I rise early and walk to the British Museum. The shopkeepers open their doors, heaving signs and boxes out onto the street, their hair untidy, their faces still puffy. The cafés are already open. I’ve never managed to beat them to it; the waiters are always smudged with cream and tomato sauce and coffee by the time I’m out in the streets. It’s a Friday morning, the sky is grey, and thin frost lies on the roads and pavement. My cheeks, when I move my hand up to touch them, feel cold and soft.
 
Nevertheless, I’ve begun to sweat by the time I reach the Museum. There is a prickling in my armpits. A line of school boys makes their way inefficiently through the great gates. I take off my beanie as I enter the hall.
 
The Elgin Marbles are in their own room. A few people move from one rock to the next, spending the same amount of time with each, and then shuffle down the line. I do it too, sidestepping along, attempting to see them as they were in Greece – if they’d been touched, lain against, eaten near. hey feel cold to me – different to the way my cheeks are cold, which is due to some process of exercise and blood I do not understand. The Marbles are out of context. No one has touched them, awoken them, used them, for a long time. Any properties they held are dormant. I begin to read the little note cards next to them; someone once told me they’re called tombstones.
 
‘The centaur’s head is in Wurzburg – South Metope V’
‘Iris was winged – West Pediment N’
‘Oreithyia wears sandals with thick soles, but her toes are missing. The torso of her son (figure P) is displayed in a showcase in an adjoining room – West Pediment Q’
 
Why is the centaur’s head in Wurzburg, when its body is here in London? Why is this mother made to rest in this hall, while her son’s mutilated chest is in another? Who took Iris’ wings?
 
I moved to London a few months ago.
 
I’d brought very little – not enough. I assumed I would buy new things when I got here, to suit the new person I would become. But I still find myself thinking about a dress I wore every day in the years after high school, a black shift I got from a secondhand shop. Its scalloped neckline, decorated with embroidery. I’d worn it so much, with sandals when I was going to the shops, with doc martens in the winter, and, when I went to parties, with my stained and beloved sky blue suede mules. As I packed to move, I looked at that dress and thought: I’m changing. This is a relic of my past life and I don’t need it anymore. It’s covered in lint and I’ve worn it into the ground. I put it in a bag and donated it to a charity shop. I’m sure some other 19-year-old picked it up.
 
But you don’t just become someone who lets things go. I miss that dress, and when I go into the big shops in Oxford Circus to find something similar, nothing fits the same. Nothing feels as adaptable or as unassumingly glamourous. I can’t bring myself to spend £70 on these imitations.
 
I enter the Department of Asian Antiquities. There are so many of them. I look in display case after display case, attempting to have an emotional reaction to one of the pieces of pottery, to a bronze figurine, a necklace. Here are Chinese compacts with broken mirror fragments still in place, here are painted Islamic ceramics – from someone’s home, probably – here, a child’s clay toy, a Tibetan prayer wheel, maybe it belonged to an old lady, maybe she swung it when at rest in the evenings, after a long day’s cooking and milking and mothering. A giant painted Buddha sits on a pylon. I see a pair of gold earrings. They look like ancient jellyfish; I imagine them bobbing up and down as their owner moves through their work. Another pair swing across my vision, a silver pair attached to my mother.
 
What I see most when I try to remember my mother are her hands, strong-jointed though lean, pushing a flatbread around a circular, flat iron pan. She pushes it in the way women sewing at machines push fabric forward as they cycle the pedal with their feet: firm and confident, brusque. A push around, then pausing until the centre of the bread puffs up away from the heat, and then another push, before she flips it over. Her hands, dusty with flour. When cooked, she whips it from the pan, and on goes another, and another. I eat two or three dripping in ghee and honey, which runs down my fingers, wrist, and arm into my t-shirt. She keeps going, and I leave to walk around the garden, to read my fantasy books, to pat our old dog.
 
 
She wore earrings like it was her job; for tradition, with pride, in beauty. Her lobes were so stretched I could fit my little finger in them. I think she must have been hung with silver since she was a small girl.
 
I prefer wearing gold to silver and wondered how I would look wearing this pair in front of me. I could find some, some high-street version maybe, and I’d look a little like her.
 
‘I’d love to see you in those’ – a voice speaks behind me, close. I turn to see a museum attendant, smiling at me. I mumble something, perhaps even a thanks, and walk quickly out of the Asia department and down the staircase, around the circular structure on which is carved, ‘Her Majesty 2000,’ and out into the air.
 
Back home I worked in a department store. I did well there. I spritzed a bluebell perfume. I would ask people if they wanted to try, and then I would spray the air before them and say, ‘One moment, it must settle into the air.’ We’d both pause with breaths held, and then I’d say again ‘Please,’ and gesture for them to walk through, which they would, and we’d both sigh. ‘It smells so different on each person,’ I’d say, and, ‘It suits you so much, you smell like a flower fairy,’ or ‘So earthy and fresh on you,’ or, ‘You smell like a French girl,’ or whatever it seemed the person would like. I had a knack for telling them the right thing, the best adjective for who they wanted to be. They seemed to think I knew what I was talking about. If I didn’t like a person’s demeanour, or if I honestly thought it smelled awful on them, I would sometimes say nothing.
 
I look after a baby now. I push the baby around Primrose Hill, and people let me go in front of them, smiling. Sometimes I’ll sit at a particular café. The first time I met the waiter there he held the door wide and said, ‘Sit in the sun, darling, I will bring you whatever you want.’ He came back out with an oat latté. ‘What a beautiful kid,’ he said, and looked into my face to see if it was mine. Sitting out there, I sketch strangers in the sun and the baby sleeps, little face shaded by muslin. My hands are dry from washing dishes, marked with little cuts of unknown origins. The waiter always brings me an almond biscuit.
 
