'When your mother got married she wanted a bouquet of forget-me-nots,' Mr Treever said. 'The florist told her it couldn't be done. Those are wild flowers, not to be cultivated, and they die only an hour after they're picked. But your mother wouldn't have it. So your Grandad had to put her in the horse and carriage, all dressed in white with a veil that trailed on the floor, and ride around the countryside for hours until he found a patch of forget me nots. By the weir they were. He picked an armful, took her to the church, and pushed her down the aisle with his shotgun trained on her back.'

I pictured a forget me not in my head: a small, delicate flower, with soft petals and tiny leaves, a beautiful fragrance forever cradled in my mother's arms. 'What did she look like, Mr Treever?'

'Hugely fat. Like a magnificent white whale. And your father, eyes raised to the vaulted ceiling, tapping the ground expectantly although he must have felt the vibrations as she lolloped down the aisle towards him in that festooned marquee of a wedding dress. He had the grizzled, intent expression of an Ahab that day, with that impressive beard thrown over one shoulder. So they fitted together, you see, my angel. It was a marriage made in heaven, even if they had to be forced to do it. They preferred the raw passion of adultery, you see.'

Mr Treever had read Moby Dick to me over a month of evenings, so I understood his description a little more than usual. His words were always like puzzle boxes to me. Sometimes, when he left me alone in my room to sleep, I woke to realise my hands were scrabbling in my hair as if I could grab hold of the strange images he implanted in my mind and tease meaning from them.

The quick, even ticking on my left that kept me company was replaced by the tinkle of bright music, a little tune, four sounds repeated four times.

'Oil time,' I said. My favourite time.

'Yes, pet.' I heard my bedside drawer squeak open and slam shut. I could picture the bottle of oil in his hands: those long, thin fingers; the rough skin of his square palms.

'But they grew to love each other, didn't they? My mother and father?'

'I wouldn't say love,' Mr Treever mused. 'Not for each other. But they loved you very much, because you were so much like both of them.'

'My mother's size and my father's blindness,' I said. I felt my silk sheet slide from my body, down from my collarbones to my knees. A breeze from the open window on my right caught the hairs on my arms and legs and stirred them into erectness. The skin under my left breast itched. I slid my hand into the fold and scratched.

'Bad lass. You're making it red,' Mr Treever admonished.

'What's red?'

'Sore. Marked. Swollen. Inflamed. Dangerous.'

I pictured my dangerous breast, sucking blood from my vast body like a giant, pulsing parasite. I dropped my hand.

'Good girl.' And then there was a dripping of the oil, slow, deliberate, into my navel until it ran down the mountainside of my waist and soaked into the silk sheet beneath me. 'Oh dear,' Mr Treever said in his soft, slow voice. 'We'll have to change the bed later.'

I waited for the pressure of his hands. When they came there was pleasure, vast serene lakes of pleasure, and I sailed away on them like the giant, beautiful whale I was. 'Tell me about my father,' I sighed.

'He was a spy.'

'A brilliant spy.'

'An incredible spy, for who would think a blind man so capable? But intelligence and ingeniousness runs in your veins. He could climb the blank faces of tall buildings, speak twenty languages, hold his breath for four minutes, and his cane hid a knife as sharp as his wit. For emergencies only, that secret knife, you understand, and he only ever had to use it once. That was the time, the only time, that he was captured.'

'When? Where?'

'You were yet to be born, I believe, and the honeymoon was in full swing on the remote island of Zanzibar, which is a mystical place of aromas and textures, birds and insects, when the enemy came for him and took him by surprise, lifting him from his bed without disturbing your sleeping mother. She awoke to find herself alone and assumed he had left her for one of the dark-skinned beauties of the island, as they all smelled of sunshine and citrus, two things your father couldn't resist. She came home alone, distraught, and could never really forgive him, even when she found out the truth. Doubt had entered her life, you see, duckling. Doubt destroys passion.'

I pictured doubt as a cloud of nibbling flies, crawling over my mother's ears and eyes, crawling into her head and laying their eggs in the meaty creases of her mind. I shuddered at the thought.

'Are you cold, dear heart? Shall we stop?' I heard eagerness in his voice.

'Just a little longer. So what happened to my father? Where did the enemy take him?'

'A Siberian Gulag. All ice and snow and cold, with thin, ripped clothes and torture beyond endurance. But the physical punishment was nothing to a man like him. It was the mental tests that wore him down. Every day he was placed in a room with a puzzle to solve. It was as if they wanted to understand how his mind worked, so that they might try to make more men like him. They couldn't understand that he was a product of his own deficiency. He had grown around his blindness in new, amazing directions.'

