Lamb by Bernard MacLaverty (Penguin Books 1980)

'Ah, Brother Sebastian. I was expecting you.'

Michael began, the words becoming slurred in his haste to get them out before his courage failed him.

'Brother Benedict, I must protest in the strongest possible terms about the . . . the thrashing you have just given Owen Kane.'

'And why is that?'

'He did not sign his name to any slogan.'

'Brother Sebastian, I'll thank you to calm yourself.'

'Did you say that the boy signed his initials to some graffiti?'

'I did.'

'O.K. is a slogan itself. They just add it to things.'

Brother Benedict took off his glasses, folded the legs flat and rubbed into the corners of his eyes with finger and thumb.

'Brother Sebastian, do you think I'm a fool? Credit me with a little lore intelligence.'

Michael did not know how to react. He was confused.

'You know and I know,' said Brother Benedict, 'that we could never find the real culprit. By now the boys know that punishment has been meted out. Someone has got it in the neck. It may deter others from doing the like again, for fear their mates get it. The O.K. is just a little irony of mine. "Benny dies O.K." Now the boys know that Benny has risen.' He bunched his big fist and swung it in a slow punch, clicking his tongue at the supposed moment of impact.

'K.O.,' he said with satisfaction.

For the next week Owen had to try and clean the slogan off with a pad of steel wool. To reach it he had to stand on a stool.

Whatever Love Means by David Baddiel (Abacus 1999)

'What about you? Still at the paper?'

'Not really. I'm a features editor at Jack.' That figures, thought Vic. Jack was a late addition to the FHM, Loaded, Maxim, aren't-we-the-naughty-ones magazine market, it specialised in covering topics too shallow for its competitors. On the odd occasion Vic had read one of them (not often: Vic hated stuff that aspired to, but wasn't, pornography), he'd recognised more than one byline from his days of contact with the music press, men who in their twenties would've been politically incorrect to be rebellious, and who now had to be politically incorrect to be rebellious, instead of realising that the dignified thing to do is stop being rebellious. 'Although I still do odd bits and pieces for the. Can I help it if I still bloody love rock and roll?

It was at that point that Vic remembered just how cunty Chris Moore was. He wasn't just a cunt. He was off the cuntometer.

Border Crossing by Pat Barker (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2001)

Three children were saved that day. A man glances up from his newspaper, see what's going on, acts on what he sees. Accident. A more interesting news story, a thicker coat of dirt on the bus window, a disinclination to intervene, and it might have ended differently. In tragedy, perhaps. It might have. He didn't know. It was his good fortune not to know.

Blow Your House Down by Pat Barker (Picador USA 1984)

You do a lot of walking in this job. More than you might think. In fact, when I get to the end of a busy Saturday night, it's me feet that ache. There, that surprised you, didn't it?

I work on me own now. Nobody else fancies this place, because they've all got it worked out that he must've picked Kath up from here. I've got the whole viaduct to meself some nights. Except for Kath, who's still here in a way, stuck up there on her billboard. Hiya, Kath.

I watched them putting that up and it was very strange if you knew Kath, because it was too big to go up all at once. I watched them pasting across first one eye and then the other and I thought, My God. Because her eyes, they follow you. They do, they follow you everywhere. I can be walking along with me back to her, and I still feel them. And they've got such a funny look. You'd just think they'd taken that photo after she was dead - that's the effect it has on you. Which is mad, because you can see she's alive, and anyway dead people's eyes close.