The body was that of a thin elderly man of Afro-Caribbean race, 166cm in height, at the time of my examination unclothed.

The pleural spaces were clear. There were dense bilateral interpleural and pleuropericardial adhesions with hyaline plaques on the diaphragm. The air passages contained abundant pus and were inflamed. The lungs were congested and oedematous and showed pneumonic consolidation affecting in particular the lower lobe of the left lung with severe chronic inflammatory thickening of the bronchial tree. There was a slight thickening of the dilation of pulmonary arteries. No evidence of thromboembolism.

The Burial Ground

Stanley is burying his father, in a field of dumb bedfellows whose sole purpose is to provide balanced nutrition for the more vulnerable members of the animal kingdom: the invertebrates, who eat with the slow, sarcastic knowledge that dinner really isn’t going anywhere. These are the subterranean militia of revenge, whose communal memory stores the cruel holocaust of their various insect species by predictable versions of swat: shoe, garden implement, rolled-up newspaper, cricket bat.

Mr Clasford Williams is the newest, fully paid-up resident of Tower Hamlets’ community of gourmet cadavers, whose social relationship to each other is defined only by proximity and the fact that their hearts, in one breathtaking moment, had stopped.

Here Clasford will crave his daily cocktail of whisky and beer, as rainwater soaks through his rotting oak coffin with its oyster-coloured lining, through the linen safari suit he’d brought with him in 1965, When mi fus come a this blasted country, and finally seeps down to accentuate his thirst and accelerate the decay of brown skin that had been, for thirty-two years, his formal application to British society, determining his acceptance or rejection, something he was always going on about. We doan belong ina this country … we doan belong, Stanley. The bitterness at his transformation from fully qualified chemist in his home country to ill-paid postman in his adopted one never quite overcome. Clasford had overseen the trajectory of Stanley from grammar school boy, to university graduate, to City analyst receiving a weekly pay cheque that Clasford himself could never earn in a whole month of rising at 4 a.m. to sort out the post at the depot. But if it was a slap on the back Stanley craved: ‘Ongle a man like me can produce pickney like oonoo. So don’t swell y’head and tink say y’boots bigger than mine.’

‘Hardly likely,’ Stanley would mutter.

To which Clasford would reply, drawing his arm back as if to hit him, ‘Awa you say?’

‘Nuttin’.’ Stanley shuffled out of the room, letting his father have the last word, as always, as he walked down the corridor.