I’d seen her several times before, this woman. Loitering on the steps to our small shopping plaza down the road, wild-eyed in Miller Street, its river of traffic churning around her through canyons of high-rise office blocks, peering into plate glass windows, advertising cellulose injections and other horrors, her expression suggesting the Martians had landed.

Friday lunchtime is always awful. Alone at her desk, Sally eats a prepacked sandwich. The bread tastes wet and sticks to the roof of her mouth. At the empty desks, geometric shapes moil on computer screens. The lift door makes a sucking sound as it opens, and George ambles out. Even from where she sits…

Yesterday, I met a litter of kittens that couldn’t yet see or walk. I think there were five of them. My daughter picked one up by the neck like the cat mothers do, except that she did it with the rough tenderness of a child, and it made the real mother hiss.

You were rinsing your plate in the sink when you found the orange gun. Why was it in the same kitchen cupboard as the lemon soap? You picked it up and your fingers struggled to wrap around the handle. The dock and bullrushes bobbed outside of the houseboat, and your stomach lurched.

Forgive me, Father, for I will sin unless you come down and tell me not to. But you won’t, will you? No. That’s not your style. You prefer the theatrics of signs and wonders. Signs, like when Mummy dreamt we’d be poisoned if we ate at Mama’s funeral. So, we sat under the tent in…

In the end, I think that we should dispose of our dead in some easy, practical, pragmatic way. Ultimately, we are all just walking bags of dust, aren’t we? Why so much fuss then? What is it all about?

Nella hated the new extension. The builders had rolled their digger right over the grass and the daisies and taken over her garden. When they dug the foundations, she’d run out with her red plastic beach bucket and tried to collect all of the worms, beetles and spiders that had been so cruelly uprooted from…

“Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream…” “Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream…” We sang this, over and over, bellowing with drunken enthusiasm as we did indeed row a boat – a long wood canoe, rather – down the winding passage of the creek through the valley.

“Seven, red!” the dealer shouts. I am sitting on a padded black stool. My elbows glued to the upholstered edge of the roulette table, with my chin resting against my intertwined fingers. The guy in a black Puma tracksuit, who’s been standing next to me for the last six hours, is punching the air with…

We arrive early at the museum, Jean and me. It’s a special event for patrons but my friend has somehow acquired two free tickets. Two, she has emphasised, in order that I might accompany her. She is wearing her aquamarine scarf; Jean always wears a scarf.