I am standing at the sink, peeling potatoes, so an old man with no teeth can suck them, mashed, through his naked, baby-pink gums.

When I stop the snicker-scrape, stand with knife in hand, I hear the opening of the bureau in the dining room, the drag of the drawer, that mahogany-fronted drawer with its unpolished back and broken handle, the repository for birth certificates, marriage lines, bank-books, passports. I hear the shuffle of slippers, mumbling, fumbling, searching for himself.

I know who I am. I am a woman, standing at the sink, peeling potatoes.

I have a daughter in Boston, pureeing carrots, learning how to be a mother, not a daughter. But she’s also Sally, and a wife, a teacher, a creator of intricate doodles while she talks on the telephone, a sucker of long hair, a secret tuneless singer.

I’ve cut a perfect long peel, right around the potato. It would form a ring, but it’s broken where the knife went in, broken before I started crafting it.

I have a husband, colour-blind, with a wart under the hair on his neck, but he is a partner now, and a boyfriend to a woman who takes him out to eat in restaurants – penne pasta, Arborio rice, potatoes dauphinoise. She’s Anna. She has long legs and a briefcase, thin nose. She’s a lawyer. She’s a wonderful, exotic lover. (And I am a woman with thighs like mashed potatoes.)

Oh Dad, leave my drawer alone. Don’t scatter my life on the floor like trodden leaves. You won’t find her in there. That’s just words on paper. She’s ashes in a jar, in the ground. Shall I show you the certificate, prove it to you?

There’s an eye in this potato. I incise it with the point of my knife. I am a surgeon (no, not really, but I am a woman with a hidden imagination).

Now Dad, he has a fantastic imagination. He thinks he’s Picasso, paints his bedroom walls with shit, says it’s only early work, his Rose period. How can he remember Picasso, but not know who I am?

If a moth flapped its wings in a distant forest, but the scientist forgot it was called a moth, would it ever be recorded? Would it just flap on, waiting? Or would it not be really there at all?

I am meals on wheels. I am the changer of adult-sized nappies, wiper of shit from a bony arse, guardian of the locked front-door. I am a “carer”.

I am reaching for a second potato, large, lumpy, but the white flesh inside is still green. I don’t have a third, because I’d peel it as well, and eat it.

I am a woman standing at a sink, peeling green unripeness, exposing the smaller useful nugget of white inside.

I am not a very good potato peeler. The knife slips and I peel a perfect long strip of thumb. Some of me seeps out, wells, trickles down the sink.

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