1. my real mother (you've never met her, by the by) my real mother went crazy a long time ago. like i said, you've never met her; even i've only met her the once. tore her address out of the pleather-bound address book belonging to my adopted-mother (the one you know and always thought was the one who birthed me but then i lie all the time, you always thought i was a natural redhead too. you never questioned the almost-black eyebrows, just trusted me.) and caught the next bus, only an hour later, having bundled my favourite possessions into an old sports-brand rucksack (my lingerie, the disgusting tangerine taffeta prom dress i found in an oxfam store, and a copy of irvine welsh's "trainspotting"). i found her, hermit-lonely, in her one-bedroom inner-city apartment (she sent me back home that evening, better head back the way you came maria baby, no room at the inn, my name for seventeen-and-a-half years not being maria but it's what she would have called me had she kept me) and her inner-city apartment was like some nasty nightmare house of mirrors, with all these charcoal circus clowns lost inside - making balloon animals and hating their big feet and binging on custard pies then throwing up and looming face-painted and terrifying of my reflection.

2. "i shoulda never fucked your father," she said. she looked kinda like frida kahlo, with her intense ugly-beauty and great caterpillar of one eyebrow. "he had the hairiest, strongest arms i've ever seen, and he smelt like roadkill or something. sex is nasty. it's sweaty and smelly and ugly. it was like fucking a bear."

"you're a bear child," my real mother said to me. "ugly with your monobrow and hairy body," she said. "you will not be beautiful no matter how many times you dye your hair, no matter how many tubes of lipstick you buy."

"when you get home, wipe away your mascara," my real mother said to me. "look at your eyelashes like they are thorns. think of your face, your body like a rose, some wild-growing rose. all your thorns. humans are ugly. flawed."

i took a different bus and stopped by the m.a.c counter on the way home, drowned out my real mother's words in paint pots, lipglass, beauty marked and seedy pearl and clarity and hush. i made a silent promise, i am never going to use the word ugly again.

3. like i said, my real mother went crazy a long time ago and she thinks she is a poet or something because ever since i went there that day she has sent me letters, hundreds of them, and they read like drug-poetry or just plain hallucinations. or the way hallucinations would read if people always wrote them down, anyway. my adopted mother reads them over my shoulder and she tuts like "it was a real bad idea to go see that crazy lady, you know that, maria?" ever since i went there that day i can't stop thinking of myself as maria even though i'm trying to tell myself that's not my name, not really. maria is a hairy goblin kid my real mother has hallucinated. she's not me, i'm not her.

i tut too and say to my adopted mother, "i don't have a clue what this psycho is talking about," and crumple the letters into the bin. i don't even have to sneak down in the middle of the midnight to find them again because i know them by heart the moment i read them. i can't stop thinking about them. because, somewhere hidden and dark deep down, i guess i know exactly what that psycho is talking about.

4. the first letter my real mother sent me after i went there that day talked about this dream she used to have, about this monkey. at least i think it was a monkey, she wrote, it looked somewhere between the stages of evolution if evolution even happened because it was sorta human too, with this great crooked human nose like a smashed gravestone and cigarette breath.

anyway, this monkey said to her "i bought a puppy yesterday." and then most of the rest of the dream would be this monkey telling her about the puppy, about how cute it was with its big eyes and funny little tail wagging nine to the dozen all the time, a cute happy little puppy.

eventually i'd get tired of hearing about this dog, my real mother wrote, i never even liked dogs anyway, so i'd walk away. and i'd turn around at the end of the pavement to see him stood there, this great misogynist hairy monkey clutching a hershey's bar in his hands.

5. my real mother has written to me four hundred times i'd guess so far. i remember the letter she sent me about the teenage girls who hung out on the pavement outside her apartment, teenage girls with shaved heads and angry-looking drawn eyebrows with nose piercings, sucking black lollipops, slumped on the pavement getting grit and dust all over the arse of their acid-wash jeans.

i remember the letter she sent me about hookers buying underwear and fishnets from petrol stations, hookers with parrot beaks and rabbit ears, dressed like tropical fruit girls but their skin sunken and the colour of bones. that one hooker she saw who would steal chocolate, milky way bars i think, but pay for the tights.

i remember the letter she sent me about how she wished she was an artist. i want to paint a triptych, my real mother wrote, a triptych of some pretty model girl wearing a shift dress with honey-blonde hair holding a tiny lamb like a piece of cloud in her arms, that would be one picture. and the other two paintings would be that model eating the little lamb, tearing into the carcass, her teeth huge and bloody and her pretty face all twisted and animal like, her eyes crazed, veins pulsing violet and blue in her neck trying to push out of her skin.

6. my real mother wrote to me to tell me how much she loves pictures of rapists in newspapers. they're her favourite, she said. rapists with their acne and dirty hair and those eyes, those eyes like giant peach pits of black glass.

this was the one time i wrote back to my real mother. told her about the dream from a long time ago - the dream i'd pushed deep down far down, down into the sleepy monster cave somewhere inside me. the dream i'd pushed deep down but carried the knowledge of with me always. i dreamt of two boys, i wrote to my real mother, two boys dressed like angels, with great swan-coloured feathery wings. they had bloody hands, i wrote to my real mother, all this blood like paint on their hands. and later in the dream they were clutching this doll and just staring out at me. their eyes, i wrote to my real mother, their eyes were the scariest fucking thing of all, like they wanted to be angry and crazy but they knew it wasn't the right time. that they could be angry and crazy later and maybe get away with it.

my real mother wrote back to me, just this real short letter: little maria one day when i learn to paint i will paint you, i will paint you real pretty with your small nose and high cheekbones, i will paint you dewy skinned and surrounded by flowers, the most lovely coloured flowers, i will paint you dressed in all these jewels the size of globes and platform sandals and fashionable plaid scarves, my little maria

i will paint you screaming