Write the piece. Just write the piece. Neil had never had too much of a problem meeting a word count before; he’d accepted long ago that nobody cared how beautifully constructed your prose was when you were working to a deadline and your primary focus was the conveyance of information. He plonked them out now, words, usually didn’t stop to analyse his process as they appeared on the screen, three or four small articles a day, filling the space, creating content. But none of them had mattered. He would usually start a story knowing exactly where he needed the words to take him to get to the end; telling Clio’s story, suddenly, he had no idea where it could possibly go. There was so much of her, spilling out in all directions, even after she’d drawn her own full stop. How did you do it? How did you use words, black on white with a finite limit, slotting into a pre-designed space on a page, to describe what a person’s life had been? He’d tried sticking to the very bare facts as he saw them, the way he’d usually build a story, and been told he was wrong. All he’d managed to write was her name, and now he wasn’t even sure what that meant; the four letters peeling apart from each other, just scratches, lines and dots, a circle.

He was just going to have to get really, really drunk for this one. It proved harder than he’d expected; the ballast of whisky he’d kept topping up over the past three days tilting the scale unfairly. But eventually he felt it. A click, a flow. It came. Clio. Clio Clio Clio.

When had he got to sleep? Three? Four? There had not been enough of it, for sure. Not enough to allow him to deal with the morning lights of the office, with Craig, already advancing. Neil tried to hide behind the sausage roll he’d grabbed from the Greggs round the corner, realized immediately how foolish a plan that was.

‘Mate. Maaaate. Have you seen it? Have you? Did she send it to you as well? I’m going to forward it to you just in case, all right? This is going to change everything.’

The email had been sent using software that let organizations hurl out pre-designed communications to mailing lists. There was a corporate logo at the top right-hand corner, incongruous, a little cartoon of a monkey’s face. Her name in the Sender file.

Subject: Clio Campbell Suicide Note.

Hello

My name is Clio Campbell and I’m dead.