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After her daughter had – for the third time, no less – laid her eggs in the fruit bowl, Mrs Jane Smith lost her temper, because if she had told that girl once, she’d told her a thousand times: no procreation in the house Not even the parthenogenetic kind And especially not on the nectarines But there was no reasoning with that child Stubborn as a mule, just like her father In fact Jane Smith was often saying it: My Georgia – just like her father, she is She was a testy girl, always giving her parents the contrary She’d swear the day was night just to naysay her mother There really is no reasoning with that child Not that you could call Georgia Smith a child anymore Lately the girl had been all over the place, literally: climbing up the walls, hanging from the ceiling, scuttling furtively up and down the stairs at night She’d developed infuriating habits like going round the house, turning off the lights and drawing all the curtains because she preferred lurking in darkness Last Sunday she had even bitten the dog And why did she do it? She was thirsty She was thirsty, she said! But the breaking point for Jane was her daughter’s ovulation onto the fruit Thinking about it later, Jane struggled to justify, even to herself, why she had become quite so apoplectic over the incident Yes, she had been waiting days for the nectarines to reach just the right stage of ripeness and, yes, her craving for juicy peach flesh would have to remain unsated a little longer, but this frustration could not begin to account for the cataclysmic intensity of her reaction, which had culminated in Mrs Jane Smith running – screaming – down the High Road, in her dressing gown and slippers, the fruit bowl held aloft with outstretched arms before she flung it furiously from the Station Road overpass down onto the train tracks below to be lacerated by the 0737 to London Victoria The inconvenient truth – the truth that