Joe compares me to other women? (His other women?) And more to the point, why is he doing this? This is humiliating, sadistic behaviour.  

‘Wah wahhhhh wahhhhh’

Impeccable timing! Saved! I throw on my towelling dressing gown (towelling is milk-absorbent, my silk one is ruined) and stamp downstairs. Joe has Evie in his arms and paces the stripped wood floor in the living room, singing the Wheels on The Bus under his breath. The answermachine light blinks. Two messages. Thankful for something to do, I depress the button.

‘Hi-yahhh! Sue here. I’m organising a group rendez on Monday, 10.30, Teaz Time, Willesden Lane. All the girls should be there. Oh, by the way, Oliver has a new tooth! It’s the sweetest. Bye now!’

Every development of Oliver’s is the sweetest. Sue is the sweetest too.  Sue is what’s known as ‘An Amazing Friend’. There’s nothing she likes better than discussing birth stories. She phones all the time, offers information on inoculations, commiserates about the disturbed nights, offers to take the baby for a couple of hours, an offer which, to my knowledge, nobody has taken up because you don’t want to get into an exchange situation with her. You don’t want to be beholden somehow.

Beep beep beep

‘Amy, Alice. Done our duty, we’re going dancing. I’ll pick you up Friday at eight. Glad-rags on! Call me if a problem. Later.’

Alice! My new friend Alice. We were ‘put in touch’ by Sophie, a workmate at Nest PR  - where I worked in my pre-baby past life - because we lived close and both had babies (although Alice’s is almost a year older, so in baby terms, a different species). I think Sophie thought I might be lonely. Having a baby is like belonging to an exclusive dating club, or being Jewish. You get introduced.  Just not to women you want to date. Most of them you’ve got nothing in common with bar exhaustion, which limits conversation rather. But it was different with Alice. We met a few weeks ago at Porchester Baths, Bayswater, by the shallow end with our babes in armbands like Bertie Bassets. She said she’d be the one in the bikini. It was lip gloss pink with shells on the ties. In a pool filled with mothers in M&S navy swimming costumes with low cut legs, Alice stood out. 

‘How rude is she? So bloody presumptuous.’ Joe is angry because I’ve ruined the mood by opting to press the telephone’s buttons, not his. But then I don’t seem to do that anymore, with or without expensive underwear.

‘Oh it’s fine. She’s a bit of a character.’

‘But she hardly knows you! What makes her think you want to go out dancing when you’ve got a six month old baby and you’re not getting any sleep and you’re breastfeeding? The whole point of you two meeting up was to have someone to go to play groups and things with, not…’

‘Sadly, I’ve got absolutely nothing to wear. Any half decent items of clothing are three sizes too small…’

‘Exactly,’ Joe says, visibly relieved. ‘Besides, Evie’s too little. I really don’t think you’d enjoy it.’

This gets me. Joe presuming what I’d enjoy! Like everything at the moment, my instinct is just to oppose him. Pulling in the opposite direction is a way of creating space in our newly shrunken life.

‘On second thoughts…’ I clear my throat. ‘Maybe a night out would do me good, haven’t been out for months. I must have something that won’t get me turned away on the door.’ Joe’s face sags with disappointment. ‘You’ll be fine here with Evie won’t you?’

Joe looks doubtful. It’s all very well me living under a six o clock curfew, different for him. ‘I was planning…’

I push hair out of my eyes to give Joe a don’t-go-there glare. As my arm shifts, the towelling dressing gown gapes open to reveal a frothy flash of pink lace. Joe stares, shocked.  My newly packaged flesh seems wildly inappropriate here, in the chilly hall, caught in the crossfire of the unsaid. He looks away, ignores it. 

‘…we were hoping to go out for dinner this Friday. Remember? You did ask your mum if she could baby sit?’

I did. She can’t, I lie. 

Later that evening. After Evie’s bath, putting her to bed, listening to her scream, getting up, stroking her head, trying to remember what that supernova nanny preached on TV, letting her scream and feeling horribly guilty, I collapse on the sofa. Joe sits down heavily next to me, beer in hand. A repeat of ER is on. I’m so tired I can’t follow it. I just watch mouths move, like bad dubbing. Joe’s ham hand worms its way under the towelling, on my knee.

