He’d grabbed the sewing tin and launched it across the room.

‘Why? Where’s my mother?’

Fergus kicked the wardrobe door, his foot smashing through the cheap pine. He’d punched and hit until the upper section was in pieces on the floor before turning his attention to the bed, ripping the covers off and flinging them impotently around. They’d watched him from the floor, nothing more than crumpled bedding waiting to be picked up again.

‘What am I?’ he’d demanded of the photos on the wall. ‘If I’m not dead and I’m not alive, how can I still walk and talk and move things?’

He’d given a cry that turned into a bark, caught between the tides of fury and fear, slapping his own face, one cheek then the other, screwing his eyes tightly shut then opening them again, finally realising the needle was still stuck in his thigh. Wrenching it out, he then dropped it where he stood.

‘Did I not do enough yet?’ Fergus had demanded of the woman immortalised on his wall. ‘I got a wife and a daughter. They’re in my house, living with me. I should be allowed to come to you now. This isn’t fair.’ He’d fallen to his knees. ‘You’re not being fair.’

Crumpling into a ball, his forehead touching the floor, he’d cried. When he’d sat back up, nothing had changed. The sky had been completely dark, the house silent. There’d been a new feeling inside his body, a liquid softness, as if the tension that had tethered his organs in place while alive had allowed everything to blend. He’d been able to smell his own breath, and it was more animal than human.

‘I’m rotting,’ he’d said. ‘I have to make things better before I decompose. How much time do I have? Shit, I’m going to fall apart.’

In the kitchen, he’d taken a laptop from an old satchel hanging on the back of the door, booting it up with shaking hands. He hated using technology. Being on the grid meant being visible. But he’d needed information fast. A little circle turned round and round as Fergus had stood chewing his nails.

When the search engine had finally bothered springing into life, he’d typed in ‘stages of decomposition’ and hit return, sitting down at the table to read the pearls of wisdom the ether had to offer.

‘Internal organs decompose twenty-four to seventy-two hours after death,’ he’d read. ‘Bloating and bloody foam leakage from facial cavities, three to five days after death. Bloating from decomposition gases will happen after eight to ten days. After a month, body starts to liquefy.’ He’d slammed the lid.