His coffin lay cold in the ground, yet all I could think when I peered down was how messy it looked with all those handfuls of dirt splattered over it like mucky paintballs. I would have liked to sweep it off, to clear the glossy, oak surface and the plaque embossed with his name. But I couldn’t risk falling in there with him. That wouldn’t do at all. I bet he would have found it funny though.

I hadn’t been able to get anywhere near him during the funeral. Or the graveside service afterwards. He’d been surrounded by sobbing women, soldiers and small children. His many nieces and nephews, some of whom I knew he’d never even met. But family are entitled to be higher on the list of grief than friends, especially friends who haven’t seen each other for the best part of ten years.

And it had been the best part of ten years since either of us had been back here either, with me at university and him in Iraq. We’d changed, but nothing had here. The graveyard I stood in was the same, just a few more lines added. We used to play here, hiding behind gravestones and climbing the big tree. It seemed wrong now. Disrespectful. Like calling Mrs Berghaus (the portly, German lady from down the road) ‘Mrs Burgerhead’. The air smelled the same as it always did at this time of year; grass, corn and manure from the fields, with a light breeze carrying the sounds of metallic squeals and clangs from the steel wharf on the nearby banks of the River Trent. And overhead the trees rustled and the wood pigeon sang its familiar song; coo-coo-coo, coo-coo-coo. I hoped that wasn’t the same bird, it seemed so wrong that a pigeon should outlive him.

His mother used to call us Vada and Thomas-Jay, always in a mock American accent, like the silly 90’s film My Girl. I suppose it was a good comparison, we were best friends after all. He even gave me a ring once. Not a mood ring like in the film, but a ring pull off a can on Pepsi that got stuck on my pinkie. And at the end of the film Thomas-Jay died, stung to death my bees. Now Ben was dead and he was stung too. But not by bees, by shards of glass and shrapnel in the explosion that I’d seen in my dreams every night since my mum had phoned to gently tell me the news.