“She usually worked at night, claiming that the racket he made about the house distracted her during the day; she needed silence, total silence, in which to pursue her inspiration - else it fled away and left her with a splitting headache to show for it.”

“She had six months at most left to live. She had cancer, she hissed. A filthy growth eating her insides away. There was an operation, she'd been told. They took half your stomach out and fitted you up with a plastic bag. Better a semicolon than a full stop, some might say.”

“The sun was up - stuck like half a tinned apricot on a sky awash with all the colours of a fading bruise. Down below the living dead were forming their complaining queues at bus stops.”

“She usually worked at night, claiming that the racket he made about the house distracted her during the day; she needed silence, total silence, in which to pursue her inspiration - else it fled away and left her with a splitting headache to show for it.”

“He was dazed, the soft thoughts sinking slowly in. A son. Even a daughter. His child. Immortality. A chance to make good. Pass on the hard lessons learned.”

“Jack and Jill slept, wrapped in each other's arms, untroubled by any dream in their cocoon of freshly discovered wrinkly passion.”