‘Wards.’ It was the woman who’d asked me for money in the first place. She spoke bluntly, tersely, her face - still averted from mine - expressionless. ‘Wards and stay-nots.’

I laughed politely. ‘Right,’ I said. ‘Scared of ghosts, are we?’

Now she looked up at me again, and the others did too. ‘Not ghosts, mate,’ one of the men said.

‘Loup-garous?’ That did make a kind of sense, although it would be a pretty desperate werewolf that fed on this meat.

I was still the focus for all eyes. The woman put her hands out towards the fire, the gesture forlorn and futile, like a bereaved mother singing a lullaby to her dead child’s doll. The fire was only a memory of something she’d had once and would never have again.

‘There’s other things besides the hairy men,’ she muttered. ‘More all the time, from what I can see. They come in the night, wriggling all around you. Shining, some of them. Don’t know what they are, or where they came from, but I don’t want them crawling over me in the dark, that’s for bloody sure.’

There were murmurs of agreement from all sides. I flashed on a memory: the tapeworm-like ribbons of nothingness that had drifted around me as I sat on the pavement, drunk out of my mind, and tried to play the new note I was hearing in the night.

‘World’s changing,’ said another of the zombies, his voice a horrendously prolonged death rattle. ‘It don’t want us no more.’

‘Never fucking did, mate,’ said another man gloomily. ‘Cold leftovers is what we are. Shoved to the side of the plate.’

‘Something always turns up though, doesn’t it?’ I pointed out with impeccable banality. I fished in another of my coat’s many and capacious pockets and came up with something that might cheer them up - a half-bottle of blended Scotch. I handed it to the woman, who looked at it with solemn approval. Although I said that the dead couldn’t eat or drink, some of them do anyway, even though they know it will sit in their stomach and rot, giving the vectors of decay something extra to work on. Others, like my friend Nicky, drink the wine-breath and take some attenuated comfort from that.

‘Thanks, mister,’ the dead woman said. ‘You’re a diamond.’

‘Take care of yourself,’ I said, probably at least a month or so too late, and went on my less-than-merry way.

Pen was not only still up, she was actually outside the house, prowling around the floral border underneath the ground-floor windows in a state of simmering rage.

‘Look at this,’ she said as I came up, as though we were already in the middle of a conversation. ‘I only planted these tulips yesterday, and something’s trampled right through them. You can’t keep anything. Not a thing.’

The sheer ordinariness of the topic was welcome right then. ‘You could put a circle of salt down,’ I said. ‘That’s what my dad used to do, to stop cats shitting in our coal bunker.’