I realised it was critical not to drop or threaten the baby. I solved both problems by lying on my back before the mother gave it to me. I steadied it with my hands and let it crawl over me. My human body repulsion reflex did not activate. It was great fun, and the baby was making hilarious noises. Women in the visitor group were taking photos. We continued for approximately two minutes, then I looked around for B3. I waved to her and she put down the video camera.

‘Test please.’ I suspected my own oxytocin levels had risen, but only the baby’s were relevant.

‘No,’ said B1. ‘It’s not part of the protocol.’

‘Incorrect,’ I said. ‘The protocol is modified so as not to exclude serendipitous data, this being an exploratory study. Or the protocol will not be approved by the medical school.’

Friendly Woman smiled and nodded.

B3 opened the baby’s mouth and took the swab. The mother let me play with the baby for another minute.

The pram I had ordered arrived in my absence. Rosie had unpacked it and now insisted we return it.

‘Don, you know I’m not girly and I’m not into frilly baby stuff, but this is like some sort of industrial-military…tank. The Hummer of prams.’

‘World’s safest pram.’ I meant this literally. The base model had been the safest available, and I had augmented it with numerous custom enhancements. I was confident Bud would be unhurt in a rollover, and would survive a low-speed automobile encounter, particularly if he or she was wearing the helmet I had purchased as an accessory. The only negatives were an increase in size and some complexity in access to the baby. And, of course, cost.

‘Is appearance more important than safety?’ I asked.

Rosie ignored the question. ‘Don, I appreciate you’re trying, I appreciate it a lot, but this just isn’t you, is it? Babies aren’t really your thing. Prams, big metal prams with rubber bumpers, are more your thing.’

‘I don’t know. I have limited experience with both.’

My chances of increasing my experience through the Lesbian Mothers Project were looking poor. The protocol change I had suggested, involving each baby having a ‘crawl over Don’ experience, was subject to approval from the mothers. After my initial success, all had refused. I gave B2 and B3 my phone number in case any changed their minds.

‘Don’t stay up waiting for a call,’ said B2.

But B3 sent me a text message: Oxytocin through the roof on your intervention. Highest result from play activity. And you’re not even a carer!

The implication was that my gender had affected the result, but a single instance was of value only to prompt further investigation.

B1 wrote to David Borenstein, and did not copy the email to me.

‘Just skim it,’ said the Dean, indicating his computer screen.

I am not accustomed to skimming. Skimming involves ignoring some words. What if I ignored a not? It was a long message, but I noted the words unprofessional, disruptive and insensitive.

‘Basically, she wants you off the study, and she says they’re discarding the one-off result because it didn’t fit the protocol, was not serendipitous but was the outcome of a deliberate intervention, blah blah.’

‘Did she say what the result was?’

‘She implied they hadn’t tested it. Fat chance. If it had tested low, she’d have been falling over herself to include it.’

‘Terrible science.’

‘Agreed. I made a good call putting you on the job, didn’t I?’

‘It’s possible that a person who cared about appropriate social behaviour would have given it priority over the research objective.’

The Dean laughed.

‘I have to say, Professor Tillman, you’re a fine scientist, but I sometimes wonder how Rosie copes.’

Rosie was not coping well with me.

One of the curious things about animals, including humans, is that we spend approximately one-third of our lives sleeping. There is no practical way around this inefficiency. In my twenties, I had conducted a series of trials to establish my minimum sleep requirement, and had settled on scheduling seven hours and eighteen minutes per night, excluding all light from the bedroom, and never using amphetamines again.

As we age, we sleep less soundly: one evolutionary explanation is that in the ancestral environment the young hunters and warriors required undisturbed sleep, while the older members of the tribe acted as watchdogs and needed to be woken by the slightest noise.

In sleep terms, Rosie was already a watchdog. She woke frequently, and exacerbated the problem by visiting the toilet and making herself a cup of hot chocolate, which of course began a vicious circle. Before she was pregnant Rosie would sometimes go to bed early, exhausted or intoxicated; on other occasions she would study until after 1.00 a.m. and come to bed animated and even wanting to initiate a conversation. At 1.00 a.m.! Sometimes she would also be interested in sex, in which case I accommodated the change to my routine and scheduled additional sleep for the following night.

I had become accustomed to being woken, and generally managed to fall asleep again within a few minutes. But the aggregate effect could not be ignored and I was forced to reschedule my bedtime to thirteen minutes earlier.

The pregnancy aggravated the problem. As predicted by The Book, the expanding baby and its associated support system had reduced Rosie’s bladder capacity. And Rosie had begun snoring, not loudly but enough to be disruptive. I had to reschedule bedtime again.

We had a discussion about the problem at 3.14 a.m.