Outside, he saw Teena was right: the day was clear and unpolluted, the sky a soft sage that rose to a deep olive tone. He crossed the street and hailed a bus. Once he was on board, his phone rang. It was his dad, calling from Leeds, but as soon as he picked up the call dropped out. He wasn’t the only one with a bad signal; he heard a girl behind him say, ‘I’ve only got two bars. Make that zero bars. You would think we were on Pluto.’

It was something of a relief not to have to talk. Settling back in his seat, he returned to his thoughts of the early hours, considering again how he would like to be sent off. He knew there was an irony, even hypocrisy, in planning his funeral in his head. Hadn’t he often mocked the elaborate preparation that went into his friends’ weddings? He had always seen such efforts as stupid and exhausting. Of course he played his part when required. He had shuttled to the nearest moon for a stag weekend, cramming in with the other guys in a rank-smelling cabin. He had been to nuptials in the desert where the guests were made to wear retro bubble helmets, and to a town hall service where the groomsmen were kitted out by the last living Neapolitan tailor (the suits would never be worn again, thanks to a quirky choice of fabric). He had heard the works of Bach played on ruined cellos, their strings brittle from the dry air of the steppes, and the performance of one musician who was also the bride’s ex-boyfriend, because his career had really taken off and no hard feelings, right?

It was a sort of advertising, a conscientious display of individuality that was in truth (he’d been heard to say) ‘the logical extension of late capitalism’. But here he was indulging the same dubious impulse, enjoying the curation of his ideal funeral. He had been jotting his ideas in a moleskin notebook, eclectic song lists that consisted of a mix of high and low, classical and pop. In the hours when he had the flat to himself, he listened to the tracks on his longlist, assessing the degree to which they evoked a sense of his being. A hard thing to pull off in the space of forty minutes, but he relished the task, treating it like an aesthetic puzzle.