Ricochet Baby Read Online Free PDF

engagement ring that sits snugly beside her wedding band, expecting a planned baby. At twenty-six, she is neither too old nor too young to be having her first child. She has had a scan because she goes to a specialist at her father’s insistence, and specialists like scans; the baby looks fine. It’s got all its fingers and toes, the woman in X-ray had said. She asked Roberta if she wanted to know about the other bits.
    Roberta told her, no, she didn’t want to know, and Paul agreed. But she has guessed, from the way the woman spoke, that there was another piece, the mysterious instrument, the little boy’s penis. She has decided not to tell Paul, even though she knows she is right.
    At Ann Claude’s command, the group rolls sideways again, and this time she rolls with them, so it is not so obvious she is alone. She is facing Mr Blue Eyes’ back. She closes her eyes so she does not have to watch what he is doing to Helen. With her eyes shut, Roberta feels comfortable and drowsy, suddenly quite sleepy, remembering what it is like to sleep on her own. In her warm womb, her baby floats and somersaults. Ann Claude has put on a soothing tape, and she thinks that it is good that she is not reallyon her own, that now she has Paul, whose hands are on her back, stroking gently but firmly, like a professional masseur, kneading deep into the muscles round the base of her spine where it aches.
    ‘That’s nice,’ she says out loud, forgetting where she is. She hears Michelle’s high whinnying giggle again and opens her eyes in a panic. Sandy has changed places with Michelle on the mat behind her, and it is his hands on her back, and Paul is walking towards them, his face blind with anger.
MOON SHADOWS
    ‘Y OU MUST HAVE known,’ Paul says, as he puts the car away in the garage.
    ‘I was asleep.’
    ‘I’d only just walked out of the room.’
    ‘I don’t know why you’re going on at me,’ Roberta says. ‘It didn’t happen to you.’
    ‘It’s a violation,’ states Paul. They turn the lights on in the house. ‘I should probably call the police.’
    The thought flicks through her mind, unbidden, that he is acting as if there has been a burglary. Someone has taken something that belongs to him.
    ‘It was a joke,’ she says. All she wants now, after the unpleasantly quiet drive home, is for the whole thing to be forgotten.
    ‘Make up your mind. Now it’s funny? Don’t you care that he put his hand on you? Felt you up?’
    ‘He’d say it was a mistake, an honest mistake.’
    ‘He couldn’t say that, he was facing your back. His wife was behind him.’
    ‘Well, he probably would, wouldn’t he? It’s silly, you couldn’t prove anything.’
    ‘I saw it, Roberta.’ His voice is pained with disappointment. ‘Wouldn’t you do anything if you were raped?’
    This truly frightens her. Once, she had served on a jury for a rape trial.
    ‘I saw what that woman went through,’ she had told friends at a dinner party, one night when they had all been drinking wine too late. ‘And yet we didn’t convict the man because the evidence was faulty. There was a reasonable doubt. I lie awake at nights and think about that young woman. She was younger than me. I picked she was a street walker, or a sex worker of some kind. Like anyother woman, she had the right to say no, and she had gone through all that, for what? For humiliation and more degradation and probably the pay-off of a good hiding from someone because she couldn’t make her story stick.’
    They had all looked away and Paul had wished Roberta would be quiet, because his section head was at the dinner, and the wives were clucking their tongues with disapproval. She could tell that they thought she was wrong.
    He knows how she feels. What is he on about, she wonders, blurred with tiredness.
    ‘We’re not talking about rape,’ she says. ‘What we’ve got here is a prank, like a kid pulling his pants down in the playground.’
    ‘You’re passive, Roberta,