‘YOUR SONG!’ she shouted. Joe put me down.

‘YEAH!’ I replied. I leant in to speak in her ear. Her hair smelt of Elnett hairspray and jasmine perfume. ‘YOU REALLY DO LOOK SO BEAUTIFUL, LUCY.’ She smiled and gave me a hug, which we held for longer than we would have done sober, and swayed in time to the music. Joe took us both by the hand and twirled us around – him the maypole, us the flailing ribbons. We picked up speed – he spun us both out to the side of him and when we reeled back in we collided, ricocheting off each other and falling on the floor. He bent down to help us up, and Lucy yanked his arms so he fell and lay prone on top of us. It was unexpected and ridiculous, to have found ourselves in this tangle. All three of us couldn’t stop laughing.

14

Katherine’s baby boy was born in early April. The night of Olive’s birth, I had dreamt that Katherine was in labour. Her low cries of pain woke me up at exactly 4.12 a.m. and I knew her baby was here – I turned on my bedside light and wrote down the time on a piece of paper. The next day Mark texted me a photo of newborn Olive, black-eyed, rosy-lipped and puffy-cheeked, informing me that she had been born at four that morning. I gave Katherine the piece of paper – she put it in the back of a framed photo of Olive. This time, when I received the text from Mark telling me their six-pound son, Frederick Thomas, was born just after midday, I’d had no premonition he was here. It was like an invisible psychic string between us had been severed.

I got the train out of London and went to their new house a week after his birth, taking pre-prepared trays of homemade lasagne for Mark and Katherine and brownies for Olive. When I arrived at the large house that was exactly as purpose-built as it looked in the pictures, I heard a familiar toddler racket seep out of the door. Mark answered – Olive was sitting on the floor behind him, crying.

‘Nina!’ he said, giving me a hug. He had the sunken, small-featured face of someone on a handful of hours’ sleep. ‘It’s a bit of a madhouse here this morning.’

‘I like madhouses,’ I said, moving into the hallway and crouching down to give Olive a hug.

‘Look, Olly, Aunty Neenaw. She’s come to see us. That’s nice, isn’t it? Will you give her a big hug hello?’

‘I DON’T LIKE YOU, AUNTY NEENAW,’ she shouted, pointing at me as she wrinkled her face up in vengefulness.

‘Oh dear,’ I said, stroking the top of her head. ‘Now, I just don’t think that’s true at all.’

‘It is, Neenaw, it is, I don’t LIKE you.’

I laughed and Mark took my coat. ‘I’m so sorry, this is a new thing she’s saying to everyone. You mustn’t take it personally.’

‘Please. She’s a toddler.’

‘I know, I know, but it’s just so embarrassing. It started about a week ago, when –’ he glanced down at Olive who had stopped crying and was now listening intently – ‘when our new friend arrived.’

‘Got it,’ I said, walking towards the living room. ‘Well, that’s to be expected. And she can get lots of attention from me today.’

‘Thanks, Aunty Neenaw,’ he said, briefly placing his palm on my back. I always preferred Mark softer – I’d forgotten a newborn and no sleep did this to him.

Katherine was sitting in the corner of the sofa, her legs folded under her body in her neatly feline way, and a small cotton-swathed bundle in her arms.

‘Oh hello,’ I said in a hushed voice, taking a seat next to her. I kissed her on the cheek and gazed down at the tiny sleeping baby who smelt of warm milk and warm laundry.

‘Hello,’ she said with a smile. Her face was bare, her lids were heavy. She looked ethereally gorgeous. ‘This is Freddie. Freddie, this is Aunty Nina.’

‘I DON’T LIKE HER, GO AWAY, AUNTY NEENAW,’ Olive shouted from the hallway.

‘Olive’s having a difficult week,’ Katherine said.

‘Don’t worry, I’ve got brownies and I’m going to use them tactically.’

‘Clever Aunty Neenaw.’

‘Look at this perfect little boy,’ I said, gently stroking his cheek with my forefinger. ‘Brand new.’

‘Guess his life expectancy? Mark and I couldn’t believe it when the doctor told us.’

‘What?’

‘One hundred and twenty years old.’

I gasped and put my face closer to his, to examine every micro-pore. ‘Magic baby dinosaur.’

