I had tentatively shaken my head, but I didn’t really understand. My mum continued: “Something else lets us eat, not God. God wouldn’t want to help a demon survive, and that’s what we are, Lyds. We are unnatural, disgusting, and ugly. Look at us; we are just sin.”

Mum then had reached across the table for my hands. “But it’s okay,” she said. “Because we are the same, so we have each other.” And then she said our prayer, the version that suited us, which wasn’t to any higher being but just to the pigs whose blood we drank.

I lay awake all last night. The house, while I’d been growing up, had always been cluttered, full of things that never got thrown away—mail, documents, piles of old rags and old clothes—as well as, before my mum sold it all to pay the rent, my dad’s artwork. The pieces he left behind were framed like they were ready to be hung in a gallery, but were propped up against the walls of Mum’s bedroom instead, the backs of the canvases facing into the room as if the paintings were in fact photographs of his face that my mum couldn’t bear to look at. Now all of that is gone. I barely remember my dad’s art, other than the few pieces viewable online. Last night, I’d felt the emptiness of the house as if it were a presence. I felt it judging me for selling all of my mum’s things, and moving on with my life, and leaving my mother behind, in a home.

In the morning, I packed my belongings—my sleeping bag; my laptop; a few books on art, others on animals that in the past I’d read to try to find similarities between myself and other species, some cookbooks and foraging books; my clothes; my favorite mug; some old sketchbooks—into a large suitcase and my rucksack. I opened the fridge but there was nothing in it, apart from the stubby end of a black pudding sausage wrapped in cling film, which had been in there for god knows how long, as an emergency stash for when we ran out of blood or the butcher’s was closed. I chopped it up into little pieces and carried them in the palm of my hand, like I was offering bread crumbs to birds, while I went around the house one last time. I took little pieces one by one and popped them in my mouth. The black pudding tasted bad, especially so cold from the fridge. And my body couldn’t take much of the egg and oats and pepper that were mixed with the blood to make the sausage; I had to spit most of it out. But it was sustenance, enough to tide me over. Then I left.