She wants me to call her Mother Earth, but she doesn’t seem that maternal to me, more like a mad scientist. Especially in her later years. Some of the primates she dreamt up were ludicrous. The monkey with the giant nose that honks out love songs, or those weird lemurs with six fingers and bat eyes.

The most recent ones she made lanky, and stripped them of most of their hair. When I saw her stitching up little cloaks for them, I thought it was to cover their nakedness. The new clothes fit awkwardly, and the poor things wandered around hapless and unseeing, like Halloween ghosts. It was no use trying to free them; they clung ferociously to their cloth casings, fighting for their own confinement.

‘What material did you use?’ I asked the old lady. The fabric had a gossamer feel, some ethereal quality I didn’t recognise.

She said nothing in response, but threw one of the ghost-sheets over me. The world I’d known faded to nothingness, like lights going down in a cinema house. A shadow of a self appeared on the white cloth—I named it—me—I was trapped in a world of language, captivated. Since then I’ve kept my sheet wrapped tight around me, secure, encompassing, like swaddling.