I sit up, faster than I expect to, so I’m bolt upright. It makes Ben jump. And then—“You don’t like me,” I hear myself say, and I feel embarrassed immediately at how childish a thing it is to say. But I feel what I say too: that I am myself a mistake, and that I am a mistake not because of anything positive about Ben and Anju’s relationship, or because—despite my experience of his birth and episodes from his life—Ben and I don’t actually know each other too well and Anju has years and years on me, of being with Ben, of caring for and loving him, but because I’m a demon. I’m piggish. After years of drinking the animal’s blood, I’ve taken on aspects of it. I’m full of death. While I’d felt the edges of life with Ben the other night, perhaps he had felt the opposite in me: a dark, ominous, unfathomable wave—an impenetrable haze.

“It’s not that, Lyd. I do like you, but we have to just be friends,” he says. I nod, but my body feels like it isn’t being controlled by me anymore, but by something or someone else all of a sudden.

Ben struggles up from the beanbag. “Shall I go down and get my laptop or something?” he asks. “We could just stay here and watch a film maybe. I’ll get a duvet and stuff too.”

I shake my head. I dig my nails into the flesh of my palms, until I feel liquid running from the little wounds I make. I try to talk; I try to say no, but I find that my voice doesn’t work. It’s gone. The tiny final remnants of the duck’s blood are being directed only to the most crucial muscles now. My larynx has closed down. I imagine, inside my throat, all the lights turning off, the muscles deflating and spreading out on the nearest flat surfaces. My tongue rests against my bottom teeth. You should eat, a voice says in my head.

Chapter 8

8