A novella, or short story, in a series of installments.
Part I: The feast of Stephen.
Drafted again. Another fucking relative. And no occasion for false consolation. None of this, “he died in his sleep”, “sure, he didn’t suffer”, or “he had a quare long life, sure” – none of that. Dominic died slowly, from leukaemia, and he suffered, by fuck did he suffer. He was only forty seven, the poor fucker, only forty seven, and he’d spent most of that in jail with loyalist psychos because of a string of armed robberies. His wife, Auntie Margo, had been eighteen years his senior, but her vivacity had prevented this from being a barrier to their fling, and marriage. That was only two years ago. Now she looked frazzled, washed out, almost deader than he was. Most of their marriage had been spent with him being diagnosed, then going through a series of treatments, each of which seemed to logarithmically accelerate his degeneration. They had clung on to the dwindling odds of remission until the poor bastard expired his last puff of air. And there were a lot of people who had once called him all the sleekit bastards and scums of the earth under the sun now commending his memory to their pint glasses.
