"Cat food," she said, with a nervous smile. It seemed straight forward enough - I could clearly see the familiar blue and red tin sitting on the middle shelf, plain as day.

"There it is," I said, pointing at the can. "Right in front of your nose."

Her eyes tightened. She cast her gaze further into the cool dark chasm. "Where?" she said.

Finally, a little exasperated, I got up from the bean bag, reached into the fridge and handed it to her. "Can you see it now?" I asked. She seemed to wake from a very deep sleep, rubbed her eyes, looked once more at the opened, half-empty tin and without a word began feeding Muffet the cat.

This was not the only occasion on which I have been stumped by her seemingly odd behaviour.

Once, when confronted with the top sheet to a bed, she somehow managed to construct the sort of unenterable linen trap which we used to make for fat people at school. When handed a can of Mr Sheen furniture polish, she emptied the entire thing into a room in the vain hope, I later surmised, of killing the mosquitoes. Once I actually found a packet of bacon stuffed like a child’s tooth under my pillow.

Don’t get me wrong. She-who-cooks-and-cleans is essential to the scene around here, much loved and, well, part of the unpolished furniture. I figured the mistake with the bed sheet was because she had never used one, hers being a traditional sort of life lived in a Balinese compound at the top of the track. The cat food and the bacon under the pillow I found a little harder to grasp.

And then one day I saw this in a book about the Balinese psyche. It read: "For the Balinese, there is no clear distinction made between oneself and some other self or between oneself and some other object. There is no clear distinction made between what we would call living things and nonliving things. There is no clear distinction made between what will happen, what has happened and what is happening right now."

Wayan’s world, I surmised, must be a very different place. A French anthropologist called Lucien Levy-Bruhl also wrote about the sometimes abstract Balinese mind: "In the collective representations of [Balinese] mentality," he said, "objects, beings, phenomena can be, though in a way incomprehensible to us, both themselves and something other than themselves."

Perhaps that was it. Wayan’s inability to make the bed came down to this simple fact - it was wasn’t that she didn’t know how to do it, it was because she was living in an altered dimension, one where beds might as well be trees, fridges rice fields and the cushions a flock of blue tailed bee-eaters. Or a sea of spoons. In the parlance of a certain Dr Oliver Sachs, she was The Woman Who Mistook the Cat food for A Gaping Black Hole.

I sat on the balcony contemplating this extraordinary discovery when Victor arrived with mail from the pub, a bottle of Scotch and two glasses. It was 9.30 in the morning. "Mostly bills, I’m afraid," he said, handing over the clear fronted letters.

"Victor," I said. "How long have you lived in Bali?"

"Twenty seven years," he answered, cracking open the bottle. As ever, he had arrived barefoot with a pair of binoculars swinging around his neck.

"Have you noticed anything different about the way people act around here?" I asked.

"My dear boy," he said, filling our glasses to the brim. "What ever do you mean?"

"Oh nothing," I said, slugging back the first of the day. "It was just something I read."