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them a place. ‘Helen gives me the shits,’ Roberta tells Paul, but he says ssh, she’ll hear you.
    Mr Blue Eyes, as Roberta calls Helen’s husband, is out of the room on a call, when she whispers to her. ‘Did you hear about the woman who left her two children in the car while she looked in the shops?’
    ‘No,’ Roberta mutters, trying to look as if her breathing is everything. She knows she will hear something horrible. It is worse than she imagines.
    ‘The car went up in flames, blazing from end to end, and her children were burned. To death.’ Helen’s beautiful fine throat is working. She has a problem, Roberta thinks. Why doesn’t she tell the people on the other side of her?
    But she can see why she wouldn’t. The man has SUCKS tattooed on his forehead, and snakes coiled down his arms. His partner is a woman with dishevelled hair and a broken tooth. She wears a zipped-up bomber jacket that turns her belly into the shape of a soccer ball. The woman already has children, but it’s the man’s first and she is proud that he wants to know what to do ‘when the time comes’. Sometimes Roberta gets the impression, from the way they look at each other, that these two are crazier about each other than most of the couples in the room. They give her an odd sort of confidence , because the woman does know what it’s about, and she’s in love and wants more of it, pain and all.
    ‘Some women shouldn’t be allowed to have children,’ says Helen.
    Roberta looks away quickly, smiling at the new couple on the other side of them. The woman is young, although she tries to make herself look older by using heavy foundation and bright lipstick . The pair have introduced themselves as Michelle and Sandy. They, too, are an unlikely couple, and Roberta feels that her labelling system is slipping. Sandy is at least thirty, with hair straggling over his collar. He has a long, bare upper lip, but beneath his lower one he grows a tiny vee-shaped wisp of hair. He wears a two-piece pink and green patterned outfit that looks like shortie pyjamas , and walk socks.
    ‘All right,’ says Ann Claude. ‘Mother’s going to have a contraction now. On to your sides, mothers. Now, pant, pant, blow, pant, pant, blow. Very good. Now, all you dads, glide your hand along her back and massage evenly and slowly, that’s right, another little trial run. She’s having the contraction now, okay, and now it’s going off, so glide your hand away again.’
    On Roberta’s back, Paul’s fingers feel like a bunch of wire spikes.
    ‘You’re hurting,’ she whispers, but her voice sounds loud. He lets his hand drop. She cannot see his face but she knows she has embarrassed him. She reaches out for his hand, which feels like a surgical glove. Beside them, Michelle giggles. Roberta flicks a glance in her direction, thinking she will meet her eye and stare her down, but Michelle and Sandy’s laughter is private.
    ‘You’re tickling me,’ Michelle says to Sandy.
    ‘All right,’ croons Ann Claude, ‘roll over on to the other side now.’
    ‘I have to take a leak,’ mutters Paul.
    ‘Can’t it wait?’ Something in the air alarms Roberta. But already Paul has scrambled to his feet and is making his escape. She is left by herself among the monstrous women and their monstrous husbands.
    Sandy directs his attention to her. ‘Why did the beetroot blush?’ he murmurs, his eyes flicking over Paul’s empty space.
    She pretends she has not heard him.
    His voice is insidious, persistent. ‘Go on, give it a go.’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘Because it saw Mr Green Pea,’ says Sandy, with the remorseless insistence of a man who cannot let a joke pass. Roberta readies her label to paste on his file — a person who would crack jokes on his way to the gallows or in the middle of a tax audit. Somebody to watch out for.
    Lying on her back, staring at the ceiling, she tells herself how lucky she is. A woman with a job and a husband, and a diamond