Woman, Eating

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

‘Lyds,’ my mum said when I was leaving. She looked out of place in her new room, which was decorated with someone in their eighties or nineties in mind. Mum has for the last couple of centuries looked like she is in her early forties. She still has black hair, just with some streaks of grey here and there. Her eyes are still bright.

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

‘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.’

‘So, where did you come from?’ Ben says as we walk down a dark corridor. I pause. I get this a lot too. ‘Well, I’m from England. But my dad was Japanese, and my mum is half Malaysian.’ He turns around. ‘Oh my god, shit, no, sorry – I mean where did you come from today? Like, are you living in London?’ ‘Oh, yeah,’ I lie. ‘I live just near here, in K

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,’

We only ever got pigs’ blood. This wasn’t because it was the only type of animal blood the butcher had. ‘Pigs are dirty,’ my mum said once. ‘It’s what your body deserves.’ But it turns out that pigs aren’t naturally dirty. Rather, humans keep pigs in dirty conditions, feeding them rotten vegetables, letting the mud in their too-small pens mix with

‘Er, so … I can’t actually see the forms,’ he says. He laughs and looks up. ‘But I’ve marked crosses where you need to sign.’ He brings his head low over the table and squints. ‘Um,’ he says. ‘Here’s one.’ He slides a piece of paper and a pen across the table towards me, his thumb held firmly part way down the page where I need to sign. I can see t