Imagine if your Wikipedia page described you as a “segmented or parasitic worm” with “two head segments” and “suckers at both ends”. You might turn to the Bible, instead – here is the Book of Proverbs on leeches: “The horseleech hath two daughters, crying, Give, give. There are three things that are never satisfied, yea, four things say not, It is enough: The grave; and the barren womb; the earth that is not filled with water; and the fire that saith not, It is enough.”
The daughters are the leech’s words (though some interpret the daughters as the suckers): “Give, give.” Within this damp, humid, leech-infested jungle is the surprisingly sweet idea of the words you say as daughters you have given birth to.
A leech bit my daughter’s head once: it wanted to swallow, not pronounce, the daughter. She was eight months old and arrived home in her carrier after a walk in bushland near my husband’s parents’ house. He tried to tip her gently on to the bed without waking her, then suddenly called to my mother, who was staying with us, to come – and to me to stay away.
Of course, I hurtled myself at the room he was in, and there, on my daughter’s round, soft head, was a large black leech. We didn’t want to pull it off in case it took some of her head with it, in case it made her bleed – you never forget the first time you see your child’s blood (in my case, a nail-clipping accident). He ran to the kitchen and grabbed salt, and we salted the leech, which writhed off her head.
A leech attached itself to my leg when I was 11 and standing in a lake on school camp. When I screamed and burst into tears, the camp counsellor said there were no leeches in the lake. But I knew what I had seen. The leech, the leech: 32 segments, nine pairs of testes, a genital pore, no feet. That morning on the way to the camp, I had intense deja vu: I felt strongly as if several seconds, one after the other, were something I had dreamed. When I try to remember my premonition now, I see only a bright outdoor space and a net.
William Wordsworth wrote a poem about leech-gatherers: the people who collected the leeches used in hospitals. It begins like this terrible, unpredictable American week is starting: “There was a roaring in the wind all night / The rain came heavily and fell in floods” and continues, as we hope it might continue: “But now the sun is rising calm and bright / The birds are singing in the distant woods.”
We are all leeches now. Writhing, trying to work out what it is that is walking down the path towards us: what is its chemical smell, can we sense warmth? One sucker precariously attached to some flimsy reality – a wet leaf, a slippery rock – the other one pointed at the future. Intense deja vu. But it can’t be real. Can it?
• Helen Sullivan is a Guardian journalist. She is writing a book for Scribner Australia
• Do you have an animal, insect or other subject you’d like to see profiled by this columnist? Email helen.sullivan@theguardian.com