‘Darling. You look so sexy in this…’ He rubs his hand between my legs.

Nothing. I feel nothing. It’s like trying to strike a damp match. I curl up, squishing his hand and restricting its movement. ‘Not now, I’m so tired.’

‘Suppose you must be,’ he says, hand quickly retreating to the easy predictability of the TV remote control.

Gusset-less on the sofa, sleep seduces instead.

Two

Alice leans back in a battered leather armchair, scarved in cigarette smoke. ‘No one tells you this Amy, but the less you see your baby, the less you miss her when she’s not there.  It’s just like sex,’ she says, tugging down her V neck, more cleavage. ‘That’s how working mothers cope. A natural independence develops. Those women who bleat on that it hurts the baby?’ She swirls the ice cubes in her glass.  ‘Hysterical womb-worshippers. Babies are hardy creatures, they adapt. So don’t let Joe make you feel guilty about going out. Evie will be fine. Young babies are about as loyal as cats.’

Evie. Milky Evie, sweet and warm as a pudding. Is she coping with a mama-shaped hole in her evening? Probably. Do I miss her? Well, actually, at this moment, shamefully…no.

‘What are you drinking? Water! How about a champagne cocktail?’ Alice orders before I answer.

Alice makes me feel much better about everything actually. She’s not like the other mothers - like Sue - from my National Childbirth Trust group, that weird institution that all middle class mothers are too scared not to sign up to in the run up to The Birth. (That the real trauma begins after this event never makes the white-board.)  At the NCT you don’t meet teenage mothers. Or single ones. Or lesbian ones. Well, not in north west London. You meet the coupled-off mothers, the thirty-somethings relieved that they got their eggs fertilised before the biological alarm clock chimed their ovaries into pumpkins, the ones who talk about massaging their perineum with organic nut oils, the ones who think they’ll give birth ‘naturally’ in pools and end up begging for drugs, fannies sliced like salami. Or the ones like Sue who do my head in by flopping out their great pendulous blue-veined breasts at every opportunity. I once got squirted. You know, when that first gush of milk sprays into the baby’s surprised mouth like a garden sprinkler. Well, the baby looked away. I didn’t.

Alice, like me, is 31. Alfie, her little boy, is eighteen months, so she’s almost out of babyworld, although it seems unlikely she was ever in it. You’d never know she was a mother. Her belly is as flat as a changing mat. She’s wearing tailored long shorts cut so low you can tell she’s had a Brazilian (her pubic bone is tanned), a studded belt, tight green cashmere cardigan and heels like chopsticks. A huge bangle, woven leather and silver, slides up and down her slim forearm. And her face belongs to a Thirties film star, the kind who had fast affairs and faster ripostes: bruise-red rosebud lips and wide-set eyes set within a cloud of butter-blonde curls. No, you’d never look at Alice and think, stress incontinence. 

‘Managed to get out much since Evie was born?’ Late evening sunshine slices through the window. Alice squints. Her eyes are Absinth green.

‘Uh. Not really. Not together. I mean Joe still goes out quite a lot…’

‘Sadly, babies don’t really cramp daddy’s style, not in the same way. If anything parenthood gives them opportunity to behave like single men again, going out and about unaccompanied. It can turn into one long stag party if you’re not careful.’

‘Well, I’m breastfeeding. It’s strategically difficult to do things as a couple. Mum baby-sits occasionally. But Joe’s parents haven’t been much use, being six feet under.’

Alice snorts. I feel bad going for a cheap laugh. Joe’s parents died in a Corsican pedallo accident in the early nineties.

‘Still, we’ve got some great friends in the country, Kate and Pete. Been there a couple of times, shown Evie what a cow looks like. That sort of thing.’

‘Now friends in the country are good, especially hospitable ones with beautiful houses,’ says Alice, conducting the conversation with a pretzel. ‘But in laws, bad. You’re well out of it. In my experience their purpose is to make you fat and miserable. All those ‘helpful’ meals they cook, to ‘give you a break.’ Pah! About as relaxing as a meal with your old headmistress.’ Alice puts the half-eaten pretzel in the ashtray, as if finishing it off might just tip her calorific daily allowance over the edge, and lights another cigarette. Incorrect to say but, shit, it does look sexy, the smoke curling from her partly-open glossed mouth like an exhalation of desire.  

