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

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.

‘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.’

My mum had gum disease when she was fully human and, gradually, over the last couple of centuries, her teeth have, one by one, fallen out. The last tooth, a sharp and pointed molar, came out while she slept one night, when I was around twenty, and was there on her pillow in the morning – the last semblance of her demon body, she said, that God had

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

I think I realised quite a long time ago that the demon isn’t necessarily linked to God; it’s not the antithesis of human, or of the soul. It is just a different animal, which has a different diet to humans. I’ve heard of a crustacean that eats just the corneas of sharks, until the sharks are blinded, and butterflies in the Amazon that drink the

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.

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,’

I arrive at the Otter and the front door is closed and there is no one to let me in. This is what I always fear about arriving at new places. Being stuck outside. I stand as close to the wall as possible so I’m in shade.