Quotes from Harry Bingham

and I can make him smile. And smiles are precious.

He says the sort of thing that people say. The light. The movement. The ceaseless change. But I think that's to get it precisely wrong. Isn't it the other way around? That it never changes. That you are staring at a vision of eternity, sometimes sunlit, sometimes furious, but always there. Gazing at you gazing at it. I

Dreams?' 'I never dream.' And that's true. I never dream except sometimes when I wake up in blank terror and have no idea what I am terrified of. Nights with gaping horror in the middle of them and no reason why. A skull grinning in the dark. Nights when I have all too little difficulty in identifying my emotions. 'Fear? You get frightened sometimes

Did your mam get those tulips? I sent them. I felt bad.' 'Yes, she did. Thank you for that.' 'OK...' Don't know how to answer that. I stole his phone. He hit me. I bought his mam tulips. It's hard to work out who owes whom exactly.

There was a posh girl in my year at Cambridge, also a philosopher, who gave names to every significant possession in her life. She had a teddy bear, of course, but her car had a name too. So did her phone. So did both of her laptops and her camera. For all I know, she gave names to her knives and forks as well - I don't know how far these things go with the English aristocracy.

I've got a stack of various tedious paperwork-type jobs to do, but few of them are urgent. Over the other side of the office, a couple of DCs are making piles of empty coffee cups and trying to knock them over by throwing a soft indoor rugby ball at them. There are yells of laughter when they succeed, more yells when they fail. I sometimes think it must be a lot easier to be a man.

I envy her her tears. I wonder what they feel like. I wonder if they hurt.

But there's a disconnect between the eyes and the mouth. Like the eyes are saying one thing and the mouth is about to

I don't know what the point of mirrors is. They tell you what you already know.

Where do you hide a leaf? In a forest.

A grey pigeon flies with heavy wing beats across the yard. It sits on the low wall bounding the pig-sties and tries to remember what it came for.

Thanks, Fi. Well, you've really freed up my evening.' He doesn't sound completely thrilled. 'Good. I was hoping I could drop by, maybe. But I didn't want to watch Morse .' 'Whereabouts are you?' 'Peering in through your front window. Is that a new sofa?

I have a kind of farewell lunch with Burnett in Carmarthen. A greasy spoon café just up behind the police station. The sort of place where the laminated menus stick slightly to the tables. Where lasagne represents the most adventurous meal choice.

Pryce's chicken is an unhealthy-looking grey, the way my sister looked when she had glandular fever. He examines it gloomily. 'We'll get

Fi . That's 'if' backwards. Griffiths . Nice ordinary name, but two more 'if's lurking at the heart of it. My name, literally, is as iffy as you can get. The only solid sound, the only one you can actually hang on to, is that opening G, and it's not to be trusted.

I do what I think I'm meant to do, but I find it hard. The noise of the applause – the din, that sense of mental concussion – is like the shooting up on the hill, only I was more comfortable there. More at ease. Since I can't reasonably start shooting anyone now, I just shrink into myself and wait for it all to stop. For