‘The problem is, once you have their grandchild any mother or mother-in-law thinks she’s got an access-all-areas pass to your life.’

I laugh, thinking of my mum, her invasive offers of ‘help’ – the plant potting, washing up, toy delivery – just thinly disguised reasons to visit Evie.  I think she probably loves Evie more than me. Which is quite understandable, so do I.

‘All you really want them to do is take over in the morning while you get some sleep, make tea and disappear again. But they don’t. Which is why we all end up spending a fortune on maternity nurses.’

Do we? Not anyone I know.

Alice rolls her shoulders. ‘Ah, so stiff. Must do some Pilates, been slacking.’

I’m not entirely sure what Pilates is. I’ve seen it written about in magazines but skip the articles, not being the fitness-trend type. 

‘A very precise work-out that sorts everything out with little sweating,’ Alice says, catching my ignorance. ‘Not to be confused with yoga, not if you’re a purist. But Josh…’ Alice laughs to herself. ‘Josh, my instructor, ain’t no purist. So it’s confused with yoga.’ 

‘Where do you…?’

‘A little studio in NW10. Hey, come along.’ A smile curls her lips. ‘But less of boring old Pilates. The big question is…’ Alice camps up a perfect arch of eyebrow. ‘How is your lurve life?’

A gulp of water torrents out of my left nostril. I can’t believe she asked me that! I wipe my nose with my sleeve. A waitress clinks down our cocktails. Without being asked Alice slips her credit card into her hand, slick as a poker player. ‘A tab,’ she nods, swinging one leg over the other. So long and lean it’s vaguely pornographic, the leg protrudes out into the communal space around our table so  people must manoeuvre around it, becoming the unconscious focus point of the bar. During pauses in conversation, those spacey moments when you have to look away to avoid intimacy, both men and women’s eyes fall on the leg rather than their wine glasses or blank mobile phones (turned off, it’s private members in here).

‘I remember the first time. Like being fucked by a cheese grater! That’s breastfeeding for you. It changes the chemistry of it. Turns a black run into a dry slope.’ She doesn’t lower her voice. At an adjacent table a man’s hooded eyes flick up from his beer glass. 

‘I don’t know,’ I say, daring myself to confess. ‘We haven’t done it…not yet. Well, it’s been months actually.’ There, outed! I search Alice’s face for a reaction. To my relief, she’s unfazed. Everyone else who talks about this issue – mostly GPs  and other mothers - just keep banging on about contraception and how easy it is to get pregnant when you’re breastfeeding, which makes me feel worse. ‘I’m beginning to feel like a bit of a freak.’

‘You’re so not a freak,’ Alice says, perhaps too insistently, like I need strong defence. ‘I doubt any of your new mum friends are swinging from the nursery mobiles.’

‘No, no, they’re all at it. Did I mention Sue at NCT?’

As Alice nods, the gleam on her hair shifts and slips like a halo. My hair has no light reflecting qualities.

‘She’s started ‘making love’ again and it is really ‘tender, better than ever’’. The words still taunt me. ‘She said, I’m not joking, that it’s like being ‘a freshly de-flowered virgin.’ That it means more now, now she realises that sex has a proper meaning…babies.’ Sue spoke in a low breathy whisper that smelt of parmesan.

‘Ugh! Let smug Sue keep her fertilisation sex. You, my girl…’ Alice strokes my hand, trailing a sugar pink finger nail along my wrist. It makes my eyes water. I don’t want anyone to be nice to me. It will set me off. It’s the hormones.

‘…you need a good fuck.’

I sip my champagne, trying not to look shocked. You get a bit bourgeois when you’re at home with a baby all day. ‘What about you?’  I say, emboldened by the saltiness of the conversation. 

‘Me?’ She smiles coyly. ‘Well, I do get my rocks off.’

‘What’s um…’ I realise I don’t know her partner’s name. ‘What’s the name of Alfie’s dad?’

‘John.’

‘On the tip of my tongue. John. What’s he like?’ Stupid question, I adjust it. ‘What does he do?’

