“Better. Much better than before,” the woman says.

“Oh, that’s good.”

“She’s been asking for sweets that I guess are from her childhood.”

“Really?” This takes me aback. I’ve never properly thought about my mum eating human food. It’s not that I haven’t ever thought of her as being a human. I know she once was. What I’ve never considered is how the same body my mum occupies now extends backward through centuries of existence, at the beginning of which it digested not blood but fruits and vegetables and meat and sweets. My mum’s brain, which sits in a body just meters away from me now, must contain the memory of eating whole meals, of the feel of her body processing those meals, of tasting different flavors. “What kind?” I ask.

“I wrote some down,” the woman says, and she takes a piece of paper torn from a notebook out of her pocket and passes it to me. On it are several words I don’t recognize: “kuih talam pandan,” “cendol,” and “pandan kalamae.” The only word I do know is “pandan,” which is a bright green leaf known as the Southeast Asian vanilla. I’ve seen someone on Instagram mix it in powdered form into a kanten jelly, and top it with whipped cream from a can.

“I don’t know how easy they’d be to get hold of but it might be nice for her if you could bring some next time you visit.”

“Can I keep this?” I ask.

“Of course,” the woman says, and then she asks, “Did your mum grow up in Malaysia?”

“Um, yes, mostly. But her dad was British and they moved over to England at some point,” I say, feeling like I’m telling the story of a mythical figure, not my mother. This little bit of information is one of the only things my mum has ever told me about her father; and that together they traveled on a ship—that it was a time before planes.

“And her mum, your grandmother, was Malaysian?”

“Yeah,” I say, but I blush as if I am lying.

My mum, for most of my life, never talked about her parents or the vampire who sired her and, so, for a long time while I was a child, I didn’t think of her as being made at all, but just as having existed forever, somehow, parent- and maker-less.

“My mum was the same as yours. She started wanting treats from her home when she got older,” the woman says now. She smiles.

“Thank you,” I say.

“If you want to reach me personally, to see how she is doing, you can ask for me at reception whenever you visit or call; my name is Kemi,” the woman says.