I lean back on the pillows and look at the corners of the room. When I was a kid, I always wanted to live on the ceiling - it looked so clean and uncluttered, like the top of a cake.

Her skin tasted expensive.

Bye, Tess. haunt me if you like. I don't mind.

The shops in High Street still have their metal grilles down, blank-eyed and sleeping. My name is scrawled across them all. I'm outside Ajay's newsagent's. I'm on the expensive shutters of the health food store. I'm massive on Handie's furniture shop, King's Chicken Joint and the Barbecue Cafe. I thread the pavement outside the bank and all the way to Mothercare. I've possessed the road and am a glistening circle at the roundabout.

She'd never in her whole life bunked school, smoked dope, or kissed a boy whose name she didn't know, and yet in the last few days, she'd done all these things.

when I was four I almost fell down the shaft of a tin mine and when I was five the car rolled over on the motorway and when I was seven we went on holiday and the gas ring blew out in the caravan and nobody noticed I've been dying all my life

But all that is warm will go cold. My ears will fall off and my eyes will melt. My mouth will be clamped shut. My lips will turn to glue. ...No taste or smell or touch or sound.Nothing to look at. Total emptiness for ever.