I finished my task of removing the barbed weeds, separating young shoots from old and tenacious, unwanted parassites. I worked with determination and a deeply felt aggression. Despite my garden gloves, I bear the scratches and cuts inflicted by the dying plants. Later, my arms, legs and shoulders throb painfully in the cooling silence of late evening.

On my own, again. Mr Husband's work requires his presence somewhere important and stressful. Bathing Pest n.1 and Pest n.2 is not involving enough to stop me from floating somewhere else, not necessarily very far.

Once the sacred silence of sleeping children has descended on the household, I rush to my diary, ready to pour over untold truths. Instead, I notice the dim light of a spent sunset filtering through the light curtains behind the desk, and leave the chair I have just pulled out from under it.

I take the baby monitor with me, hoping that the place I want to go to may be just within its reach. I am wearing a pale blue dressing gown, and my skin underneath. The angry scratches howl under the silk.

As I run down the garden barefoot, I vaguely register the smell of lavender and oregano thrown at me by the flowerbeds flanking the lawn, and the dewy grass giving in under my weight.

When I reach the now bare fence and a small gate, previously suffocated by the overgrowth I battled through today, my breath is mixing with the gurgling of the waters flowing nearby, the calm river still visible in the crepuscular light.

Mr. Vroom's windows wink against the darkness of the house. I push the wooden gate open with one hand, and hold the monitor with the other. Soon, my feet are squelching in soft mud, still warm from the day just gone. As I approach the river bank, I gain a better view of the house; the light inside one of the ground-floor rooms floods out into his dark back garden.

I can see him. Tall and dark, standing near the window. Perhaps looking this way. Suddenly, from the way that shadow inside the room stiffens a little, I know that he must have seen me; though what exactly he must see out of his window, across the river and into the now near-darkness, apart from my floaty pale blue dressing gown, I do not know.

I let the baby monitor drop on the floor by my feet with a soft thud. Quickly, and without thinking, I remove my dressing gown, which soon joins the monitor. There I stand, naked on the river bank, my feet warm with mud and wet grass, hair tangled up by the breeze. My nipples protest at the exposure and harden with indignation, but I ignore them.

If I had shouted across the land, he could not have noticed me more.

Here is my body to hold. Pull me closer.

And then, in the perfect silence of the countryside, the baby monitor starts bleeping randomly, and its echo bounces off the surrounding trees.