The warm sun slants on to my face as I walk through the car park. It's so bright today that I have my shades locked tight into my eyes.

When I reach my destination I place the decanter on the ground beside me and, like a drooling raptor, I glare hard at Ronan's pride and joy. His principal pleasure in life after sex.

I am talking about his car.

The Porsche is almost new. It's the first real sign of the accumulating wealth of his dental practice. I had the colour changed at the last minute from Ronan's preferred Sherwood green to pale yellowcoincidentally. We'd had an argument over money: I demanded that he put the car into joint ownership. As a reprisal, he made me contribute one grand to the purchase price. I got even by changing the colour. He was not happy.

It really is is a wonderful machine, though. a wonderful machine, though.

Now I'm slamming the decanter stopper hard into the windscreen. I start counting to twelve. Twelve seconds later there are twelve lunar crater designs on the glass, patterned around a wide cavity in the centre.

Whew! This kind of manual labour takes it out of you.

Halting, I eye the decanter, a shining monument on the warm carbon tarmac, a jewel blistering with a billion sun sparkles. I'm saving it for later. For my two friends by the pool.

You should hear the crunching now.

Expertly, I'm working my way through left side window number one. These decanter stoppers are exceptionally good battering rams. They're terrific. To be recommended.

You know, it annoys me intensely to think that if a man is violent he is described as 'aggressive', whereas if a woman is violent she is merely 'hysterical'.

I will damn well be aggressive if I want to be.

I mean, what do you want me to be? A lady? Come on! Am I supposed to sit down with my husband at the breakfast table and discuss in a calm and appropriate manner the causes of his random sexual addiction? Or burst into tears? Or forgive his youthful, errant ways? Or slam the front door in a huff, suitcase in hand, and write frigid but tearful letters from Mother's pad? Not me.

I prefer to be the dragon he'll never forget.

In three tough blows, left side window number two disappears. The two right side windows go down. I seem to have more energy than there is window surface. In one single blow, the plastic sunroof surround cracks.

After a second short mid-afternoon break I take to the shiny yellow bonnet like a tiger in heat. I'm battering away at the soft metal until I'm swimming in an ocean of yellow paint dust.

The wing mirror takes a hit.

I think I've had enough now. Besides, I might be seen. I smooth down my trousers. I check my hair in the reflection of a nearby car windowthere aren't any left in the Porsche to speak of.

How do I feel?

Terrific. Alive Alive.

I pick the decanter off the tarmac and stride back through the car park towards a narrow path that leads past our apartment block to the swimming pool at the rear. I know I must look odd with the wine decanter and the scarecrow scowl, but you can't always look your best, can you?

This is where the fun begins.

Just as I reach the edge of the car park, a bright red BMW 318i screeches to a halt several inches in front of me, blocking my progress.

The tinted glass window rolls down.

It's Sylvana.

Sylvana is big, brash and impatient. She's stylish, rich and confident. She's incredibly generous to those she loves: with her crippled father, for instance, she's like an angel. (To those she hates she's a nightmare.) She's as blunt as a Celtic gravestone. She'll tell you if you look like crap or if your make-up resembles muck veneered with poster paint.

She has just one genetic defect: she's pathologically incapable of taking shit from anyone. Especially men, which is one reason I love her so.

On men: dump them. With no second chances, because nobody needs even a first chance to prove who they are. A chance is just a licence to cause further hurt. Better to enjoy, use and abuse. Crush and consume the grape but spit out the pip. Rinse your mouth afterwards. Above all, don't commit if you want a varied and exciting life filled with pleasant surprises and odours. It's time, she says, we stopped craving to spend our whole lives with three-year-old automatic pilots.

People say she's a stuck-up dragon.

Jealousysuch a terrible burden.

How does one describe this truly weird and wonderful woman who is my best friend and whom I have adored since the days we used to rip off her mother's lipstick to smudge our faces, and paint our toes with her purple nail varnish?

It's like Sylvana was born with dogshit in her mouth but to her friends up close her breath smells like roses.

She has always been a supportive pal.

Or so I thought.

"I've decided to have a baby," I told her just before lunch today, anticipating a supportive reaction.

We were sitting in the pleasant carpet-faded Gothic seventeenth-century drawing-room of the hotel to which Ronan banished me in order to spend time with his side shag.

I was tinkling away on a piano, eighteenth century by the feel of it, while Miss Impervious Herself sat nearby on a commodious nineteenth-century armchair, venting her sublimations on her favourite novel, Interview with the Vampire Interview with the Vampire, which she regards as the greatest literary event of the twentieth centurycarelessly omitting a whole range of interesting personalities from James Joyce to Salman Rushdie and a hailstorm of Nobel Laureates, but that's Sylvana for you.

"Did you hear what I just said?"

She acknowledged my query with a dead grunt.

"I'm going home today instead of Saturday."

"Shush! I'm coming up to a good fang part."

"You've already read that book three times."

"Multiply that by two."

I hit her with it again: "I've decided to have a baby, Sylvana."

This time she heard: I knew this because her eyeballs moved.

I'd just stopped playing the piano, so the atmosphere was weighed in favour of speech. Eventually her head followed her eyes and she spoke, frowning at me. "Nice one, Julie."

"I'm not joking."

My voice was casual, but my pulse beat with annoyance. I had half expected her to say this was wonderful news. But no, she was behaving like I'd just betrayed her.

I felt her sunburning glare on my skin. I rebegan my battered rendition of Beethoven's Pathetique Pathetique sonata. After a while I heard her voice slide over the piano sounds: was I actually going to have a baby, the voice politely inquired, or had I merely decided that I might sonata. After a while I heard her voice slide over the piano sounds: was I actually going to have a baby, the voice politely inquired, or had I merely decided that I might one day one day have a baby? have a baby?

