Leith - an obsessed transvestite has been involved in a fifteen year relationship with her lover, jelly and Jelly’s dead mother, whose spirit inhabits a large fig tree in their garden beneath which Jelly’s placenta is buried. Consumed by jealousy for the mother, and by a primordial urge to possess Jelly - a slippery and seemingly passive drama lecturer - Leith’s world is cracked wide open by the arrival of Jelly’s student - the exotic beauty, Hart Sommerstein. Later when Jelly arrives home, she accuses him of having an affair. In a shattering confrontation, they spill the horror of their relationship, and in her frenzy to destroy the mother’s dominance, Leith slays the tree with an ax, which unexpectedly frees Jelly.