Ten paces away from the road, maybe twenty, lay a felled oak. That was the last he remembered. When he woke, he was kneeling on the road again, exactly where he began. Again, he walked to the tree only to find himself once more waking up on the road. A rider in a hurry to reach the city passed him, mud from the horse’s hooves slapping against his side and face. He stood again. This time, he ran at the tree. Darkness. Sparrows singing. He on his knees again in the middle of the track. Barred from the only path he wished to take, the swineherd’s face contorted into a cry so terrible and raw that, deep in the oak woods, a wolf sprang to her feet and ushered her cubs further into the forest. Everything he loved was now lost, a husband and father powerless to help the ones who needed him most.

In the chemist, May Wesley waits patiently for the lady in the lab coat to serve the man at the counter in front of her. Wesley with her brown twiglet fingers, the pain so bad that sometimes she doesn’t bother getting up from the housing association bed with its three counterpanes, none of which match; her bones crumbling away from the top of her head to the tip of her toes. Eighty six and mad as mercury, eldest of eleven, May Wesley who delivered babies in hospital scrubs for forty years, staring daily at the butchery which nature wreaks on woman, Lord kill her if she ever let a man place any part of his person inside her. Poor, crippled May Wesley, alone in her ramshackle flat, dropping things she can’t pick up and always a dry lemon cake in the cupboard for visitors who never come.

She prays while she waits, the same prayer for the Dear Lord to take her away, but he won’t. May Wesley in a patterned woollen hat, stooped and frail, leaning on an aluminium crutch, blue canvas shopping trolley by her side, waiting for the lady to give her an ickle bit of codeine. This the third chemist of three; Wesley can’t get all she needs from just the one, and it goes down so easy and feels so good. When it’s finally her turn, the chemist warns May Wesley of the dosage; Wesley not listening, turning with her trolley to the home in Willesden where she adds herself to the clutter and waits for the beauteous anointing of the opiates to undo her.