Woman, Eating

My mum coached me on how to lose friends when I was a teenager. She taught me how to drift out of other people’s lives so that they eventually stopped contacting me and forgot I existed. She taught me how to appear boring to friends, depending on what they were interested in, or how to act clingier than I really was so that the other person would b

‘You must have been influenced by him as an artist.’ Gideon says this as a statement, not a question. ‘It’d be interesting to see your work.’ ‘I suppose I have been, yes,’ I say, feeling guilty again that I haven’t made any work for such a long time. ‘Were you close?’ Gideon asks. ‘Actually, he died before I was born.’

Amrita Sher-Gil. I take this last one off the shelf and it falls open at the middle page, which has a picture of her painting Three Girls on it.

I realised that demon is a subjective term, and the splitting of my identity between devil and God, between impure and pure, was something that my mum did to me rather than the reality of my existence. Still, though, after a lifetime of eating just pigs’ blood, I feared eating anything else, especially human, in case I developed a taste for it, and

felt that I knew – like really knew, as though I had a sense about these things – that the girls depicted were vampires, and that they were still out there in the world, looking exactly the same as when Sher-Gil painted them in 1935, and that I would one day meet them. The painting, I decided when I was a child, depicted the three girls quietly wai

There’d been nothing in our house that we’d had just because my mum liked it; nothing that stood as a memento of her human life, her life in Malaysia. Everything was about convenience, not her taste or personality.

I had also thought that she would like Olafur Eliasson’s piece, The Weather Project, for which there was a huge round mirror strung up to look like the setting sun in the same space, and dry ice to create a kind of false heat haze. But Mum said that she didn’t really miss the sun.

I open the Bernice Bing book. I look at her piece Velasquez Family. I don’t know how she does it. I want to paint like this. There are people in this strange painting, one with a green face and alarmingly red eyes, another like an animal with multiple limbs drawn in black paint and a blank white face, and a woman by a window, her face red, her hair

You think they won’t notice you not ageing? When they are thirty and you are still just how you look now? When they are forty, fifty? Any friendships are a lie from the start,’