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It’s just something to do.

I mean, everyone’s taken drugs and stolen a car and shagged someone else’s boyfriend in the middle of Beaumont Park on a wet Saturday afternoon. There’s nothing unusual about robbing fags from the offie, or spray-painting your names on the railway arches, or drinking till you throw up all over a policeman. We all did that when we were 14, and now the little kids are doing it – we have to move on, or we become a joke.

You want to find something unique. Something no-one else has done. Something no-one else has felt. And when you hear that soil falling over your head, tumbling down onto the lid of the box – the patter that becomes a thud that becomes a dull and distant shuffle, then the heavy silence that follows… I can’t describe it, but it’s like nothing else you’ll ever experience.

This is my fifth time now, and it’s been a while. Too long. Like any other buzz, you get withdrawal if you don’t… you get cravings. I know some of the others, Wayne and Lisa in particular, they think maybe we should pack it in. Especially after what happened with Townsey. But I just couldn’t give it up. It’s so boring round here, you’ve got to do something or else they might as well plant you for real, a couple more feet down, or burn you up and toss the bits off the top of Stodely Pike. Besides, I still think Townsey’s having us on, trying to shit us out. That’d be just like him. And if we were all to just pussy out now, he’d really have the last laugh, wouldn’t he?

It was Townsey who came up with the idea, at his Uncle Michael’s funeral. Old boy was doing 110, undertaking a lorry on the hard shoulder of the M62 when he sneezed ‘cos the sun was in his eyes and lost control of his Audi. It would have been easier to cremate him, considering how many bits he ended up in, but Uncle Michael had always insisted on being buried, so they pieced him back together best they could, stuffed him in a box, and dropped him in the ground.

“You ever wonder what it must feel like, Jules - to be stuck down there, all that earth on top of you, no way out?”

“I think he’s past noticing,” I said, watching a crow fight with a stick and trying to tune out the dull vicar’s didgeridoo of a voice.

At first I thought maybe Townsey had taken what I’d said the wrong way, like I was taking the piss out of his Uncle Mike being dead or something - then I recognised that look on his face for what it was. The look he’d had when he used to dare us to run across the tracks when he knew the Intercity was coming; the look he’d had when we stole our old Biology teacher’s 4×4 and drove it into the canal (Wilco tried to get us all expelled, but he just couldn’t prove it was us); the look of someone who’d made Rob climb to the top of St. Agnes’ to tie an eight inch dildo onto the weathervane. Some of the crazy things he made us do, they were cool. Others were just stupid. For a long time, I’d gone along with whatever he said. Lately though, I’d started to say. If I thought it was a shit idea, I told him. I reckon he expected me to kick off about this one too… but I didn’t. I saw the potential. Right from the start, I had a feeling. He was onto something here.

Read the complete story here.