‘John’s a darling. A total darling,’ purrs Alice, pushing a wayward curl behind her hooped earring. ‘Dot comer, own business, Twentieth century design imported cut price from Europe. Doing very well, if you please.’ She sighs, mentally weighing him up. ‘He’s blond, good height and very handsome, of course. Wouldn’t have mated with anything but the best genetic material…’ I chuckle. ‘And he’s an amazing father.’

‘He sounds great,’ I say rather blandly. Alice’s exuberance makes me fade to grey a bit.

‘And as you are wondering, we haven’t had sex for…Oh, let me see…almost a year.’

A year! Alice is one of those women who looks like she’s having knee-trembling sex, 24/7.

‘Like me!’ I sound rather too exuberant.

‘Well not quite. We’re no longer together.’

‘Oh God, I’m so sorry.’ Done it again.

‘No problem.’ She blows out a trumpet of cigarette smoke.  ‘I wasn’t that into it.’

I’m unsure how to respond to such glibness. Joe would dislike her.  ‘Oh dear. Didn’t you want to stay with him?’

‘In the beginning, of course.’ Alice speaks softly. ‘But it wasn’t to be. I was in love with John, well, as much as you can be in love with anyone after four weeks. We met in Ibiza, real summer of love stuff. I still worry about the fact that Alfie was conceived while I was on an E. But, touch wood…’ She taps the table. ‘He’s totally fine.’

‘John didn’t want the baby?’

‘No, John loved the idea! We talked about getting married, on Calassalada beach, me in a white Allegra Hicks kaftan, orchid in the hair, fruits de mer for dinner.’ I can see her so clearly. She’d have made a beautiful bride. ‘We decided to stay on for a while in Ibiza, John flying back and forth to London. And then…I realised, we both did, that we didn’t know each other, not really. I mean I knew he was a nice man who loved calamari with a twist of lemon and could dance sexily sans drugs which is always a bonus but that was about it…’

‘Did you stay in Ibiza?’

‘No, as I got bigger I couldn’t stand wallowing about in the heat like a fat tourist. We came back to London and I rented out my flat in Ladbroke Grove, where Alfie and I live now, and moved into his loft space in Clerkenwell.’

‘Gosh. How was that?’

Alice blows up her fringe. ‘Ugh. Couldn’t stand the East End. No good parks, just lots of people with silly hair cuts and neon hoof trainers talking about bad video art. Not my scene.’

How glamorous to care about ‘a scene’ when pregnant. I just cared about my proximity to the local bakery.

‘Got the hell out after the birth.’  She shrugs off her cardigan.

‘And how was that, the birth?’

‘OK. They all come out one way or another don’t they?’

Does Alice not want to elaborate? Birth stories, told in exhaustive gruesome detail, are a staple of the NCT meetings and usually require much distraction – a choking baby, a nearby smoker - for closure. 

‘But it must have been great living in a loft. I’ve always wanted to…’

‘A loft! Oh my god it was a nightmare! Imagine a baby screaming in an echoey aircraft hanger.’ She falls back in the chair, spent by the trauma of recollection. ‘There were no internal walls at all!  I had to have a bath in some futuristic pod in the centre of the living room when I wanted to be tucked away in my antique claw foot with Diptique candles. No garden, just a stainless steel balcony with a view of factories and traffic. No escape. We all drove each other mad.’ Alice shudders. ‘It was awful. Awful.’

‘Couldn’t you have moved?’ Lack of internal walls and ironic mullets seem pretty poor reasons to give up on a relationship. 

‘We did, back into my place in Ladbroke Grove. Things improved, in the sense that we could be in two separate rooms and close the doors on each other. But the relationship wasn’t going anywhere. I don’t know…’ Her voice trails off. ‘We were trying to get to know each other while bringing up a baby. Forget candle lit dinners, romantic holidays…the things most couples have to ease themselves into monogamy. We had three am wake up calls and a baby with colic. You know how it is. Bloody hard. But I think if we were right for each other it would have worked.’

‘What was so wrong?’

‘Well you just know don’t you? It hardly required marriage guidance.’

Even now, I still don’t ‘just know.’  Life gets complex when there are children involved. It seems kind of pointless pondering whether the father of your child is your soul mate.  The deed is done. And there are bigger things to worry about.

