After that, I’d googled “does a baby share mother’s blood,” wondering whether once in my life I’d perhaps had my own, untainted human blood, and the top result that came back read: “The unborn baby is connected to the placenta via the umbilical cord. All nutrition, oxygen, and life support from the mother’s blood goes through the placenta through blood vessels in the umbilical cord to the baby.” I’d felt resentful about this fact, and disappointed. I felt like it meant that I was somehow more my mother and less my father, more demon and less human, evil and sinful before I was even born. I don’t know how a vampire pregnancy really works, though. Whether, for the first nine months of my existence, I swam in rotting waters in an almost-dead womb; whether the womb I have in me, which has been the womb of a vampire since I was turned as a baby, would support life at all. I never got my period, and my mum once told me she barely bleeds anymore and, when she does, she does so irregularly, as if she is perpetually stuck on the boundary between fertility and menopause.

The memory of human blood manifests now as a kind of visceral reaction to seeing people’s veins and their necks. The skin on a neck appears to me as different from the skin anywhere else on a body. It seems as thin and consumable as rice paper wrapped around a sweet. It is too blank compared with skin everywhere else, as though it is asking to have marks made on it, like very expensive calligraphy paper, or cold-pressed Fabriano. Often, I wonder whether the urge I have to make art is the same as the urge to consume and destroy the blankness of a human neck. While at art college, I read that the best paper used by artists in the seventeenth century was made from the skins of lamb fetuses. This skin was soft and absorbent, and had an even texture right across its surface. For a long time, the process of creating art has been linked to the killing of living things. My dad, even, used fine silk stretched across wooden frames in his own work as a painter. Once, when we still had some of his pieces, I looked at the odd geometric shapes he created on a huge sheet and thought about all the silkworms who had had their cocoons torn open before they were able to become moths.