Babyville Page 0,4

can't hold her now. She can't see Jessica's parents, because she so resents them for being able to have her. Time, she prays. It is surely just a question of time before she gets pregnant and she will be able to have a baby of her own.

Once upon a long time ago Julia had an abortion. She hadn't thought about it for years. Recently she finds she thinks about it an awful lot. What she thinks most is that there is nothing wrong with her. She has been pregnant. This is not her fault. And if it's not her fault, then whose fault must it be?

She tries not to dwell on that one, frightened of where it might lead.

And still she stops mothers and asks for their tips, still she tries every old wives' tale in a bid to become pregnant.

The latest is this position, this legs-in-the-air position. This was passed on by a woman in the children's playground. (Yet another place she has been frequenting, eyes filling up with tears as she watches chubby little bodies toddling around, mouths filled with sand from the sandbox while their mothers are too engrossed in chat to notice. Just for the record, Julia thinks as she sits on the bench, she wouldn't be too engrossed. Just for the record, she would be the perfect mother.)

The woman sitting next to her had four children, and this was her tip: legs in the air for five minutes, not a second less. Julia doesn't believe five minutes is long enough for sperm to reach their destination, so she has taken to lying like this for an hour, Mark quietly snoring beside her as she rereads her books on getting pregnant.

Creative Visualization. That's another one. From time to time she lays the book down by her side, closes her eyes, and visualizes those sperm, fighting their way along the fallopian tubes to meet the egg, and sometimes she thinks so hard, she believes she can actually feel it happening.

In fact, is it happening now . . . ? Could that be . . . ? Is it . . . ? Please God, she prays, Let this work. Please God, let me have a baby. Let the More to Life than This be fertilized even as I lie here with my eyes tightly shut.

Just in case you're wondering, Julia hasn't been to see anyone, a fertility expert, anyone like that. God no, she would say. Not yet. On a good day she will tell herself that it's only been nine months, really not that long.

Tonight, as she practices her Creative Visualization with her legs in the air, Julia swears she can feel something happening. Not that she's entirely sure, but this time she thinks they really might have done it.

2

By rights Julia should not be able to see Sam, with Sam's stomach growing, her mind focusing on childbirth, labor, and chocolate ice cream with green olives and prawns. But somehow Julia can cope with Sam, because she loves her, and because, even though she can admit she's jealous, it doesn't seem to overwhelm her as it does with others.

But Sam is only pregnant. She does not yet have the baby Julia so desperately craves, and try though Julia will to be in her life post-baby as much as she is now, she cannot make any promises.

Julia stopped at Pizza Hut on the way. Two large pepperoni pizzas, extra green olives and prawns, to make Sam smile. As expected, Sam sits and picks all the topping off, mixes it in with the ice cream in the freezer, then throws the crust away while Julia makes disgusted faces.

“It could be so much worse,” she says, mouth full of the revolting concoction. “Think of all those really disgusting cravings people have. I could be on my hands and knees in the garden shoveling soil into my mouth.”

“First of all, what makes you think what you're eating is any better?” Julia ventures. “Anyway, isn't that stuff all an urban myth? I mean, people don't really do that, do they?”

Sam smiles, as she always does. “Yup. And coal. I could have sent you down to the garage for huge bags of coal instead of to Pizza Hut. It's called pica, some kind of iron deficiency. That's the interesting thing. Your body always tells you what it needs when you're pregnant.”

“So what exactly is the chocolate ice cream, olive, and prawn thing telling you?”

She shovels a bit more into her mouth. “Probably