I cannot keep it straight in my head that he’s dead.
I tell her about the two wasted days I spent trying to imagine how decomposed his body was, only to remember that we had cremated him, his body was no more. She turned back to me and took my wrist.
‘Well you know he’s here …’
I felt the familiar weariness I always get when confronted with other people’s spirituality, but then she finished, ‘ … in my house.’
In this vivid and ambitious collection, Sophie White is a uniquely articulate witness to the horrors of grief, addiction, mental illness, and the casual and sometimes hilarious cruelty of life.