When Lucy found herself pregnant she took to buying litre bottles of gin and rearranging the heaviest furniture in her flat. Each morning on the way to work she jumped down the last steps, increasing the number by one step every day until the stinging soles of her feet brought tears to her eyes. Twelve steps did nothing to dislodge the intruder and thirteen looked ominous for Lucy's own neck. It remained intact. Its intention was obviously to be born.

At work Lucy marvelled at her ability to hold reasonable conversations. She felt as if she were talking to people through a long tunnel. Lucy wondered if anyone had noticed the change in her but her colleagues on the acute psychiatric ward seemed oblivious, and the patients would hardly have noticed if she sprouted another head. It seemed to her ironic that she felt so lonely, given that for the first time in her life she was no longer alone.

On Christmas Eve, during a rare solitary moment in the nursing office, Dan phoned her. Despite the religious timing this was, of course, no immaculate conception, but what she and Dan did together had never seemed to be about breeding. He was an artist, contemptuous of domesticity, and he spent weeks alone in his studio in Wales. Lucy didn't mind. She quite enjoyed missing him. Now Dan's words, two hundred miles away, sounded so close that she felt shivers down her neck as if his hot breath were touching her ear, but her own voice was like that of a distant stranger as she impotently groped for the right phrase.

"What's up?" asked Dan. "You sound funny."

But the words strangled each other in Lucy's throat as she stared at the wall.

"I'll be home next week," he told her. "Home for New Year."

"That's good," said Lucy. "Dan - I've got something to tell you."

"Look, the money's running out," said Dan. "I'll talk to you when I get back."

"So," said Dan the following week. "What are you going to do?"

Lucy was in bed, the duvet pulled up to her nose.

"It's your decision," said Dan. "But of course I'll support you in whatever you decide."

"I've got an appointment for a termination," said Lucy. "Abortion," she added. It sounded more honest.

He hugged her, so she knew it was the right answer.

"So," said Annabel. "What are you going to do?"

"Would you - collect me from the clinic?"

Lucy felt she was owed such a favour, having collected Annabel from the same clinic the year before. Annabel's eyes, however, alerted her to the insensitivity of her request.

"I will - ye-es, of course I will." Annabel instictively laid her hands on the large lump that was her second, luckier mistake.

"I'm sorry," said Lucy. "It's just Dan - well - he hates that sort of thing., hospitals - you know."

Annabel raised her eyebrows.

"Such a sensitive artist!" she said sarcastically.

"And I don't want him there," Lucy added.

"Of course I'll collect you," said Annabel. "But it won't be easy for me, Lucy, going back there."

Lucy looked guiltily at her friend. She had tried to forget Annabel's day, returning to Annabel's house and the room with the flickering pink candles, the room which became in the weeks that followed, a shrine. But Annabel was prone to drama and Lucy only wanted a lift in the car.

Ten women sat in the waiting-room. Lucy furtively scanned the faces for emotion but the averted eyes were set in expressions of nonchalance. The nurse behind the desk methodically filled in forms and called each woman in turn to sign, as the excited voice of the radio announced the birth of the second child of the Duke and Duchess of York.

"You'd think she'd turn that off," Lucy whispered to the young girl next to her. The girl put down her magazine and stared at Lucy.

"Why?"

She looked about fourteen, with a round child's face under her bleached hair. On her arm was a tattoo saying 'Kevin'.

"I just thought it seemed a bit inappropriate," said Lucy, embarassed.

"Oh."

The girl resumed flicking the pages of her magazine.

Lucy was allocated a room with the tattooed girl and a woman of about forty with a hard face.

"Been here before?" asked the woman as they changed into white surgical gowns.

"No," replied Lucy, surprised that a second visit could be a possibility.

"It's my third," said the woman before Lucy had time to return the question. The tattooed girl was struggling to find fastenings on the back slit of her garment.

"It don't do up," the woman told her. "Just put your dressing-gown over the top."

"I ain't got one." The girl held the back of her gown together and turned to Lucy.

"Have you got a fag?"

"Sorry, I've given up."

"Here y'are, love." The hard-faced woman produced a packet of Benson and Hedges from her handbag. "You're not allowed to smoke in here so lean out the window - you want one too?" She thrust the packet at Lucy who hesitated and then reached gratefully for a cigarette.

"Thanks - I will."

"Thought so - you look like one of those who says they've give up and then makes a habit of smoking everyone else's."

"I'm sorry," stammered Lucy. "I'll get you some."

"Don't worry about it."

