Jenny pulled the van into the driveway, the familiar crunch of gravel under the wheels comforting like an old blanket, and parked next to the hearse in the garage. She remembered a night when she was a teenager, some boy walking her home, God, she couldn’t even remember his name, Jason something. They’d been drinking in one of the hotel bars in Bruntsfield, it was a Best Western now but back then it was independent and a good place to drink underage. Nobody gave a shit about that in the eighties. Anyway, she let Jason kiss her at the front gate, then after a time she let him put his hand up her blouse. Eventually she pulled him along the driveway, his eyes widening, and into the garage. Climbed into the back of the hearse they had then and fucked him, her on top, seeing the amazement in his eyes, feeling the cold metal of the hearse on her knees as she moved up and down on him, fingers spread out on his chest.

It had been a long time since she’d touched a man’s bare chest. She thought about Orla fucking Karl, her Lithuanian toyboy, while Liam dabbed mauve onto the corner of a canvas. Human desire was a bitch. She remembered kissing Craig a couple of days ago and wondered what his chest was like under his shirt these days. She wondered about Liam’s chest, thought about his shy smile. He was getting fucked over by Orla, and Jenny had the evidence. She sat thinking about that.

She went inside still chewing it over. The ground floor was silent, Indy and Archie away home. Light dappled through the stained glass on the staircase as she went up, woodpigeons cooing in the trees outside. She’d resented all this quiet as a teenager but 244now she craved it. People change, their bodies change, their minds change, their selves change. Hannah once told her that all the atoms in your body are replaced by new ones every seven years. If every plank of a ship is gradually replaced, is it still the same ship? What had Liam said to her about his paintings, it wasn’t about the end product, it was about the process of making the work. We are a series of actions, we are our cumulative experience and that’s it.

Dorothy was sitting in the kitchen, Schrödinger in her lap, a piece of paper on the table in front of her. She looked like she’d been crying.

‘Mum?’

Dorothy shook her head, stroked the cat, who stretched his neck.

Jenny sat and placed a hand on her mum’s knee.

‘What is it?’

Dorothy looked out of the window. The skies were blood red bleaching burnt orange at the edges. ‘I need your help.’

Jenny squeezed Dorothy’s knee.

Dorothy took a deep breath and turned. ‘I need you to help me dig up a grave.’