Many are drawn to stare across this bridge. They come, and stare, and turn back. What else can they do? A desultory, ragged band of witnesses, silently, attentively, one after another, they come, and take up the position, and then turn back. A Japanese journalist, an American historian, an English photographer, a Jewish survivor of the holocaust, a French diplomat, a Scottish poet, a Thai princess, a Chinese Quaker from Hong Kong. For different reasons and for the same reason they are drawn here. That young man with curly hair is the son of the British Chief Prosecutor at Nuremberg. That broad-shouldered woman in the yellow Aertex shirt is the daughter of a discredited Oxford-educated Marxist scholar. Here they come, here they stand. They are asking a question, but there is no answer. Here too Stephen Cox will stand.

Good Time and Bad Time coexist. We in Good Time receive messengers who stumble across the bridge or through the river, maimed and bleeding, shocked and starving. They try to tell us what it is like over there, and we try to listen. We invoke them with libations of aid, with barley and blood, with rice and water, and they flock to the dark trenches, moaning and fluttering in their thousands. We are seized with panic and pity and fear. Can we believe these stories from beyond the tomb? Can it be that these things happen in our world, our time?

The dead and dying travel fast these days. We can devour thousands at breakfast with our toast and coffee, and thousands more on the evening news. It would be easy to say that we grow fat and greedy, that we thrive on atrocities, that we eagerly consume suffering. It is not as simple as that. We need them as they need us. There is a relationship between Good Time and Bad Time. There are interpenetrations. Some cross the bridge into the Bad Time, into the Underworld, and return to tell the tale. Some go deliberately. Some step into Bad Time suddenly. It may be waiting, there, in the next room.

While opening her post one dark morning, Liz Headleand was surprised to come across a package containing part of a human finger bone. It contained other objects, but the bone was the first to attract her attention. She could feel it before she saw it, through the scruffy layers of envelope and battered jiffy-bag. She shook the bag, and out it fell upon her desk, wrapped in a twist of thin cheap grey-green paper. She prodded it curiously with her own fleshy finger, and immediately and correctly identified it as kin.