He felt a chill in his heart. Glancing beyond himself, he saw that her inner arm was lacerated with two deep scars that scissored the flesh between her wrist and elbow. In places, one still wore the beads of a scab. He nodded stiffly, and wished her luck.

♦

Harold couldn’t go for more than fifteen minutes without needing to stop and rest his right leg. His back, neck, arms and shoulders were so sore he thought of little else. The rain drove at him in thick pins that bounced off the roofs and tarmac. After only an hour, he was stumbling and desperate to stop. There were trees ahead and something red that was maybe a flag. People left the strangest things at the roadside.

The rain plashed on the leaves, making them shiver, and the air smelt of the soft leaf mould at his feet. As Harold grew closer to the flag, his shoulders hunched. The splash of red was not a flag. It was a Liverpool FC T-shirt, hanging from a wooden cross.

He had passed several roadside memorials but none of them disturbed him so much as this one. He told himself to walk on the other side and not look, but he couldn’t. He was drawn to it, like something he shouldn’t see. Evidently a relative or friend had decorated the cross with glittery Christmas baubles in the shape of pine trees, and a plastic wreath of holly. Harold examined the wilting flowers in cellophane, bled of colour, and a photograph in a plastic wallet. The man was maybe in his forties, thickset, with dark hair, and had a child’s hand trailing his shoulder. He was grinning at the camera. To the best dad in the world, read the words on a sodden card.

What eulogy would you write for the worst one?

“Fuck you,” David had hissed, as his legs failed him and he seemed to be in danger of catapulting down the stairs. “Fuck you.”