‘As the months go by the woman becomes more and more exhausted. She has to take more time off work because she can’t focus any more. The baby doesn’t sleep – well, never for more than an hour and a half in a row and never, not once, does the baby sleep through the night. She becomes so tired that she cannot sleep. She has one night of respite when she takes a Temazepam having breast-pumped her milk out like a cow so her husband can feed the baby. But she feels guilty, stupidly worried that the baby may suffer. She becomes depressed, which she feels deeply ashamed about because she has everything that she ever wanted. This is a woman who can usually solve problems: she has patience, she can manage other people, fix her own computer, she can assemble flat-pack furniture, she can change a tyre, she can cook for ten, but there is no instruction pamphlet that came with this baby and she feels a total failure that she cannot cope.

‘And the baby becomes a toddler and still doesn’t sleep. She is like any toddler: adorable but a handful, sweetness and tantrums. The mother is in this strange new endless exhausting hamster-wheel cycle of washing, cleaning, feeding and crying. She doesn’t know how to deal with these tantrums – the child is a ball of fury and rage – and any of her usual strategies and logic fall on deaf ears. Her threats are hollow because she simply does not have the energy to carry them out. She is on medication now, belatedly self-diagnosed with post-natal depression. She is angry with the father because he sleeps soundly in the spare room, because his work is somehow more important than hers, because his body has not been sucked, stretched and mauled beyond recognition. Anyway, thank God for play-dates and mothers’ clubs and friends in the park, because otherwise this mother, who is truly grateful for the blessing of her daughter, would be driven round the bend . . .’

She pauses here again and takes another sip of her water and wipes her nose. She turns her chair a little, so she is talking to the tree.

‘Then one day, the mother and the toddler are meeting friends in the play area of the local park. She’s pushing the stroller up the crescent, the swings and slides visible through the railings and the bushes. She can feel the stretch in the back of her legs, the fumes from the traffic; the toddler is kicking her legs with excitement, her little red rain boots going up and down, because she too can see the swings and slides, better from her height because she only has the trunks of the bushes to see through – she can probably see her little pals already playing.