Walking down our street at eight o'clock in the morning with my son James - he is shuffling along, resignedly. It's summer, there are only three days left of school, and Friday is a half-day anyway. His hair is a mess, tangled (long) and unwashed; bits of flaky scalp.

It was round about Christmas when Troy knocked on my door and told me that he was going to lose his arm.
'The doctors told me they can't do nothing,' he said.
Troy had his arm up in a sling and it did look pretty painful. I had broken my arm once and it hurt like hell. I didn't lose it though.

The essentials are these: when Tony was 16 and on a train between Johannesburg and Irene, where he then lived with his parents, he caught the eye of the man sitting opposite him and, before leaving the train, made an arrangement to meet the man in Pretoria under Paul Kruger's statue at one o'clock on the coming Saturday...

On the first day of the rest of his unemployment, Mr Simmons sat on the edge of his bed, the noose of his Monday tie limp in his hand, like an executioner who'd forgotten whom he was to hang...

That damn asshole who lived on the other side of the fence with his reindeer sweaters and the coffee mug finally met his maker the other day.

Septembers never used to be like this - and you'd think we might deserve a little relief after the string of heat waves we suffered this summer. Just when one week of feverish temperatures and choking humidity seemed too much, a run of three, four, then five weeks would prove that greater miseries were still possible, and in fact likely in Gideon Meadows ...

'Love's whole or else it's nothing,' said Shilpa. She lay the book face down on the bedside table, fixed him with her huge spaceship eyes and sighed, 'It's true, Bubaloo, isn't it?' She curled the hairs on his chest until he was annoyed, but not too much.