Without language to describe them, memories linger in the limbo of vaguely recollected dreams, impressions left on the psyche like sketches for an under-painting, upon which more distinctive layers obscure their founding ghosts. Nana, lacking traditional parentage, nonetheless can retrieve nurturing recollections. Contrary to what one might expect from a cast-off commodity, her infancy proved a phase of unremitting care, a succession of nipples comprising her first reminiscences:

• the flush one, barely protuberant from its prepossessing mound, milk like liquid silk, luxuriant and plentiful;
• the pert one, almost rubbery in its teenage-toned resilience, stingy at the start, more generous once primed;
• the bulbous one, aromatic, most conspicuous for its veins, a pillow once its outsized lobe was sapped;
• and lastly Nana’s favourite, quite the mouthful was its pucker, faintly purplish, shaped like a pacifier, HUGE, its yield a steady ebb, its spongy pores secreting an infusion of bittersweet ambrosia;

her daily, nightly feedings fond, apportioned via shifts, her earliest engrammes fostered by a bevy of accommodating wet-nurses.