Alice takes a gulp of drink. I watch the gulp travel, like a broad bean, down her long slender throat. ‘The ‘soul mate’ connections we made on a beach in Ibiza under the influence of high grade MDMA powder turned out – surprise – to be made of little more than the sand we bonked on,’ Alice muses, eyes fixed dreamily in the smoky mid-distance. ‘Our expectations were very different. He wanted me to stay at home and be this mother earth type, stop doing my jewellery…or just keep it to a real hobby level, to be on the safe side.’ She sighs. ‘Despite all the cool trappings he is a terrible suburbanite at heart. Which is great. Suburbanites make great dads.’ There is something rehearsed about this answer.

‘You sound fond of him.’

‘I am. Alfie gets the best of both worlds.’ Alice stretches and the S of her waist rises out of her shorts.

‘Now, enough of me. How long were you and Joe together before Evie came along?’

‘Only a year.’

‘And?’

‘The result of post-row, one quick poke roulette sex I’m afraid.’

‘So many babies are. The risk of pregnancy makes sex more exciting, no?’ I nod, trying to remember. ‘Were you living together when it happened?’

I’m uncomfortable with this line of questioning. I’d rather hear about Alice. ‘Joe moved in when I was pregnant.’ Alice stares at me quizzically. ‘We made the best of it,’ I say with some finality, shifting on the leather banquette.  I can feel my mouth rebelling against this forced jovial casualness and turning downwards. Alice studies me for a moment. She knows the subject is closed.   ‘Another cocktail?’

‘Sadly can’t. Breastfeeding...’

‘Oh come on! One more won’t hurt. Milk is an excellent mixer. Only a tiny amount gets through. It’ll make her sleep. Don’t listen to the breastfeeding Nazis.’

‘No really, better not.’

‘Look, I’ll order a water too and I’ll drink the cocktail if you find you don’t want it.’

I put my hands up, surrender. Talk of Joe has made me glum. A drink could shift it.
‘Am off to the loo.’ Again. Need to do more pencil squeezing pelvic floor exercises but still unsure which muscle is which. When I squeeze I feel a contraction in my left buttock, which doesn’t seem right somehow. Outside in the corridor, by the cigarette machine, I turn on my phone. There are four text messages from Joe.

‘poo spectacular’
‘when u hm?’
‘gt blk cab’
‘cn u call me?’

No, I can’t call him. Can’t face it. Don’t want to let that world into this one: the crying, the powdery baby fug, the cloying micro universe of our Kilburn house. In this club I’m cocooned temporarily in an artificial environment, like an airplane. Pressing the green button would be like bashing open a window, the air sucking me out into freefall. So I hide behind a text.

‘Wll be late. Gv E bttle. Dn’t wt up’

In the Ladies I gloss my mouth. My lips are dehydrated and there is a tiny bloody nick on the lower one which I’ve been biting absent-mindedly. My breasts – without a baby to drain them – are hard and knotty and beginning to throb. I rearrange my feeding bra, hoping to make them look smaller. God! What am I wearing? My ‘fat’ jeans, waistline stretched from squeezing into them while pregnant; a silk floral ‘feminine’ blouse, which gives me the frumpy aura of a geography teacher dressing up for a school social. Flat, very flat, pink sandals. Quickly painted toe nails, and toes. The varnish was so old it had congealed into a thick paste, impossible to apply accurately. 

In contrast, the other girls in front of the mirror look surreal as billboard girls, all white teeth and shining eyes. They touch up their make up, pull lipstick faces, angle their heads for the most flattering reflection. It is only now, seeing us lined up like some weird reality TV show filmed through a two way mirror that I realise that we are from different worlds, me and these preening creatures. With their peachy flesh hugged tight in denim or sequiney slithers of chiffon, they are dressed for a stroll along a Hamptons beach, heels in hand, heading towards a hot guest list. I could be dressed for a bracing march around out of season Hastings. I used to love clothes. What happened?

12.20 am. Alice is dancing like her body is liquid, a woman from a Bond film score. It’s mesmerising to watch. Her boobs pulse gently under her top. Her hips sway. Men stare.  For the first time in months, I am dancing too. But I am dancing like my mother. 

