I feel small, like I’ve been beaten down by the city. My outings have been fruitless. I have none of the things that connect me to my life lived in Margate or my mum – only my belly button, and the little scar on my neck – and I have no food. In the dark, my stomach rumbles loudly.

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 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 te

‘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

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

Still, I like to push my body towards its limits. Or, rather, I like to pretend my body has limits. I like to feel the pain of hunger and imagine that the next step after that pain is death.

When I dream, it is because the human half of me is asleep. In those moments, my demon part is awake and, usually, I feel something beyond any human emotion – something far beyond human rage, beyond human hunger – but, since my human body is paralysed by sleep, my demon half can’t act on its feelings.

Crimson Orchard recommends that residents have as many of their belongings – photos, books, furniture even, any personal artefacts – arranged around their rooms as possible, because old things with memories already associated with them encourage the formation of new memories, apparently. But Mum still ended up having too much stuff. She essentially