The woman had turned away to open the window. Lucy drew on her cigarette, relishing the bitter smoke in her lungs and the rush of nicotine to her head. She had never really wanted to give up smoking anyway.

"Yeah it's not too bad here," the hard-faced woman was saying. "Give you tea and sandwiches afterwards."

"Does it hurt?" asked the tattooed girl.

"Nah - well a bit when you wake up, like period pains." She turned to face them. "Vacuum suction," she said knowledgeably.

Lucy fought to banish a vision of the Hoover attachments under her sink. "D'you bleed a lot?" asked the girl.

"Don't worry, love," said the woman. "How old are you anyway?"

"Sixteen," said the girl defensively.

The woman snorted.

"I weren't born yesterday, darling!"

"Well not really, but Kev - he'd be in trouble."

"Your bloke?"

The girl nodded proudly.

"He was well mad when I told him."

"I bet he was."

The girl looked from the woman to Lucy and back again, and then pulled up her gown. She touched the yellowing bruises as though they belonged to someone else.

"Threw me downstairs," she said with a little nod.

Annabel was late. Lucy sat in the same waiting-room watching the next ten women reading magazines. Twice she went to the toilet to check for blood. There was none, and she wondered if it had really gone. The nurse behind the desk kept looking at her and then pointedly eyeing the clock. When Annabel rushed in at last Lucy noticed that all eyes drifted to her bulge.

"Sorry, Lucy, I'm just all over the place at the moment." Annabel was always all over the place. "You okay?"

Lucy sat silently in the passenger seat thinking about the dream, a laughing magician dressed in white with a metal wand. She wanted to get home, inspect her body. Annabel drove wildly through London, updating her on the last twenty-four hours.

"So now the bloody house has fallen through because of the surveyor's report, and I've got to be out in two weeks' time."

Annabel pulled up abruptly in a quiet residential area.

"How are you feeling?"

Lucy thought about it. She had been trying to work out what it was that felt different, and she smiled with sudden recognition.

"I don't feel sick any more."

Annabel leaned over and took her hand. Lucy looked at Annabel's silver bangles glittering in the sun.

"So this is what happens," she thought. "People hold your hand."

"Are you sure you're okay, Luce?"

Yes, I'm fine."

"Well then, I thought we might just pop in here and have a look at this house - I've just got the key from the estate agents."

Lucy felt she was walking just slightly above the ground. The house was cool and white and smelt of new wood, and she followed Annabel through the hollow rooms, listening to the reassuring sound of her footsteps on the floorboards.

"And this would be the baby's room," Annabel was saying as they entered the smallest bedroom. "Mmm. Could be lemon, sunny for a nursery."

Lucy leaned against the bare wall and listened to Annabel's voice echoing in the still emptiness.

"Sorry, Lucy," said Annabel suddenly. "Stupid of me."

"It's okay," said Lucy, sliding gently down the wall and onto the wood floor with a little thud. "It's nice. I think I'll just sit here for a while."

Lucy was planting seeds when Dan arrived that evening, pressing them into little pots of moist compost. She planted columbines, delphiniums and passion flowers, and sealed the trays in plastic freezer bags. Dan looked relieved but he kept glancing at her, nervously, as if he expected something. Lucy held up a strange seed, a tiny black ball with a tuft of orange hair.

"Strelitzia," she told him. "A bird-of-paradise. You have to pull off the hair and soak it in water all night, and then it will grow."

In five years' time the bird-of-paradise would be the tallest plant in her flat, nearly as tall as herself, and it would flower just like an exotic bird with its huge blooms of iridescent orange and midnight blue. Lucy placed the seed in the palm of Dan's hand and watched his thick, paint-stained fingers carefully remove the little tuft of hair.

Later, in bed, as he kissed her, she said suddenly,

"Do I smell of dead baby?"

Dan laughed and held her so tight that she could not speak. Lucy thought that she would probably never say anything again. He did not ask her why she could not sleep but produced a sketch pad, pencils, and taught her how to draw with her eyes closed.

"The secret," he told her, "is not to take your pencil off the paper."

They sat up in bed, taking it in turns.

Dan was trying to draw a newt. He looked like a blind man until he finished, opened his eyes with delight, passed the result to Lucy, and began again. The pile of newts grew in her lap. They were strange, amorphous things, with stunted limbs and one big eye. Dan held up the last one and squinted.

"Well, I reckon if I lose my sight I'll be out of a job," he laughed. "Which do you think is best?"

The little, unformed creatures looked to Lucy all exactly the same. She smiled at him and fingered the drawings.

"Can I keep them?" she asked.

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