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with reciprocal haste, advance matters along those lines. This in turn, Jake reasoned, had Ally reaching for the ejector seat.
    Ally tended to take most of Jake’s sexual‐
political theories with a pinch of post‐
modernism, but a retrospective analysis of his break‐
ups did unearth certain recurrences in the preceding days or weeks, notably a tendency on his girlfriends’ parts to dwell in front of estate agents or Pronuptia outlets. It was very possible, therefore, that he and Annette had made it so far because for so long he’d have found it hard to believe she could have such designs on him.
    Christ, maybe she hadn’t, but it was moot now. She was pregnant and glowingly happy about it. That, in fact, was the greatest compliment Ally had ever been paid: that when she told him about it, she did so with a big, cheeky, bad‐
girl grin. Whatever fears she was naturally bound to have for how he’d take it, she masked them behind a show of assumption that he’d be as astonished but pleased about it as she was.
    And she was right. He’d have to confess that his initial unmanly show of emotion was partly in response to the shock of the news and partly in ecstatic appreciation of its long‐
term ramifications (principally those affecting the likelihood of that sudden‐
clarity/
dressing‐
gown/
slippers/
street scenario). However, in the week that followed, when he actually had time to consider the reality of what he was facing, he was even more surprised to find that he was unreservedly, uncomplicatedly, utterly fucking delighted about it.
    None of which made sense. In fact, for about four days, nothing in his head made sense. Responsibility suddenly sounded like a fourteen‐
rather than four‐
letter word. Parenthood sounded like a great adventure rather than a waste of Steve Martin. And growing up sounded plausibly achievable.
    Once his whizzing brain had calmed down a wee bit and he discovered that such ludicrous thoughts were actually there to stay, he appreciated that he shouldn’t really have been so amazed at the strength with which his paternal instincts had suddenly kicked in. It was hundreds of thousands of years of genetic programming against a brief decade or so of late‐
twentieth‐
century pseudo‐
individualism. Besides, bottle feeding a wean at three in the morning would provide a unique opportunity to revisit the
Moonlighting
back‐
catalogue.
    At the end of that week, Annette asked him to marry her. It was the sort of moment that made him think the real secret of their relationship might lie in ‘McQuade’ turning out to be Gaelic for ‘Faust’. Ally knew this was largely down to his Catholic upbringing and the guilt it made you feel over anything good that life allowed you. However, he was able to counter his fear with the rationalisation that, as an atheist, he hadn’t accounted for having a soul anyway, so Meph was welcome to whatever was going. Eternity seemed a price worth paying for one lifetime of what he was signing up for when he said yes to Annette.
    Of course, she did very openly add the proviso that this meant he’d have to sell all his CDs, videos and computer games, and that they’d never have sex again, but he’d taken that as read: marriage is marriage. Similarly sticking with tradition, it was decided that they should proceed to the main event fairly swiftly in order that Annette should not be ‘showing too much in the photies’, and the date was accordingly set for a month hence.
    Annette sympathetically observed that this didn’t leave much time to organise a stag night, sympathy that Ally considered misspent as he had never expressed any desire to put himself through such a thing. His now‐
fiancée (oh, how he loved that word) elaborated that it was an important and time‐
observed custom for the groom‐
to‐
be to undergo a night out so thoroughly ghastly and traumatic that he would wish to spend the rest of his life exclusively in the company of someone