On my way back to the factory, I go down side roads, looking for other people. I want to eat more. I’m still hungry. I want to try other flavors. I find one around the back of a newsagent’s, a lit cigarette held between his lips, and he doesn’t even have time to say anything, but he looks me up and down and starts walking toward me, smirking. When I bite into his neck, the cigarette stays between his lips for a moment and I inhale and taste smoke and ash through the blood. I munch through the skin and muscle and bone, tasting chips and steak and gammon and soft-boiled eggs with bread soldiers dipped in, and reach a strange knot of flesh that I pull at with my teeth. It’s his tongue and it hangs from my mouth as I drop the man’s body to the floor. The tongue gently lands on his chest and then I say to the body, “Thank you.” I almost say the whole grace my mum and I said to pigs. But I don’t; instead I just listen to my voice ringing out in the silence and it is beautiful.

The factory is quiet when I arrive. Water runs off my clothes and hair in streams. I go quietly to my studio and unlock it, and the door closes behind me.

In the dark, I survey the room. Bits of the new life I’d started to build are here and there. The plant from Ben hanging from the hook, puppet Yaga, my painting, the books I bought under the bridge, the books I stole, clothes on the walls, my bed in the corner. I start packing things into my bag. Just some of the things. Most of them, I leave behind—the Beuys book, the book on vegetables I never read, the book on ethics. I open the Sher-Gil book and take out the cutout picture of Three Girls that I’d replaced between the pages earlier, and look at the girls’ faces. Three beautiful faces I feel like I know; perhaps I’ll go and find them, I think; perhaps they’re waiting for me. I put the picture and the book in my bag, and then pick up puppet Yaga.

For the first time, I feel like I truly own her, and it is because, within Gideon’s memories, is the experience of buying art. In among Washoe baskets, Japanese ink drawings, and Chilean arpilleras is puppet Yaga, bought from an auction house in Russia; and among works by Emin and the Chapman brothers and Goya are paintings by my dad—the thick brushstrokes on silk, the angular black marks, the jagged shapes, now mine.