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– Well? Can you? Can you get away?

No. It would just be a bigger vortex. Hannah looked at the envelope. There was writing on it, now. Hers.

– Sorry. I’m being moved on to a new project.

– A new project, she says! Ma’s voice had suddenly taken on a new tone – high and sniffy. – Projects, aren’t we important! Aren’t we special, aren’t we –

– Ma? asked Hannah. I’m sending you an envelope to keep for me. Just some personal stuff. Could you do that?

Betray the customer, and you are betraying yourself.

– Course, I’ll put it with your peanut-butter-label collection. By the way, Dr Higgerlen said he wouldn’t be at all surprised if there wasn’t some odd activity at cell-structure level. But he can only confirm it by booking me in for a session on the convectorator machine at Yokeville Hospital in West Eighth.

Hannah interrupted.

– Ma, this envelope, it’s –

– So I said to him while you’re at it with your machines, my pelvis has been giving me gyp.

– Sorry, Ma, croaked Hannah, interrupting. Can’t breathe. Got to go. And she hung up.

Leaving the room, she flipped Leo’s envelope in her out tray, and felt an instant lightening in her step. She hurried on. It was behind her now. Dealt with. It felt as though someone else had done it, she thought, as she left for another session with Harvey Kidd, her mind tingling with expectation and fear and wholly inappropriate thoughts of sex. A different person altogether.

Someone she didn’t know.

HARBOURVILLE

In the week that followed the Festival of Choice and Harvey Kidd’s arrest, Atlantica glowed like a bride.

Warm breezes drifted in from the distant continents of North America and Europe, their limpid salt wash merging delicately with the peppermint freshness of the capital, where Atlanticans walked with a spring in their step, alive to the symbiosis between land, sky and sea, and the myriad lives that fluttered in the air, moved on land or writhed beneath the carpety surface of the deep, from whales and squid and octopuses down to the smallest, flickering urges of krill.

In the city, flat vistas of glass and cool cement juggled shadows in the changing light, the pylons murmured, and a static vibration swarmed across the sky, shooting fragments of pure energy down to the streets, the avenues, the hushed crevices where, beneath the safe shadow of skyscrapers, the customers of Atlantica went about the simple, proud business of being part of society.

From a small corner of this peaceful world – from a house in a street in South District, comes a low groan of physical and mental discomfort.

– Mmmmm, moans the woman. Oargh.

The street, a small cul-de-sac with its own gas pump. The house, one upon whose front door gleams a bronzed fibreglass plate bearing the words: Stress-Management Consultancy – Please Knock GENTLY. The woman, Gwynneth, turning listlessly in crumpled sheets, struck down by the whirling nausea of morning sickness.

Her lover Geoff is in attendance. His five o’clock client has cancelled his Winding Down appointment, and the stress-management consultant has taken advantage of this unexpected lacuna to return to the conjugal bed – only to discover that passion must play second fiddle to the tiny rival of their embryonic child. For Gwynneth, at the age of forty-two, is pregnant.

– Just take a deep-deep-deep-deep breath in, counsels Geoff, in the hushed, low, capable voice he has developed in a work capacity. He finds it can be applied domestically too. – And then let it out again very, very slowly. SLOWLY. Balance out your Yin and Yang, that’s right.

Gwynneth obeys. But as she breathes (– In… out. In… and out, murmurs Geoff soothingly), Gwynneth’s mind – rucked as the sheets – can’t help floating down the flowchart of possibility ahead of her, and meandering into its tributaries. Tiffany’ll be moving out, no doubt, once she’s got her Libertyforce promotion. And then she and Geoff will have the place to themselves and Baby. It’ll be like starting all over again. A brand-new family. And a second chance. Doesn’t she deserve a makeover?

Gwynneth sighs and blinks her round, mother-of-pearl eyes. She doesn’t feel bad about Libertyforce catching up with Harvey – that’s how she thinks of it, that’s the phrase she uses – ‘catching up’. After all, she’s at one remove from it, isn’t she? But – well, she can’t say she feels one hundred per cent good, either. It’s kept her awake at night – that and the pressure on her bladder, which forces her to piss a thimbleful of urine twenty times a night. She’s glad Tiffany didn’t tell Harvey about the pregnancy when she arrested him.

It wouldn’t’ve been fair, would it, to make him cope with so much at once.

– OK now, love? asks Geoff gently, nuzzling closer in, and burying his face between her breasts.

– Much better, she sighs, and her flesh squishes in welcome. Way better.

– Better enough to… his voice muffles as his head moves downward.

Gwynneth shudders in delight, the sickness forgotten. Gentleness could be Geoff’s middle name. She’s never come across a man with such soft hands, and such a caring manner, such an intimate knowledge of what women want to hear. And feel. Where, and when.

Like down there. Now.

– A sissy, Harvey had called him.

You wouldn’t say that if you knew what he was like in bed, she’d wanted to reply, but had stopped herself just in time. Geoff knew all about a woman’s anatomy, its little secret places, its little secret needs. Harvey wasn’t like that.

– There were always four of us in the bed, when I was with him, Gwynneth said. Geoff looked up from his nuzzling. – What with Gloria and Lola.

– Well, now there’s three, he said softly, with a puffy smile, reaching for the bottle of wheatgerm oil.

Carefully, he poured some of the thick liquid into his palm and reached down to massage the already visible swell of Gwynneth’s belly. His palm drew circles, wider and wider, and Gwynneth groaned with pleasure. Then groaned again, as Geoff ran an expert finger down. And in. He waggled it till she cried out.

– Huh, huh, huh! Yes, yes, yes! Keep doing that. Just keep doing that! The thrilling pleasure of being cared for properly by another man – being seen to – lapped over Gwynneth as Geoff continued his masterful ministrations.

– Now fuck me, she hissed urgently.

And so he did – and he still was, with his usual proficiency, when five minutes later, they heard the front door crash open and Tiffany’s urgent shout downstairs.

– Mum! Mum!

– Oh Jesus, groaned Geoff, his rhythm shot to hell.

– Oh God, what’s happened? gasped Gwynneth, panting, pushing Geoff off and reaching for a dressing gown.

Geoff pulled the bedclothes over his jilted penis and sighed, majesty subsiding as the thud on the stairs grew heavier and Tiffany burst in.

– My job, she wailed, throwing herself on the bed and squashing Geoff’s feet beneath her bulky rump. Her orange-and-blue Libertyforce uniform was all skew-whiff, and her peaked cap tilted precariously. My job!

– Didn’t you get your promotion then? asked Gwynneth, trying to fix her hair.

– No! I bloody fucking didn’t!

– Oh, poor love, said Gwynneth, but – I mean, how come? It’s so unfair! What happened?