Ash & Bone

For Graham

Good friend and sound adviser for more than twenty years

Don't come round reminding me again How brittle bone is

Billy Bragg: 'Valentine's Day is Over'

By your late thirties the ground has begun to grow hard.

It grows harder and harder until the day that it admits you.

Thomas McGuane: Nobody's Angel

The first girl dead, there wasn't any choice.

Her friend – her sister, or was that all part of the pretence? – standing in the corner of the room, naked, one arm across her breasts.

Wanting to know what she'd seen but knowing. Reading it in her eyes. The thin stream of urine that ran down her leg.

'Oh, Christ!' he'd said.

Then someone: 'I'll take care of it'.

And when he looked again she wasn't there. Neither of them were there.