"Get on! I seen 'im and his flash bleddy car in the rest area with Mr. Hart's niece, I know I did. Wos' think I am? Stupid?"

"That would be one word." Dave laughed.

"I'll tell you one more time," Niall said, trying to sound as if he was enjoying the wind-up. "It wasn't me. Prove otherwise and I'll buy you a beer every day for the rest of your life."

"That'll be till a week on Tuesday, looking at 'im," Dave said.

"Your twin, was it?" Roy asked.

"My brother, I expect."

"Your brother? I love to see a grown man squirm, I do."

"Was the hood up?" Niall asked.

"T'wadn't the hood that was up, boy."

"What was the other car? A blue Golf?"

"Course it bleddy was. You were there. All right, Jim?"

Jim Best, the electrician, came over to the bar. Same crowd every lunchtime.

"All right, Roy?"

"I'm just telling Mr. O'Connor here, the Boxtree rest area idn't as private as 'e thinks 'tis."

"It's your car there, is it? Partridge'll 'ave your guts for garters, boy. 'Ee can't get his car through the gate."

"I'll go and shift it," Niall said.

"I thought you said t'wadn't yours?"

"It isn't, it's Emmy's." He was relieved to have an excuse to leave after admitting that. He forced the last of his stout down. "Haven't you two got work to do? Like fixing my Aga, for a start?"

"I'll be there d'rec'ly," Roy said.

"And I'll be there just after that," Jim said, his face as straight as a poker.

As he shut the low white door that led from the public bar onto the road, he could hear the three of them coughing and laughing through their Superkings like a coven of witches.

He started his bike with a more aggressive kick than it needed, and pulled away from the pub, wondering where the hell Boxtree rest area was and why every hole in the hedge needed to have a name around here.

He took the first right, heading in the vague direction of Bodinnick but not down a lane he knew. Then he took a left, and at a junction of no fewer than five roads known locally, but not to him, as Star Cross, he took another right. It was like a labyrinth out to trick him. Every road had the same landmarks. Five-bar gates leading to timber companies, driveways to farms, private lanes to big houses.

Just when he thought he had completely lost his bearings, he saw it. Emmy's car, abandoned in the middle of a long, narrow rest area in front of some privately owned woodland. Tracks in the leafy mulch suggested the recent arrival and departure of another car. Well, he could be more specific than that if he chose to be. He could say the arrival and departure of a blue Italian front-wheel-drive with a throaty roar, which belonged to his brother Cathal.

He pulled in and took off his helmet with fumbling fingers. His mind searched for a more palatable scenario. Perhaps she had broken down, and phoned home for help. Perhaps Cathal had been the one to answer. Perhaps he had been hearing things when they were in the sewing room. Perhaps Maya hadn't really thought Emmy was refusing to come out because of Cathal. Perhaps he hadn't really seen them on the stairs, seen their faces.

He tried the door of her car and looked inside. Her bag was on the passenger floor and one of Maya's sweaters was on the back seat, the very thinly striped hand-knitted one he'd bought her at Greenwich Market that had stretched so much it now reached her knees. The hood was still warm.

He leaned against the front of the car, trying to work out why he felt so sick. Why not Cathal? He could see why she would find him attractive. But if they were together, how? And when? There were some pieces of the jigsaw that seemed to fit and others that didn't. He tried this way and that way to find the whole picture, picking up the same few bits again and again, turning them to the left, the right, upside down, forcing them. But he just couldn't see it clearly. Stuff was missing.

My God, he thought. What the fuck am I doing here? What am I doing acting like some crazed Peeping Tom? What will I say if they find me?

He heard traffic and panicked. As he turned his bike back toward the road, Cathal's car came over the brow of the hill. He saw Emmy in the passenger seat but her head was bowed. Cathal didn't look exactly full of the joys of spring, either. With white-hot panic boiling in his head, he opened up the throttle, bareheaded, his crash helmet still hanging on the fence. He didn't know how to get out of there fast enough.

17.

