She was so locked in her own thoughts that she could have been struck by lightning and not noticed. She was thinking about things she’d never thought of before – big things, with capital letters, like Death, and Freedom, and Honour. Death was the main thing. They might all speak of freedom and honour, but what it seemed to come down to in the end was always death. She could feel Da’s arm enclosing hers as she walked along saying the word to herself under her breath: ‘Death.’ She realised that death had never been real to her before. It had only been a sort of idea. Now the word had a new and deeper sound when she said it. It was no longer so easy to say. Before this it had only been a word. Now it was a spray of bright red blood, fountaining out of a man’s neck, from a hole put there by someone she’d sat and talked with. Sarah had been to a wake once. The corpse was an old woman. She’d died in her sleep. They’d washed her and fixed her hair.
