Make no mistake about it. We're all bitched from the start.

That's what Ernest Hemingway used to say anyway. Now Hemingway was one smart cookie – no argument there – but the same boy didn't know the half of it. Take me for instance. I was well and truly bitched nine months before the start. Well, nine months and two days to be exact.

There really is no good way of telling you this so I'll just tell you the best way I can. On the night I was conceived, Momma got out a darning needle and poked a hole in Pappa's johnny before she put it on him. So there you are. 

She confessed on my fourteenth birthday and after that I went about for a while thinking the best of me was thrown out with the damn thing. Away in some landfill place with dead cats and crows and squashed hedgehogs and stuff. Guts and giblets and shitty nappies(diapers to all you U.S. folks out there. Hi!) and old tin cans.

The question is though, the real question is, why would a woman do a thing like that? That's the question.Why would she poke a hole in a johnny?