‘She asks, If your past had a colour, what would it be?’

‘By the time I finish recounting my peculiar first day in Italy, a jagged citadel comes into view. Nardo makes a sharp turn and stops in front of a cottage enclosed by climbing wisteria.’

‘As a child, I met a man who had set himself on fire.’

‘Today is my birthday. I’m sitting at home, alone. I shouldn’t be here. I should be in London. I should be in London with her. I had everything planned.’

‘We had peaches in the lunch hall today when Matron fell down the stairs and broke her hip. They had to take her away with a shot in the arm. She’s not really the Matron, but that’s what we call her. ‘Not broken!’ she kept shouting, as women in white coats held her down.’

‘Lena is propped on the passenger door, rocking on her heels, discussing deliverables through an open window. She squints into the high beams. The Volvo hits the gas; heads home to kiss the wife and kids.’

‘I nudge the salt round the back of the pepper in a sneak attack. An illegal move. The cellars are glass, the black and white contents exposed. A single red carnation looks down at my antics, bemused. The waiter hovers; anxious about your empty chair in the lunch rush.’

‘Yorkie. Seven bricks to a bar. Not designed for sharing. On the bed, Solly snaps off each cocoa brick and stacks an installation in the bony dip of my chest, gets his camera. It is immediate, the onset of the melting.’

‘Samuel Walker was driving in to work when he first saw the shoe; caught the flash of orange against the brooding green of the forest. Something bright in the grey of the Minnesota winter. Something different.’

‘If I were to criticize anything about Andersen’s approach, which, let’s be clear, I’m not, then perhaps he asked the man carrying the carpet to state his business a little too early.’

‘Let us dispense with Beppe from the start. He was not real. He was transparently fictional, a phantom conjured up by a dying consciousness - my own - to help it cope with its current conditions. This much was clear.’

‘Like a prologue, sadness always preceded her’

‘Her brother died when darkness was just sinking onto the rooftops of the terrace; when a slight breeze shifted the off-white pillowcases on the line; when a neighbourhood cat split the air with a yowl.’

‘Stanley sits, still, on the balcony, in the golden hour. The railing of the balcony protects him, or holds him back; prevents him from falling out, or jumping in. Whichever way you want to look at it. (It’s like a prison, Stanley, I think.)’

‘We sat in the nearby park, eating our sweets. My cousin was crying because she lost a tooth, or chipped a tooth, I can’t remember. She settled down and started reading her journal, which had a lock and key, which I would later break into and be disappointed by the contents.’

‘At a certain point it occurred to me that my nan, stooped and splay-footed but a formidable walker even after parting company with her memory, had always been what you might call an urban forager’

‘Nobody else I knew had paprika on scrambled eggs apart from us. Nobody else had cinnamon sugar on toast, either, but that wasn't a Hungarian thing the way the paprika was’

‘… because it’s all there in front of you, the weather of it all, the atmosphere it has, the way a day curls round you and makes you its own thing’

‘It’s not the split pea soup, if that’s what you’re thinking. Though it does leap to mind. What a mess, right? But let’s back up.’

‘I hear her whine. There’s little use in trying to bat her away. Mosquitoes, like all such small creatures, have faster metabolisms than we do. Put simply, they see in slow motion.’