Just when I think I’ve found my rhythm it changes and each bit of my body moves to a different beat, feet in glued-to-the-floor raver mode, hips gyrating like a pregnant woman doing mobility exercises. Was I always such a bad dancer? I don’t think so. I used to feel it instinctively, used to forget myself.

I look down at my feet, hoping to guide them.  When I look up again Alice has gone, dissolved into the fizzing crowd. What do I do now? Dance on my own like some sad fuck with no friends? Why am I here? Where the hell is she? I stay dancing awkwardly on the spot for an eternity, edging nearer a group of girls so that I could plausibly look like I am with them, just dancing on the outside a bit. I get more and more pissed off, more self conscious. Then Alice sashays into view, beer bottle in each hand. Shining ultra-violet, men’s eye balls track her passage like Scooby Do monsters.

‘Ice cold!’ Alice juts her hips forward, throws her curls back. I forgive her immediately. A few old tunes come on. I remember these.  Kylie! Can’t get you out of my head! Alice is plaiting her arms in front of me, a pretend striptease. There is a dark haired man sashaying into our invisible dance circle, encroaching our space. He is not unattractive. But he is a terrible dancer, skipping from one leg to another like he needs the loo. We giggle. I wait for him to hit on Alice. He doesn’t.  He puts his back to Alice and grins at me.

‘Wahey! You’ve pulled!’ Alice lip syncs behind me.

Despite his odd pee-hop, I am flattered. Nobody has hit on me for an eternity. (I had kind of resigned myself to that part of my life being over and have done the grieving.) Basking in his glances, I let the music under my skin and feel myself loosening up. And for the first time in months I feel like myself, my old self. And my body belongs to me again, not Evie. I want to be trapped in this moment for ever, dancing in amber. I suspect I’m drunk.

The man is drooling, hopping closer, his eyes focused on my swollen cleavage. I feel myself ripen with the attention. Then, suddenly, he stops. Getting bumped by bottoms in low rise jeans, he bends down and picks something up off the floor, a white disc. Not looking at it, he passes it to me smiling.

‘You’ve dropped something…’

Oh my God! Squatting on his hand, domed, sodden, is my breast pad. Seeing my expression he glances down at his hand and inspects this thing, initially puzzled, then obviously horrified.

Behind him I see Alice. She’s gesturing, pointing at my chest. I glance down. A circle of wet is blooming on my right breast, my nipple a pencil stub under the wet silk. Oh. Shit.

‘I’m...I’m…sorry,’ I say, looking up. But the man has gone.
 

Delighting in the absurdities of modern motherhood's glossy myths, Williams isn't afraid to expose the funny, painful truth

Daily Mail

A first-time novelist with real flair

Easy Living

Funny, smart, honest - read this book

InStyle

Excellent - explodes the yummy mummy myth

Heat

A deliciously well written tale - sparkling and seductive

Good Housekeeping

A sharply written debut about the trials of playing hip happy families

Tatler

Funny and thoughtful, this is a refreshingly thoughtful take on the hushed-up trials of making the transition to parenthood

You magazine

Witty, empathetic

Glamour

Witty, moving, beautifully written

Wendy Holden

A brutally honest book. I laughed out loud, cried and couldn't put it down for three days. I totally identified with it.

Pearl Lowe

Publishing's latest craze...the genre may well have found its Bridget Jones in Amy...

Marie Claire

This is a fabulous book. True, insightful and wincingly funny about motherhood, friendship and bad wardrobe days

Sophie Kinsella

Scrumptious

USA Today

Gossipy and intimate...flush with self deprecating humour, and characters embodying all manner of modern motherhood

Library Journal, USA

Destined to become a classic

Toby Young

The Yummy Mummy is alive and well. Polly Williams found her. Hysterical, a real page turner, loved it

Lucy Sykes

Slickly written and very funny

The Times

Book Club Questions 

Do you think that Amy has postnatal depression or is she merely struggling with the transition from singleton to new mum?

Is Amy right to try and 'forget' her partner's supposed infidelity if it saves the future of her family unit?

Can a romantic relationship ever be the same after a couplehave a baby?

Was baby Evie the making or breaking of Amy and Joe?

Was Amy so desperate to look the part of a yummy mummy because she was so insecure in her relationship? Therefore are the happier mothers the ones with the hairy legs and masticated cookie in their hair?

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