“When?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Why?”

“Funeral. My dad’s. He’s dead.”

“Oh. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” She put her arms around him, and held him. He stood in her arms like a shop-window dummy. “How did it, did he—was he ill?”

Fat Charlie shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said.

And Rosie squeezed him tightly, and then she nodded, sympathetically, and let him go. She thought he was too overcome with grief to talk about it.

He wasn’t. That wasn’t it at all. He was too embarrassed.

There must be a hundred thousand respectable ways to die. Leaping off a bridge into a river to save a small child from drowning, for example, or being mown down in a hail of bullets while single-handedly storming a nest of criminals. Perfectly respectable ways to die.

Truth to tell, there were even some less-than-respectable ways to die that wouldn’t have been so bad. Spontaneous human combustion, for example: it’s medically dodgy and scientifically unlikely, but even so, people persist in going up in smoke, leaving nothing behind but a charred hand still clutching an unfinished cigarette. Fat Charlie had read about it in a magazine: he wouldn’t have minded if his father had gone like that. Or even if he’d had a heart attack running down the street after the men who had stolen his beer money.

This is how Fat Charlie’s father died.

He had arrived in the bar early, and had launched the karaoke evening by singing “What’s New Pussycat?” which song he had belted out, according to Mrs. Higgler, who had not been there, in a manner that would have caused Tom Jones to be festooned in flung feminine undergarments, and which brought Fat Charlie’s father a complimentary beer, courtesy of the several blonde tourists from Michigan who thought he was just about the cutest thing they’d ever seen.

“It was their fault,” said Mrs. Higgler, bitterly, over the phone. “They was encouragin’ him!” They were women who had squeezed into tube tops, and they had reddish too-much-sun-too-early tans, and they were all young enough to be his daughters.