Dean wasn't used to feeling frightened, having developed a high alarm threshold when he'd cut half his finger off with a Stanley knife at the age of eight and taken himself and the piece of digit to the hospital on the bus. His mother had been "missing" at the time, and when she went "missing" he and his brother used to fend for themselves until they ran out of food, then they'd go and get her from the pub. She always bought them double chips on the way back.

Life had continually thrown stuff at him, so he had grown up believing he could catch most things. But looking at Mog's blotchy face and wide, scared eyes, seeing the wet, slightly bloody sheets he had just taken off the bed, watching the way her back arched and her belly moved, he had an uncontainable fear that he was about to drop the one ball that really mattered.

He sat on a rickety painted stool next to the sofa on which Mog was immobilized and tried to keep his cool.

"Let me just take the motorbike up to the village and phone for an ambulance, yeah? I'll go like fuck. I'll be back before you even miss me." He pulled the edge of his beard as he spoke. The skin was already red raw underneath.

"No," Mog begged. "I don't want you to leave me. I don't want to be on my own. Please don't go."

He held her left hand in both of his and squeezed. "You'll be all right. We're gonna 'ave a baby, be a little family, yeah?"

Mog's attempt at a smile failed. "It's happening again," she whimpered, lifting her bottom off the cushions and pulling his hand underneath the small of her back. "Can you push it there? Harder than that."

He put his rough splintered hand where she told him, and tried to take the strain. He knew that what she needed was force against force, but he was nervous of making it worse and he couldn't bring himself to press as hard as his instincts told him to. A strange moan kept coming out of her mouth but he could tell she didn't know she'd made a noise. Her taut, swollen torso shifted under her thin white shirt.

"I think these are just the early ones," she tried to say bravely when the contraction subsided. "I think they're going to get a lot worse than this."

He wiped her face with the flannel she boiled with the dishcloth and the tea towel every day. Her light hair was curling and damp round the edges of her face and she looked different, like a kid in bed with a temperature. They didn't have a watch or a clock so he was counting one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi under his breath.

"I'll put some music on," he said. "What d'you feel like listening to?"

Mog shook her head and lay back on the pillow. Dean stood, pleased to have an excuse to look away. His legs were shaking and his hands fumbled through the wicker basket of tapes. He slotted a battered cassette the midwife had given them into their precious machine.

"When did we last charge the battery?" he asked, in a desperate attempt to hang on to normality, but she was too far gone for distraction. Her eyes were fixed on a distant internal horizon that he would never be able to reach, no matter how hard he tried.

Ambient ululations-whale noises or womb beats or something-filled the space, making the atmosphere even more surreal. He badly wanted a spliff.

As the plaintive baying on the tape began to compete with Mog's increasingly uninhibited wailing, the noise of a car engine broke through and Dean lost his last reserve of calm. He lurched from his stool, leaped across the floor, through the door and down the steps in one seamless stagger.

"Don't go," Mog shouted. "Please stay, Dean. Please!"

"I'm not going anywhere. There's a car out there. I'll be back in a minute."

Dean waved at Jonathan who felt a physical jolt at the promotion from stranger to friend. He had the Bedford Twin Steer aluminum sump pump in the back of his car between the fishing nets and the beach buckets, but he had a feeling that was no longer why he was here. For once, he had managed to be in the right place at the right time.

"Mog's having the baby," Dean screamed across the car park. "She's having the baby."

Jonathan turned to the four children in the car-his three and Scott-and spoke calmly. "Okay, looks like you may be rock-pooling on your own, kids."

"Why? Who's that man?"

"That's Dean."

"He looks mental," Scott said.

"I think he's trying to tell me his girlfriend is having their baby."

"Uuugh," Jay said.

"Gross," said Scott.

"So she won't be able to show us the sandhoppers?" Asha asked.

Jonathan didn't answer. He was too busy making sure he didn't run over Dean, who had his hand on the driver's door before the car had stopped moving. He saw his terrified face and remembered that alarm, that incapability to believe that anything good could possibly come out of such pain, that complete male helplessness, that awful creeping knowledge that you had led someone you loved to this place and now you had to leave her there.

