When Frankie got killed one day (by Jihadists who mistook him for an Infidel) it certainly meant changes in her life. She saw it all – the flash of scimitars and the detonation of the Improvised Explosive Device that turned his Four By Four into a cowering inferno – and there was a disturbing and or pleasurable eye contact between them as he lay on the paving slabs and softly slipped away. ‘I am leaving you’ he said, ‘do not let my bastard manager exploit the tapes I made . . . the juvenile ones that are not released yet, the tapes I made when I was a kid, before I knew what taping was all really about. Do not let him flood the market with a lot of low-quality or low grade material of me, where there is not good character development and good CGI. Do not let him water down the brand . . .’ She promised Frankie that she would look after his business interests, just as he desired and he started to go into a series of complicated notes on how he would like the edits to be completed on a unfinished tape he made called Plastic Remainders of A Posthumous Liar but before he had completed the notes he convulsed and then softly slipped away. ‘He has softly slipped away’, she said, to a doctor from the hospital who had arrived by way of an Ambulance. ‘No’, said the doctor, ‘He has not softly slipped away. You are making more out of this than is medically necessary. He has died. There is no more brain function. No more respiration. Before us lies a corpse. That is all there is to say’. And again she sadly agreed.

The next months passed quietly in a sweltering heat of mourning. She sweated in a garden at dusk. She experienced happiness because of a modest win on a lottery and again when she heard a unfamiliar song thru the walls of her apartment. Lain naked on the green carpet, curled foetal or stretched flat on her back, she tried to work out where the song was coming from, just by listening with her ears and feeling the vibration in her back and following the sound, tracing it down thru imagined stairwells and hallways, thru concrete ducting, down copper pipes and drainage systems and into to a hidden place beneath the earth that she imagined was something like Hell in the Bible, only worse. It was a horrible song.

Her mother called. Was she over Frankie? Had she found someone else? Had she found some kind of happiness?

These kind of questions drove her nuts. She loved her mother, she really did, but these inquiries never got anywhere.