In fact, I am my own subject most of the time. I crouch in my apartment, watching myself in the mirrors I’ve amassed over the years; round and square, bevelled and wood-framed, mould-speckled, acid-etched. Mirrors, and unsold paintings of myself as I gaze into them, are stacked against the white walls. I’m fanatical about those walls. I sponge them as gently as you would a lover’s back, and annually I paint them white again.

Of course, it doesn’t keep out the noise that filters through – dull fights, dull routine fucking on weeknights, the sound of supermarket bags hauled onto a counter, a news reporter’s schooled concern. But it makes me feel clean.

On days I can’t paint, I look at my old works. I stare into my own painted eyes, dark and suspicious. I can study the sag in my breast or the length of my inner thigh, smooth like the belly of a fish, for hours. Sometimes I paint myself with a cock instead of a cunt; a modest, workmanlike sort of member, nestled content on pert testes or cradled, erect, in the palm of my hand.

They are not, I have been told, commercial works.

‘You’ve got something,’ said the owner of my last gallery as she was letting me go. ‘But can’t you bring me a pretty girl, or at least a dog? Let’s face it, Tracey, old pudenda doesn’t sell.’

That night I’d sat on my tiny balcony among the dead plants, wearing a worn-out T-shirt and nothing else. I stroked the fur of my old pudenda, soothing her wounded pride. A man looked up from the street. I didn’t close my legs. He dismissed me with a wave of his hand and moved on.

It was a beautiful drive, the hills a lush, near-toxic green in the late-spring heat. I wound the window down, listening to the radio lose reception, turning it up louder and louder as the static grew, voices punctuating it less and less frequently: baby, why, love, your heart, I would die. The wind whipped my hair into my face and I liked that too, the sting of it, the quivering lines across my vision as the road hurtled towards me.

The car had been my mother’s, and like her its complaints were loud and frequent. But I loved it anyway. It was solid, heavy, reliable; I had no desire to trade it in for something new and flimsy, whose lifespan would be short by design.

Drive carefully, Leonard had said. And watch for roos – they’re everywhere up there. I’d rolled my eyes. It was so like Leonard to think everyone was attempting to sabotage him, wildlife included.

The paintings’ owners lived among beautiful hills. The house was built at the top of one, surrounded by rolling lawns and gardens that were obnoxiously successful. Along the drive were rosebushes groaning under their own gorgeous weight.