“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 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.”

“She wrote sniffing back the tears that flowed over the version of things that her unconscious insisted on sicking up.”

“Life's too short to be sat at home writing all the time.”

“He saw with sudden awful clarity that if he turned tail now and if, by some appalling miracle, she should survive, he'd never hear the end of it. She'd latch onto his flawed character and hold it up for relentless ridicule till the end of time, or thereabouts.”

“Life's so simple, thought Jill, if only you can strike the right note. All it needed was a little give-and-take. She'd often said so.”

“Jack amused himself by visualising her head creaking open on hinges concealed by her tartan Alice band, and releasing all the furry folk with which she populated her tales.”