Jenny’s phone vibrated in her pocket and she pulled it out. Kenny from The Standard. He never called. Always email, a quick back and forth about her column, then copy submitted on deadline.

She stood up and walked towards the door. ‘I need to take this.’

She pressed reply in the hallway. ‘Kenny.’

‘Hi, Jenny.’ His tone of voice was not good.

‘Copy’s not due for a couple of days.’

She walked to her childhood bedroom, now redecorated as a minimalist guest room, pine bed, stripped floorboards, narrow shelf holding the overspill from Dorothy’s book collection.11

She heard a sigh down the line. ‘There’s no easy way to say this, we’re cancelling your column.’

‘What?’

‘You know what it’s like here, Marie Celeste meets the Titanic. The numbers don’t add up.’

She wasn’t surprised but she wasn’t prepared either. Everyone she knew who’d started as a journalist at the same time as her had wangled an exit strategy, gone into PR like Craig, or teaching or consulting, or even politics. A career in journalism was death by a thousand cuts, and here was the final knife in her guts.

‘When?’

‘Immediately.’

‘Kenny, I need this, it’s the only regular gig I have left, you know that.’

She fingered a book on the shelf, pulled it out. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. She remembered seeing it around the house growing up, a flower blooming from a spanner on the front cover. She’d never read it.

‘I’m sorry,’ Kenny said.

‘I can’t pay the rent as it is.’

‘Not that it’s any consolation, but I’m getting the bullet soon as well.’

‘You’re right,’ Jenny said. ‘That’s no consolation.’

She walked to the window and looked out at the back garden. Archie was tending the pyre, which had reduced to a low pile of smouldering remains. Black and white and grey, ash and bone, Archie raking round the edges, dust sifting onto the body tray below. Jenny saw charred blobs where Dad’s shoes had been and wondered about his feet. Size eleven and thin, the second toe longer than the big one, something she and Hannah both inherited.

‘We’re slashing across the paper,’ Kenny said.

‘Freelancers first.’

‘You know how it is.’12

No contracts, easy to terminate at zero cost. Just shift the work of filling pages in-house, make the subs who are left write the columns and reviews and everything else, and if they don’t like it some bright wee sod from journalism school will do it for nothing to get their name in the paper.

Out of the window Jenny saw Schrödinger stalking along the hedge line, his eye on a woodpigeon roosting in a bush. He leapt for it, but the bird fluttered to the top of the hedge and looked down at him. Schrödinger was nonplussed, life was all a game.