Looking back it all seems so silly and innocent. Was it? I don't know. I was younger then. I was bored and unhappy with my life in Baghdad and so I used to climb inside other bodies and live their lives. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday from 6:00 to 8:00 in the evening it was Polly's turn. I sat starring at Polly while she sat staring at the professor while he tried to teach us French.

Like the other expat wives I had nothing to do all day. And, so I did `things.' Shopping at the government store in Karrada desperate for that extra bottle of Lebanese wine or Pears soap from home, pizza at the cafe next door to the Italian embassy and French at the Alliance Francaise with the Professor. You know. Things. Things to keep you busy so you don't think. I used to be good at that. Not thinking.

I was new in the class. Polly began taking classes a year and a half ago `cause she was tired of sitting at home.' I knew what she meant. She was tired of trying to be energetic. Tired of trying to look young. Tired of being a mother all the time and tired of seeing only one man, her husband of ten years. Oh Jesus, I understood. I understood all of it. Every fucking bit of it.

So I haunted her body and thoughts and began to find out who she was. I lived her life. It had to be better than mine. Polly, plain-pretty, English, married Omar, stocky, now flabby, Iraqi and they settled in Omar's exciting Baghdad with a house on the Tigris, three servants, a 280.4 Mercedes, some genuine Persian carpets belonging to Omar's grandmother and air conditioning. There was a pomegranate and orange grove to sit in. Lots of aloes and prickly pears surrounding the four-bedroom house. Bougainvillea climbing up the front and trailing across the roof. `Allah Akbar' resounding through the city. A souk full of cubby-hole shops selling antiques and plastic kitsch side by side and priced the same. So much leisure time to bask in, to read, to garden, to create exotic meals.

I suppose this would be upward mobility for some, but Polly wasn't interested in climbing, didn't even notice that she had climbed. And, really she preferred the two family, semi-detached house in Kent where she had grown up. She had lived in the lower maisonette with her older sister, younger brother, engineer father and great pastry cook mother. In the upper maisonette lived her housewife aunt, hardware store manager uncle and three cousins. They all sang carols at Christmas, ate chocolate eggs at Easter, burned the Guy on November 5th, picked proper English strawberries in the spring and loved each other. She had been a smiling, terribly well behaved, well-adjusted kid - not a particularly emotional or bright child - nothing out of the ordinary. She never had imaginary friends, threw temper tantrums, or wrote poems. She fell `in love' ten times; never had a real boyfriend or thought about sex, kept her virginity, and went to a polytechnic not far from home.