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silk. ‘Wouldn’t your daughter wear it anyway?’ I asked.
    He shook his head hastily.
    ‘You shouldn’t have,’ I said. ‘It’s beautiful.’ I slumped in the plastic seat, my stomach bulging.
    He folded the dress back in its tissue paper and slipped it into the bag.
    Though I didn’t even know his surname, I felt like I was saying goodbye to a lifelong friend, one who had no idea that this was goodbye. I insisted he have a third of my lemon tart. We talked of Montessori schools and wipeable bibs, of our best and worst childhood memories, of how much had stayed the same between his generation and mine but would be different for my baby. We decided it was just as well I was due in August as the weather might be mild enough to nurse in the garden. When I looked at my watch it was half two, the coffee cold in the pot.
    As I stood up, I had an hysterical impulse to say that if it proved to be a boy I’d name it after him. Instead, I mentioned that I was going off on an early summer holiday, but yes, of course I’d be home for the birth.
    The new regime was a manageable nuisance. On Saturdays now I went straight from karate class to a shopping centre twice as far away in the other direction. An old friend of mine, meeting me laden with bags on the bus, mocked me for being so upwardly mobile, to go that far in pursuit of walnut-and-ricotta ravioli. One Saturday in May my mother asked me to come along to the old shopping centre, to help her with a sack of peat moss, and I had to invent a sudden blinding headache.
    The dress I wore as often as the weather allowed; it seemed the least I could do. The leaf-green silk billowed round my hips as I carried my box of groceries close to the chest. There was room under there for quintuplets, or a gust of summer air. When August came and went and nothing happened, I felt lighter, flatter, relieved.
    That was five years ago, but always I keep one eye out for him, even on the streets of other cities where my new job takes me. I have my story all ready: how I shop on Sundays now when my mother can take the children, two boys and a small girl, yes, quite a handful. He’s sure to compliment me on having kept my figure. And his daughter, did she try again?
    I felt prepared, but last Friday when I thought I saw him among the grapefruit I backed out in panic. What do you say to a ghost, a visitor from another life?
    It occurs to me all of a sudden that he may be dead. Men often don’t live very long after they retire. I never thought to ask how old he was.
    I find it intolerable not to know what has become of him. Is this how he felt, wondering about me? On Saturday when I woke in my cool white bed, I had to fight off the temptation to drive down to the shopping centre and park there, watching through the windscreen for him to walk by.

The Man Who Wrote On Beaches
    As a child he’d never known what to put. He always started out along the expanse of saturated sand with a yip of excitement, but after scraping the first great arc with the edge of his sneaker, he’d stand with his leg extended like a dog trying to piss. Everything took so long on sand, you might as well be using Morse code. You’d better be sure you still meant what you were writing by the time it was done. Once he’d put HELLO, but his brothers laughed and scuffed out the O with their toes.
    Then another time on another beach, some New Year’s Day when he was maybe fourteen and alone, he’d written COCK-SUCKERS in letters as long as himself. It looked so terrible, printed so starkly for the clouds and every passing stranger to read, and he’d thought the first wave would wipe it out, but in his nervousness he’d dug too deep with the crescent of mussel shell, so the small frills of water only smoothed his words, glossed over a mistake he’d made on the K. The letters looked graven, as if on a headstone, the obscenity emerging from the beach itself. So after such a long while of standing with his back to the wind,