It worked, too. Every evening I would go into my garden and feel a deep, thrumming satisfaction as I noted the progress of my vegetables. I rubbed the goblinish skin of the pumpkins, watched each aubergine nose its way out of the calyx until eventually it hung, glossy, pendulous as a testicle. The zucchinis were smug and fat among the undergrowth.

I’d found the job at the donation centre in the early days of being alone. It soothed me, the sight of all those bags of blood chilled down to lizard temperatures in the refrigerator.

My ex-husband was a doctor. I had been a nurse. I remember my husband’s clever hands stretching out the thick beige pantyhose that had been part of my uniform. He was fascinated by them, their grip and give, the way they clung to my calves and thighs.

‘You’re like a snake,’ he’d say, picking up a pair from the floor. ‘Leaving your skins everywhere.’

I loved my vegetables. To me, love meant sitting in my garden until darkness fell, waiting for the slugs to make their approach. I read somewhere that the bottom of a slug is one giant foot, making rhythmic contractions to propel the animal forward. This disgusted me; their slick secretions reflecting silver in the moonlight disgusted me. I felt no pity when I poured salt down their backs.

Some people say that salt will dissolve a slug, but this is incorrect. It pulls the blood from them – if you can call it blood, that greenish-coppery fluid that fizzes into a pool around their shrinking bodies. The salt works by osmosis: the process by which liquid moves from a weaker solution to a stronger one.

I took precautions, of course. I was suspicious of my colleagues, of my neighbours. I was careful when I slipped the bags into my purse. When I arrived home from the centre each evening, I transferred their contents to a watering can before I went outside.

And I was right to be suspicious. My neighbours couldn’t help themselves, peering over the fence. ‘Rosie, what are you putting on those pumpkins? Rosie, that aubergine – what a monster!’ I would nod in agreement, stroking the dark surface of the thing, so shiny it seemed wet. I stroked until it squeaked.

Sometimes I thought about the donors: cheerful, civic-minded people. They liked to admire the dot of blood on the cotton wool taped to the inside of their elbows. These were the kinds of people who wore stickers: ‘I gave’. I gave. What a laugh.

I didn’t give.

Who had ever given anything to me?

One beautiful spring evening, just before he left, my husband looked at the balding lawn and vacant flowerbeds. He said, ‘We’ll never grow anything here.’