I’m back at the studios just after ten. It doesn’t sound like there’s anyone else here. My footsteps are the only sound in the building. I use my key to open the door to A14, my new home, and slip in. My door makes a loud clanging sound. The room smells of something unfamiliar. 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.

Chapter 2

2

There is a plant called the ghost pipe, because it is ghostly white, almost blue. Were you to cut open this flower and study it, you’d find no chlorophyll inside. It can grow in the dark, under the cover of fallen leaves and undergrowth in forests, under soil. It doesn’t need to photosynthesize, because it is a parasite. It uses fungal networks to suck energy from photosynthesizing trees. Its roots look like clusters of tiny fingers that grope toward and connect with huge white webs of fungus that in turn connect with the thick roots of trees.

I don’t know where the human and demon in me connect, whether there are roots that sprout from the demon and reach for and attach onto the human, or vice versa. Both live because the other exists. The demon survives off the blood my human body digests. And the demon, in turn, keeps my human heart very slowly pumping—at least, this is what my mum told me when I was young. When I imagine this, I see a little shadowy creature with feeble arms manually pumping the organ with bellows. Owing to the work the demon does to keep blood circulating, the human in me goes on living, and I retain some of the traits my human father passed down to me. The way I hunch slightly, my shoulders protectively pointing forward rather than back, is a posture that, according to my mum, derives from some deep-held insecurity that was also my dad’s. I think like him, apparently; he was a perfectionist, fixating on topics he found interesting, struggling to engage with topics he did not. My anxiety is his, my shyness, my clumsiness. I often think of my demon traits—my sharp teeth; the fact that, now I am done growing, now I am an adult, I won’t age any further; my coldness; my hunger; my irritability and hot temper—as being the only things I received from my mother. But, also, I’ve inherited some of her humanness too; it’s just harder to separate from the demon.