One day at the baby’s house, their mother said she was considering cutting her hair much shorter and dying it pink. She recommended a salon in Hampstead if I needed mine done. The last time I’d had a professional haircut, the stylist had tied on their apron and sat me in a chair. They’d misted water onto my head, and then taken out a paddle brush, settling down to the task of pushing through my knots. They kept murmuring, ‘It’s so thick, it’s very thick.’ I left looking the same, a waste of money. Now I cut my hair myself, just a little bit at the ends every two months, chasing the fast-breeding split ends. Sometimes, riding fierce emotions, I’ve cut it short just under my ears, or sliced the hairs that sit across my forehead.
 
A person gives away their energy with their hands. They use them, or they don’t. They use them in cooking, in kneading, they prick them with needles or allow them to be coated in grease or slime from a drain; they dig about in the dirt, they hit their own thumbs with a hammer, they attack, they grope, they place them inside a person, they touch someone gently, they close lids on dead eyes, they hold a pencil, they burn them on a pot, they change a child’s nappy.
 
Hestia, Selene, dancing figures without heads or hands, a man all in yellow.
 
Last week I bought a comb from a small shop that sells very expensive things. The comb was the cheapest one they had, but it still cost a chunk of rent. It’s long, about 20cm – slim, conical teeth. It is made of some beautiful wood, a deep brown. The shopkeeper explained to me the name of the tree it comes from, though I can’t remember what it was now. They said it would be best for my hair, it being long and thick with a tendency to frizz. ‘Brushing your hair wet, with a bristle brush, is not good,’ they told me. ‘It weakens the hair and causes it to snap. This comb will allow you to rough out the knots that form as it dries.’
 
The comb gives my damp hair a nice look, indented all over, piecey. I bought a cheap bottle of olive oil, and I’ve been running it through the ends. My hair needs a lot of hydration, but does not respond well to weight. It often feels prickly, and if I hover my hand a centimetre above where it lies, I feel a strange sensation, like it’s alive and vibrating with anger or excitement.
 
Back in my rooms, chased by something from the museum, I draw fast in pencil. An abject torso, a severed wing, a flightless goddess, a man’s head dislocated from the part of him that could run and draw arrows, defend itself. They sit in the middle of the page. The beings I have drawn are obviously missing parts but their lines are all sealed off. They have no chance of being reunited.
 
What I feel when I wake that next day is a stiffness in my lower belly, an ache and pull I recognise. It has already blown up so big, stretched out at least fifteen centimetres from its usual resting place. All softness is gone, it’s like thick rubber stretched over a smooth rock. I rub and hold it, which sometimes helps. There is no blood yet; it usually arrives the day after my cramps begin. I go to the bath. I quarter-fill the bathtub with hot water and doze off, safe, having heard my housemate leave as I hobbled from my room, bent over and holding my stomach like there is a growing life in it.
 
I’d so far avoided pregnancies. I tried to stay away from men, generally. But they would approach me on the street.
 
‘I want to see if you taste the same.’
 
They would follow me around, asking me what on Earth I was.
 
Once down an alley in the town I grew up in, a man pushed me against a wall. He stuck his hand up my skirt, running it along my thighs and over my pubic mound, breathing into my ear, ‘You like this, don’t you.’ Another man came to the end of the alley. ‘This guy! Move along, Pat, you’re late as it is.’ Pat, as I now knew him, leaned in and bit hard on my bottom lip. He let me go, and joined the other man. They strolled away. I tore a piece of paper from my sketch book and dabbed at my mouth, trying to stop blood. It just kept coming.
 
I ease my body further into the bath. A viscous globule of red and cream has exited me early. It moves through the water.
 
I go to sleep and dream of jumping in and out of a salty ocean. I wake and find the sun has set but the clock on my wall tells me it is only four-thirty. I eat an apple. I spit some seeds into my palm. I open my window and throw them out into the street, where they land on the rim of someone’s hat. I hope that person finds them later and wonders where the seeds have come from. I put a pad in my knickers and go back to sleep.
 
In the morning – blood everywhere. Much more than usual. My bed is flooded with deep red, and paler pink, and crusted brown. My stomach has settled from a deep gnaw to occasional cramps. A large clot passes its way outside of my body and settles down to warm my labia. The pad has fallen out into the bed.
 
I kick my legs about to find it, my calf hitting the spongy, blood-soaked cotton. I reach under the duvet to grab it, and see something else.
 
Just beyond the pad is a small thing, maybe eight centimetres long, covered in blood and white discharge. I take it into my hands. It is heavy, made of a grey metal. A figure.
 
I lay it in the sink. Run warm water over the little body. Arms appear, stretching into a yawn. I rub at the figure; what I have found is a tiny, precious little baby. They open their eyes, and bring their silver fists up around their head. Baby starts out a loud, bellowing cry, much too big a noise for such a small chest. I pick them up out of the sink, and rush back to my room, holding them as carefully as I can. I find a soft flannel, and swaddle them in it. They put their tiny thumb in their mouth, and seem happier. They suck, looking at me out of their beautiful, shiny eyes.
 
I open up my sketchbook, ripping out the last page I drew on. I make a little box by trimming and folding the card, tucking in corners. I imagine Baby will be crying a lot, but very luckily it is good quality paper, meant for painting with watercolours. I turn over the little box, and find that the limbs I’d drawn on the card the other day have, with my folding, formed the shape of a cupped palm, one little finger pointed outward. Perfect.
 
I rip open the blood-soaked duvet and place red goose feathers in the box to make a nice cushion. My little baby sleeps now, so I lift them gently into the tiny bed. They open their mouth and make a sort of contented clicking noise, before settling back down. I reach for my nearby glass of water, and drink from it, watching over them as they sleep.