My father. In my mind he had tubers of achievement springing from his long wiry beard, and his proud head raised high to spite his own blindness. 'What kind of puzzles?'

Mr Treever's hands rested on my thighs for a moment, then recommenced their rhythmic movements. 'Sometimes as simple as a jigsaw. Sometimes a shape to be made from paper or clay, or the next move on a chessboard. One time they demanded that he tattooed a tree on to the left buttock of a naked woman. He said she never once moved while he worked, and her skin was as cold as marble. But she whispered to him constantly, in a strange language which he thought might be a form of Polynesian, a begging, desperate tone to her musical voice. When he finished the tattoo, they strangled her in front of him. He heard her last choked breaths, and knew at the moment that they had broken him. The next puzzle would be his last.'

The ticking on my left gave way to the chimes once more. I listened to the little tune by which my life was lived. Mr Treever's hands left my body. I heard the rustle of the silk sheet by my knees. 'Leave it,' I said, 'and tell me about the final puzzle.'

He sighed in assent. 'The next day, after a long night of beatings and electrocutions, he was taken to the room as usual and left alone to discover what trial awaited him. He crawled forward and discovered two objects: his cane, a small act of kindness designed to humiliate him, he surmised; and a small metallic object which he identified as a canister. But holding what? For what? Even the most basic of deductions eluded him. He sat down next to both objects and let time pass. He would play games no more.

'Time moved on. Your father grew nervous, despite his resolution not to care. Would they think the canister had defeated him? Would they kill him, or, worse, think less of him? As the hours slipped away, his resolve trembled and cracked. He had to pass the test. He could not let a simple canister defeat him.

'And so he picked it up and examined it.

'He ran his finger over the smooth metal, feeling for any kind of distortion on the surface. None was apparent. The distant sound of doors being opened had his heart racing, and he desperately twisted the metal object, but his efforts were futile. He cried in frustration, rocking on his knees as heavy footsteps echoed down the hall. The door was thrown back, and the bang against the prison wall was followed by the sound of laughter, raucous, mocking laughter from the mouth of the guard.

'Your father had failed. He failed, and he was a destroyed man.'

I pictured my father, shattered, falling into shards of glass on the cold floor of his cell, so sharp in defeat that my dead eyes were cut and bleeding from the thought, the liquid falling over my cheeks. Mr Treever dabbed at my face with his soft, sweet-smelling handkerchief. He spoke on, his voice low, close to my ear.

'But he was not beaten for long. He grabbed his cane, unsheathed his blade, and ran the guard through. Then he picked up the canister and carried it like a baby across the icy wasteland of Siberia, until he found freedom and your mother once more. You had been born by then, a blubbery ball of blind loveliness, and you replaced the canister in his arms. He kept it in the corner of your nursery, as if the two of you were somehow linked.

'They were so proud of you, and they remained devoted to your every need until the day they were killed by that missile strike by the cowardly enemy. Thank goodness you were with me that day, petal, and you've been with me every day since.'

'And do you love me, Mr Treever?' I asked.

'I adore you, angel. Now, can I pull up the sheet?'

I nodded my assent, and enjoyed the sensation of silk sliding easily over my oiled, undulating skin once more.

'Now, what would you like for your dinner?'

'Venison,' I said. 'A whole deer. With a wheel of blue cheese, and three heads of lettuce.'

'As you wish. And then I'll read to you. You're enjoying The Mayor of Casterbridge, aren't you?'

'Very much. And then you must change my sheets,' I said. A bird chirped outside my window. I imagined its song as an arc from its mouth to my bed, a pattern of beauty that flew apart and dissolved into death only a moment after it had been born.

'It's time,' I said. 'Give it to me.'

Mr Treever didn't speak. He knew better than to try to dissuade me. I heard the clunk of metal under the bed, and a moment later the canister was in my hands, cold and smooth, the puzzle that couldn't be solved. I touched it all over, shook it, repeated actions I had done a hundred times before.

'Get out,' I said to Mr Treever. 'Leave me in peace.'

'Of course.' I heard his feet shuffle away from me, then stop. 'Will you, maybe, duckling, give some thought to what we talked about before? About getting up, out of this room, seeing how you like real life?'

'Don't make me angry, Mr Treever,' I warned him, and he crawled off like the blob of jelly with beautiful hands he was.

I had to keep trying. One day the canister would have to give up its secret to me. It would bow to my will, my tremendous will, that bar of iron secreted within my folds of fat. And inside the canister would be something magnificent. I could picture it ' a soft explosion of forget-me-nots, those tiny dots joined by twining, singing leaves and the smell of love upon them, sinking into my skin, making me as magnificent as my mother forever more.

Mr Treever would tell me the story again tomorrow. Every day I came closer to understanding.

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