The Three of Us by Joanna Coles

Johannesburg, various Zambian game parks, Victoria Falls, the Okavango Delta, Swakopmund, Ongava … I hang up before his tour destinations end.
    Sunday, 12 July
    Peter
    We are touring the newly opened Thackeray Medical Museum in Leeds, on a twenty-four-hour stopover at Joanna’s parents, part of a flying visit to England. We appear to be the only adults here but for a few harassed schoolteachers. The rest of the visitors are schoolchildren, hundreds of them in a mobile melée of screams and shouts. In such numbers they are quite frightening, and I am reminded of the terminal scenes of Lord of the Flies. The museum itself is actually quite fascinating and I am immersed in an exhibit which deals with an early Irish anaesthetist by the name of Abraham Colles who practised at St Stephen’s Hospital in Dublin, where he tried to anaesthetize patients by pumping tobacco smoke up their rectums. As I study the blueprint for his patented Special Tobacco Smoke Enema Kit, Joanna appears to tell me that there is a whole section devoted to the mysteries of pregnancy and childbirth. It would be an excellent idea, she feels, for me to spend time there, to help me understand what she is going through.
    I dutifully examine the various exhibits and wallcharts on fertilization and chromosomes until I reach a dummy of a pregnant women clad in a loose hospital smock, sitting in the gynaecologist’s chair with her legs spread wide in the chrome stirrups. The wallchart explains the basics of the gynae’s trade. No one else is in the room and I feel a little odd, as though I have burst in on this most intimate of examinations. The entire focus of the exhibit lies concealed beneath the folds of the white smock, and I can’t help wondering whether, like the rest of the exhibits, this one too is a ‘working model’. I sidle closer to the dummy patient intending to flip up the hem to satisfy my curiosity when suddenly there is a great roar all around me and I am surrounded by a posse of particularly aggressive schoolkids. I retreat and soon they are chanting, ‘Ged-em-off! Ged-em-off!’ and they peel back the smock themselves to examine the dummy’s genitals. But an immediate groan of disappointment goes up and they roar off to the next room.
    I am left alone in the room once more. Just me and the gynaecologist’s dummy, with its smock now up over its head to reveal the source of their disappointment – a smooth, plastic, genital-free crotch. It feels wrong to leave the dummy in this desecrated position so I move in to pull the smock down again and make her decent. Just as my fingers close around the hem, I hear a gasp. It is Joanna’s mother. She quickly moves away and I suspect she thinks I’ve been interfering with the dummy.
    Hanging on a peg on the wall is a strange white cotton suit of some sort. I walk over to the panel, which explains its use. It is a pregnancy suit, which simulates the feel of being heavily pregnant. There is no one around so I quickly slip it on and Velcro myself into it. I walk about briskly to get the feel of it, and then, growing in confidence, I bend to try and touch my toes. Immediately I feel a small twinge of pain in my lower back.
    I feel their presence before I hear them. The school party has returned. They are soon dancing around me, jeering and poking me in my false belly as I struggle out of my pregnancy.
    Monday, 20 July
    Joanna
    Now in my third month, I am always hungry and, though eager to order in supper, am still working out my position in the Great Sushi Debate. Since arriving in New York we have eaten sushi take-out on average three times a week.
    No one cooks in New York. It wasn’t until British friends came to stay, several months after we had moved here, that we first opened our oven door. And that was only because they had offered to cook Sunday lunch. My friend Meredith, who has an acute storage space crisis in her small apartment, uses