‘So we want to know what totally common thing you’ve never done,’ the voice on the radio was saying. The voices of people in their early to mid-twenties, death as far-off an idea for them as the eventual heat death of the universe itself. A shame, in other words, but not a real issue: not as bad as locking yourself out of your apartment, say.

She herself had been younger than this drivetime DJ when the terror first hit her – hit her with a series of surprise blows. First Auntie Pam had died and Sal had writhed about from 11 p.m. till the sun came wandering up into the sky, unable to believe that a mile away Pam was spending her last night on earth. That this time tomorrow her bones would have turned to ash and that, every day that dawned for the rest of the world, she would not be there to know what was happening. Then a girl in sixth form had died – of leukaemia, like Pam – and the teachers had sobbed at the back of the hall in Assembly. And John Smith the Labour leader had been taken off by a heart attack, and when the news came through Dad had stopped the car and rested his head on the steering wheel for a long time, and later applauded when they did tributes to him on the news.

On these occasions everyone else had been sad, like Sal was, but only because they would miss that specific person; because it was tragic that they specifically were gone. Whereas Sal, each time, had felt her fibres fill with ice. If that person’s dead then eventually we all will be.

The phone pulsed: ‘Steffi’. Sal glanced at the message. No, it wasn’t news; just more chat, more ‘comparing notes’. She turned the phone face down on the seat. The traffic lumbered forward, stopped. Forward again, stopped again.

And then Dad himself had gone. The night before the funeral was like Pam all over again. It was impossible that there would be cricket matches in the summer, and the Edinburgh festival, and those cloud-filled changeable days he loved – they would come round again and again, without him. At the moment the curtain closed around the coffin, and she knew it would slide into the furnace, she hadn’t been able to look. She’d heard James muttering some sort of promise. Afterwards she regretted every day that she hadn’t looked. Alone in that hotel room, the night of the ashes, it had come for her again. The impossibility of it. That he wouldn’t ever be here again. She would never see him again. And one day nobody would ever see her, Sal, again. And so not one thing that was happening, actually mattered. Was actually worth doing.