Again I ceased playing. "I've actually decided I'm going to. Starting tonight. It's the perfect time of month. Ronan won't guess a thing."

My fingers were sweating on to the stilled piano keys.

Returning to her book, Sylvana calmly informed me that this was a totally natural phase I was going through.

I resumed my Beethoven, at once botching up the B-D minor chord progression at the start of the fast passage. I struck the B chord again. Hard.

"This totally natural phase," I intoned, "as you call it, might well be issuing between my legs in nine months."

Pause.

"Can I remind you of a few facts?" she said, still reading.

"Be my guest," I hissed, tripping over some harrowing bars.

It was like Ronan all over again.

Now, I have never known a pair of people who disliked one another as instantly as Ronan and Sylvana. It was loathing at first sight. Their mutual antipathy is so intense that there is only one thing that could possible unite them: their baby philosophy.

To both, the thought of babies is akin to the taste of cyanide: they kill off life as you know it. A single hour in their company would quell a woman's maternal resolve for a generation.

Sylvana first started lecturing me on the subject when we were eleven. She's still doing it.

Let her waffle on, I told myself.

"You imagine, Julie, that having a baby is like helping yourself to a piece of cake."

"It is like a piece of cake," I coolly replied, making sure to avoid her Interview with the Vampire Interview with the Vampire glare. "One that will make my life sweet again." glare. "One that will make my life sweet again."

From the corner of my eye I espied my friend leaning forward in her armchair and placing her book down on a nearby table. "There's just one problem, Julie: you have to bake bake the cake first. Baking is equivalent to agony. Would you like me to remind you of the details?" the cake first. Baking is equivalent to agony. Would you like me to remind you of the details?"

No, I would not. Go away.

"I already know."

"It's one of the most awful things that can happen to a woman."

"Quite."

"Julie, are you listening?"

"To Beethoven," I replied, struck by a strong sense of deja-vu.

While I mucked my way through the Pathetique Pathetique, Sylvana proceeded to remind me that childbirth is like having a red-hot cannonball grow inside you, which simply refuses mercifully to explode and finish you off. She flung her standard childbirth lecture at me, containing samples on varicose veins, hyperventilation, contractions, bleeding, ripping, forceps delivery, strangulation. She told me that childbirth is a recipe for two days of agony, followed by two weeks of joy, followed by two decades of servitude, frustration, disappointment...and a fat, shapeless stomach.

"This is all very Ronan," I replied, trying to conceal my flusterment behind the musical score.

Sylvana: "Do you really believe all that well-intentioned advice, Julie? Candy-floss such as: "It will pop out in no time at all!" Or: "Controlled breathing will defeat all pain." Or: "Up to ten thousand babies are born daily; it can't be that bad.""

She paused for breath and continued: "Guess why people concoct all this nonsense about painless childbirth: because they don't want you to panic. They lie to you because they 'care' about you. But what kind of caring is it if they let you squirm on your hospital bed begging for the last rites?"

Sylvana is quite right.

"You're quite right, Sylvana," I replied in between a G- and a D-major chord.

"Oh Julie," she begged. "At least think think about it before you decide. Don't rush in like a fool without at least..." about it before you decide. Don't rush in like a fool without at least..."

I pointed out that I couldn't survive an hour of Sylvana's brutally honest friendship and remain a fool.

Her voice then became softer, sad almost. "I tell people I'm child-free and proud. Not because I can't have children but because I don't want them. People think that if you don't want children there's something wrong with you. They say it's selfish, but how can you be selfish to beings that don't even exist?"

She awaited my considered reply.

"Sylvana, I've decided, okay? I'm perfectly well aware that I am heading for the most harrowing and crude and bloody disgusting experience of my life..."

Sylvana, open-mouthed: "But the thought fills you with joy?"

"Precisely."

She picked up her Anne Rice novel again, sat back in her seat and muttered, "I don't understand you any more."

I stopped playing.

I told her that I appreciated her concern, but that I had decided to surrender my existence to the torture chamber that is Mother Nature. I told her that pain comes, but then pain goes.

I told her I was going to have a baby because it was the right time career-wise, and anyway I was almost thirty and balding fast. And babies aren't much use to you when you're old and grey.

I readily conceded that a baby constitutedat a certain ontological, pre-linguistic levela highly developed squawking, tearing, fast-food processing, puking and shitting machine. Nevertheless, I insisted that this highly developed squawking, tearing, fast-food processing, puking and shitting machine was the very entity that would in some inexplicable way bring me to the very source of meaning, fulfilment and love in my life.

Sylvana fell silent at this point. She must have sensed my seriousnesss of purpose. She tried to protest that I was just doing it because my mother was desperate to be a first-time grandmother.

I calmly shook my head and hit her with it then: I told her I was doing it for our marriage. For love. For a wonderful new family.

"But Ronan doesn't want a baby," she shot back, shrewdly but cruelly.

"They all say that."

After that, Beethoven's Pathetique Pathetique came to my fingers like a dream. came to my fingers like a dream.

Ironic, isn't it? God, I'm such an unbelievable fool.

5 5.

Staring at me through her car window, Sylvana's caustic expression reads: Well, I'm here now: what are you going to do about it? Well, I'm here now: what are you going to do about it? "You forgot something, darling," she drawls, eyebrow curled. "What?" "You forgot something, darling," she drawls, eyebrow curled. "What?"

"The present you bought for Ronan: Art and the Postmodern Art and the Postmodern."

"Oh yes, that."

It cost me sixty pounds.