He could have told Dean to dump it all there and then, because the place Mog was in would soon turn out to be so maternally absorbing, that she wouldn't necessarily notice if he was there or not. But Dean wouldn't have listened.

"Thank fuck you're here, mate," he blubbered. "I don't know what to do. We didn't have time to get into the village for the bus, or anything. It just started happening and she couldn't walk. I don't know what to do, man, I don't know what to fuckin' do."

"Well, the first thing you've got to do is calm down," Jonathan said in the measured voice he had heard Sita use with Jay lately. He hadn't noticed Dean's swearing, and if the children had they weren't showing it. With his dreadlocks pulled back off his face into a ponytail, Dean looked like a baby himself.

"Okay? Calm down," Jonathan repeated, getting out of the car. "Have you called an ambulance?"

"Haven't got a phone. She didn't want me to leave her. I thought I was going to have to..."

"Dad?" said Jay, who had got out of the car after him.

Jonathan put his hand on Dean's shaking shoulder. He felt paternal, a hundred years old. "Come on, it's going to be fine. Mog is going to need you to be strong."

"I can't, I can't, I can't. She was all right when we got up, and then..."

"We'll call an ambulance."

"She's not going to die, is she?"

"No, she's not." said Jonathan. "She really is not. Don't worry, I know what it's like. I've been through it three times myself. It's okay. It's nature's way. But it's bloody terrifying to watch, I'll give you that."

"Can you come and see her?"

"I will. I'll just deal with this lot. This is Jay."

"Hi," said Jay.

"Sorry, mate," said Dean, nodding at him in apology.

"Get your nets," Jay mouthed through the window to Scott. "Dad, what do you want me to do with Lila?"

"Leave her in the car until she wakes up. Keep checking her, will you? And don't wander off too far. And keep an eye on Asha. And don't go into the sea."

"Dad, I'm thirteen, not three," Jay said, looking at Dean for approval but Dean was heading back into the bus.

"Yes, I know. I'm sorry. But Scott-"

"Scott is fine."

"Good. Keep it that way. No showing off."

"Come on, you two. Leave Dad to deal with this."

Scott legged it out of the car and onto the beach as fast as he could, making sure he got as far away as he could from any possible blood or tears. He'd seen enough of those at home.

"Jonathan?" Dean shouted, reappearing. "She's just had two in the space of a minute."

"Two what?" asked Asha.

"Go with the boys," Jonathan said. "Be a good girl."

The inside of the bus looked different from the other day, smaller and scruffier. The sofa along the window was now a bed. Mog was lying on it, propped up with pillows, her legs open. When she saw Jonathan, she pulled a red Indian throw over herself.

"Hello," she said weakly. She sounded muffled, as if her body was conserving its strength.

"Hi, Mog. Don't worry."

She nodded and Jonathan saw a surge of energy ripple across her stomach.

"Here's another one," she said, bracing herself with a rush of panic. Her whine was barely audible at first and then, from her guts, it became an uninhibited groan. Oh shit, Jonathan thought, watching her bear down.

"Are you pushing?" he asked, failing to hide the alarm in his voice.

"Why? Is that bad?" Dean said.

"Do you feel like you need to push?" Jonathan repeated. He tried for eye contact.

"I think so," Mog sobbed. "I don't know. I don't know what to do. It hurts, it hurts."

Something bigger than him snatched at his insides. He scrabbled in the back of his mind for some forgotten piece of knowledge. First stage, transition, second stage. She was well into the second stage. Sita's labors had been long and slow but Mog had dived straight in at the deep end.

"You'll be okay. I'm just going to call an ambulance," he said quietly, hoping to God there would be a signal on his phone.

"No!" Mog shouted. "No, I don't want to go to hospital. No!"

Jonathan sat on the stool and took her clammy hand. Dean had taken up a new position by the door. He looked ready to run at any time.