Shirley's favourite of all the skull postcards she has been sent over the years, most now sun-bleached and fading on her fridge-freezer, is Garden of Death, by Hugo Simberg. Here, three skeletons in black cassocks tend to flowers - star-shaped and bell-shaped, blue and ochre red - in a sepia-tinted garden. At the very top of the picture, a meandering path leads away, between the roots of trees, to a place beyond the honeyed realm of these deathly horticulturalists. It must be hell, Shirley thinks, that the path leads to. Or else just the nothing in between the two extremes. Because, whether Hugo Simberg had meant it that way or not, his garden of death looks to Shirley like a very heavenly sort of place. Just looking at it, you feel like you can hear the bumblebees browsing between the flower beds. And no one there is speaking. No one there ever says a single word. All you would hear, if you stood there, among those eternal gardeners, would be the swish of the skeletons' heavy black cassocks, the trickle of watering cans, and the thrum of insect life.