Suddenly, he lost all interest in helping me. He began to lecture me while stealing glances at my breasts. The sight of his slick, bald pate made me feel strange. I had the urge to spew cockroaches all over him. I decided to go to another doctor, a woman with hair dyed auburn. She suggested an IUD.

She asked me to spread my legs wide. The chair I was in made me think of a seat in a rocket ship.

‘The IUD is safe, but it’ll mean more blood,’ she cautioned. ‘One pad may become two.’ Two pads may become three. Three may become four. Four may become five. Etc., etc., etc., like the whining of pesky mosquitoes. The ceiling has begun to resemble a chequered tablecloth.

Shhh… Come on, focus.

Yes. Now I go through a pack of sanitary napkins in a day and a half. My body feels wrung out. What remains is my hollow womb, like a sponge that has been squeezed dry and then stabbed with a needle.

After the IUD was implanted my blood pressure fell dramatically. My head took a disliking to the rest of me. Every time I got up from a chair, it felt like rats were crawling over it, tugging my hair and nibbling my scalp. My body was shaky from carrying chubby little rats in my skull. I came to rely on tiny pills to boost the iron count in my blood. Red pills with a metallic smell. Deep red. Redder than the scar I’d seen on my mother’s wrist.

(Mum, where are you? I’m lonely, I want to sleep next to you… I don’t hear your voice anywhere, why did you come back after so many days with a scar on your wrist? Mum, Mum, don’t be so quiet, talk to me – were you bitten by a wild animal, Mum? Have you become one of those who wander in the jungle?)

Hold on. Where did the rats go?

Weed always makes me drowsy.

—

I wake in the middle of the night, needing to use the bathroom. Eyes half-closed, I get out of bed. I open the door and walk through the living room. Things feel different. The television, the wardrobe, the desk, the chair and its cushions are gone. My house has narrowed to a hallway; both sides are lined by long, white benches. A hospital corridor.

I reach the end of the corridor. A door is ajar and I peek inside. There is a small table. Scissors. Cotton. Gloves. A light becomes ever brighter and more blinding. I spy a nurse holding my mother down, immobilising her. A man – a doctor, I think – is standing beside her open legs, straining. I can’t see what is between those legs. Red. Blue. Watercolours blending into a thick clot. Blood of different colours and consistencies, strong tea, strawberry syrup, jelly. Mum is crying out. Her howls carry the pain of a lonely wolf.