But how else to … to get through all those unbearable sentences – those endless, stewing thoughts – each one punctuated by the thudding, hammer-blow of ‘dead’? That savage, nail-in-the-coffin word. I used it – I had used it – countless times in the first short while after hearing the news (that garbled phone message), but its regular use – all that relentless thud-thud-thudding – had begun to bump and bruise my very core. The body was inside the coffin! Bang, bang, bang! The lid was sealed! Bang, bang, bang! But still the word kept on providing new nails, and of course they needed to be applied (demanded it), to be neatly and dispassionately embedded. But where? The wall? The door? My heart? My head? My soul? No! No, I had to get rid of that word. I had to eliminate it. It had suddenly become too real, too meaningful. How even to approach it now without … without feeling the urge to emit a terrible, wolf-like howl? Without jabbering? Without flailing around? Falling to my knees and tearing at my clothes? Without an all-out collapse, in other words? Surely it’s better to just … just use something else, something less definitive, something that evades … that compresses … that curtails the connected emotion. A band-aid word. Yes. A slightly vague, pointless, polite, peripheral word. To cleverly create a separate universe in language and then quietly retreat into it, to hide, like a cringing ninny, from … from …

From Kimberly’s passing?

Yes.

Kimberly has passed … Oh, look! There she goes! Hear the whistle? Kimberly! She’s a heavy-goods train thundering through the station of life (no timetabled stop) and then into the glorious bleakness – the billowing clouds of dry ice – beyond. Only the truly adventurous – the demented hobo, the illegal, the felon – would consider running after her and hitching a ride. Those trains are heavily guarded, I’ve heard. No. Better just wait a little longer on the welcoming, well-lit platform and flick through the local paper (great article about piles. Wonderful small ads. Nothing really amounting to ‘news’, as such) then head over to the kiosk for a hot cup of coffee (avoid the tea. The tea’s dreadful, like warm iron filings. It’s been stewing for days inside a giant rusty urn).

Just stand back (always respectful, mind) and let that old, heavy-goods train rumble on through …

Rumble.

Rrrrrrumble?

Gracious me! A sudden outbreak of goose-bumps on my forearm. How odd!

Uh …

No.

No. Let’s not talk of death, eh? Death sticks between the teeth like a pesky piece of sweetcorn husk. Sweetcorn’s way too ambitious a vegetable for a man in my state. I need mashed potato softened with milk. Or mushy peas. Or a lightly seasoned dollop of glowing swede, shining with butter. Or porridge. I need porridge! I need custard! A soft-boiled egg!

I’m too delicate!

Coddle me!

Uh …

No.

It wasn’t a great scheme, in other words. I wasn’t genned up on the Tide Times. I just headed out – flew out.