It was perfectly dark when he opened his eyes, a creeping neck pain doing the work of waking for him. The only light in the room was the green LED display on the stereo. He fumbled for his phone and turned it on, almost an automatic reaction, before he’d eased himself up. His body scolded him with each twinge for two concurrent nights of bad sleep out of his bed, to no purpose. 4.18 a.m. Christ. It had been early evening when he’d gone down. The phone buzzed and twitched itself to life, messages and notifications filing in – no, pouring in.

His obituary had been retweeted over eight hundred times.

There was a voicemail from Craig, because of course Craig was the sort of person who would still leave a voicemail.

‘Neil. Mate. This Clio Campbell thing – getting more hits than anything else this week. Great stuff, great stuff. Really blowing up. Think we’re going to go for a big feature in the Saturday mag. Want you to lead on it. Can you call me asap?’

He’d actually said ‘ass-ap’.

Fare-thee-weel, ma first and fairest.

Edinburgh, 2003

They rounded the corner onto Princes Street, trudging obediently, a polite phalanx of navy-blue cagoules and expensive all-weather coats. There were not very many placards and no banners; a few people had been handed now-soggy Socialist Worker posters to wave, their slogans unrelated to the issue of the day, but mostly they just trudged. It was a very well-behaved protest, despite the best efforts of the students up ahead who kept trying to stoke a half-hearted chant into something more.

‘Who let the bombs out?’

‘BUSH! BUSH AND BLAIR!’

They’d bark and howl into the drizzle, then shut themselves down again. At every burst of noise, Neil would check the tape recorder, even though he’d drawn the short straw in the office and come out with a clunky shoebox of a thing, at least fifteen years old, with no way of measuring the sound levels. The wheels were still turning, at least. He felt like a right eejit holding it up at the great man’s mouth as they walked along: Neil was also considerably shorter than him and his arm was getting tired; he had to try and keep his elbow slightly bent so it didn’t look like he was marching along giving a Nazi salute. He wished they could just sit down, go to a café, but his editor had wanted colour, a sense of the life of the protest, the big man’s politics in motion, he’d said. So this. Stupid, stupid. Neil was sure he’d play it back and have hardly anything usable.