‘Isn’t he?’

‘I hope you’re reserving your energy, little Freddie. You’re going to need it.’

I made us all tea and heard the birth story, well paced and succinctly told, having had a number of performances, with Mark and Katherine taking a line each. There had been a two-day labour, forceps and bruised – yes, bruised – labia. For someone so otherwise reserved, Katherine never spared any detail of birth. I loved hearing about it – it’s strange how quickly you can become a natal connoisseur by proxy of those around you. Five years ago, I could have barely differentiated between a one-year-old and a one-day-old baby. Now, I knew about Braxton Hicks and mastitis and pre-labour perineum massage. I knew about sleep training, growth spurts, teething and potty training. The lexicon of our peer group morphed in every decade. Soon I would know about school-catchment areas, then university applications, then pension schemes. Then care homes, then the name of every funeral parlour in my postcode.

I took Olive out for the afternoon. We went to the park, then the soft-play – she was calm and distracted, her little squeaky voice overexplaining everything to me solemnly. ‘This is the cars, Aunty Neenaw, and they drive you,’ she said as we walked hand in hand down the road. ‘This is the grasses and they are green,’ she said in the park, crouching down to collect a blade and examining it closely. ‘And sometimes you can eat them like the cows and the snakes but not every day.’ We came home in time for tea, which was fish fingers, peas and oven chips.

‘Nutrition is out the window this week, I’m afraid,’ Katherine said as she squirted a small puddle of ketchup on Olive’s plate. ‘Will only be for a week though.’

‘Relax, Kat,’ I said. ‘It’s fine.’

‘I am relaxed!’ she said. ‘I’m just saying don’t judge us for dinner out of the freezer.’

‘I wouldn’t judge you for anything you gave me for dinner.’

‘What time is it, Mark?’

‘Six.’

‘Right, feeding time for you,’ she said, scooping her swollen breast out of her bra and attaching Freddie’s mouth to it.

‘It’s so weird that newborns basically just eat all day,’ I said. ‘It’s like they’re permanently on a long boozy lunch, like a PR girl from the 1990s.’

Katherine laughed. ‘Sounds like a nice life. Speaking of which, how is Lola?’ It was a joke I would have found funny from anyone other than Katherine, who I knew thought all childless women did was have long lunches.

‘Fine, I think. Weirdly, I haven’t really seen or heard from her the last month. I hope she’s okay, I think she’s just busy.’

‘How often do you speak normally?’

‘Every day,’ I said. ‘And we see each other at least once a week, so it’s been a bit strange, actually.’

‘Wow, that’s a lot. I’m surprised you don’t get sick of each other!’ She’d made comments like this before – hinting that mine and Lola’s relationship was intense or untenable, when we’d been friends now for just shy of fifteen years. She’d had to be sceptical about the omnipresence of Lola to normalize the fact of her own increasing absence. There was a loud bang and we turned to see Olive had accidentally bashed her face on the side of the table while enthusiastically trying to hoover up the peas with her mouth. She had the foreboding wide-eyed expression of a toddler in pain.

‘Olive,’ Katherine said calmly, ‘darling, you’re going to be a brave gir–’ But before she’d finished her sentence, Olive was on the kitchen floor banging her fists on the tiles and letting out siren sounds. Mark went over to comfort her.

‘Don’t pick her up,’ Katherine said. ‘She won’t like it. When she gets like this you just need to sit close to her.’ Mark lay next to her on the floor as she wailed, barely able to breathe as her face reddened in overexertion. Mark breathed deeply and slowly to calm her and said the same sentence over and over again: ‘It’s okay, I’m here. It’s okay, I’m here. It’s okay, Olive, I’m here.’

Eventually, Olive recovered. She stood up slowly, holding on to the chair as her little legs wobbled. ‘Good girl,’ we all said to congratulate her standing up again. ‘Good girl, what a good girl.’ How did we ever manage our emotions single-handedly when this is the introduction to the world we’re given? Where do we learn to do it? How do we find a way to cry quietly on our own, in showers and loos and into pillowcases, then stand up again unassisted and with no words of encouragement?

‘Let’s put on The Lion King soundtrack, hey?’ Katherine said, removing the baby from her breast and tucking herself back into her bra.