Status Updates From The Bradshaw Variations

The woman hands him the plastic bag containing his rumpled grey jacket. She has folded it carefully: she has smoothed the exhausted fabric with her long, brilliantly varnished nails. She seems to take pity on it, this discarded piece of his life.

She stays where she is on the back seat. She has always been susceptible to ill treatment: she becomes pliant, victimised.