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him down. I wondered if he wanted to die.
    The second day, as if some reasoning had altered the course of his mind, he started to cry, a shrill, angry catcall to feed, mouth opened wide to be filled with the breast and when I gave it to him he clamped down on it like a vice, not just drinking milk but consuming me , like some starved pygmy cannibal, sucking so hard I could have stood up and let go of him and he would have swung like a pit bull, suspended in mid-air by the sheer power of his jaws and the vacuum forcing my nipple deep down his throat.
    Within days my tender flesh was reduced to raw, weeping meat and he had to go on the bottle. I harboured hopes then that with my body back I might begin the process of recovering, but no. If it wasn’t hunger or nappy rash it was colic, night and day, unsettled and unhappy, he cried and cried and cried, calming down only in his father’s arms, sleeping only on his father’s chest, rejecting me so completely the only thing I felt was resentment.
    That was when the advice started, from the man able to get away for ten hours every day and have a break from the relentless whining: how to hold him, how to feed him, how to wind him, not to shake him, and in between regularly reminding me that the six weeks of abstinence the midwife recommended had long passed. That was when I bought the costume, when I realized he was thinking about sex while I was thinking about ways to kill myself, when I knew without doubt we had run out of middle ground.
    Having Ben changed me into something I had no idea how to be: a mother. I had expected it to come naturally, but for me it didn’t. And the fact that parenthood came so easily to Red made it worse. He stepped into the role of father as if his whole life had been leading to it, as if it were the culmination of everything he was and had ever wanted.
    Finally, a few days before Ben’s first birthday, Red had had enough. He said it was the swimming costume, that it made him feel bad.
    Like a rapist.
    When I realized his suitcase was already packed, sitting on the floor beside the door, that he was not raising the issue as an agenda item up for discussion, that what he was actually doing was informing me of the decision he had already made, I tensed, the anger coiled up inside me as tight as in a cat psyching up to the pounce.
    Then he picked up Ben.
    If a proper mother should have argued, should have insisted that the offspring remain with her, I was not a proper mother. My experience was that motherhood was a façade, a fabrication that sometimes took sixteen years to unravel, but occasionally just the one single year was adequate. I held the front door wide for them both to leave and I felt two things. The first was disappointment. About all the time I had invested, all that energy wasted. As a woman, both as a mother and a partner, I had failed. The second feeling was sadness, sadness and disbelief, that a single elastic garment could be held to blame:
    Exhibit one, your honour!
    As if that one tiny item had ever been large enough to bear responsibility for everything.
    From downstairs I heard laughter. I stood up and got started. I plumped and straightened the bed, wiped down the window ledge, moved Ben’s car to the passage outside the room, then swept the floor and mopped it. Finished, I could see no point returning the car to the same spot it had occupied for years like a memorial, so I picked it up, carried it downstairs and left it by the front door.
    They were watching TV when I went back into the living room, on the settee together, with Lemon’s arm around Ben’s shoulders and Ben’s head virtually wedged up into Lemon’s armpit, watching one of those patronizing children’s programmes where there was a huge focus on covering guests with snot-like goo, and the presenters shouted every word they spoke and leapt about like they were high on E. The kind of senseless show I detested, and they were laughing their heads off. Both of