Dialogue: It's not so much the dying - it's the incomplete living

In the shower, if you really want to know, with a prison warder. He had spent the previous 45 minutes imprisoning me in the backhand corner of the squash court and then locking the door of my fate with drop shots as delicate as little keys.

In reply, I had offered only lobs and expletives. He smashed the former into the nick and let the latter ricochet harmlessly round the scuffed and damaged walls.

I had held hopes for my new titanium racquet with enlarged sweetspot. It lay limply now beside a hump of drenched, defeated clothes.

We were talking in the shower about death. The prison warder, a hugely hairy man, said he had once been frightened for his life at work, and had realised at the time that it wasn't the dying itself that he was most afraid of, not the pain, not the blood, but more the sense that he would be leaving people behind, the sense of incomplete living.

"Remember Graham?" I asked. We had played squash with Graham. Like the warder he always beat me, partly by being better at squash but also by making me laugh. When Graham played squash, he sought comedy as much as victory.

Rather than playing a winner, he would extend a rally for the pleasure of the tease. Often he would have me gasping on the back wall and all he had to do was drop a dribbly one in the front corner. But he would hold off the shot as long as possible, long enough for hope to stir me from exhaustion and drive me forward once more.

Then, when I had committed myself, he would flick the ball over my head to where I had been and I would have to laugh.

You can't laugh and run. Your limbs dissolve. I never beat Graham. Cancer did.

Graham used to play in unmatching fluorescent socks. He once donged the club cheat on the top of the skull with the side of his racquet. Not hard, but enough to make a noise that both the prison warder and I remembered - a taut, comic boing.

Graham could beat most of the players in our grade, but he often didn't. We went to visit Graham at his home a few days before he died. He insisted on fetching us beer from the fridge. Getting up took 30 seconds. Opening the fridge took all his strength. Opening the bottles took more than he had.

One of us helped him. We talked about squash and other stuff just to make some noise. Graham was in his 40s, our age, and a funny, happy man.

"How long ago did he die?"

"I'm not sure," I said. "Four years? Six?" I had shampoo in my eyes.

"It wouldn't be so bad," said the warder, "if you were old."

"I'm not sure," I said. "I mean no one says 'I've had a good innings,' sighs gently and dies smiling, do they?"

"My Gran did," he said, "well sort of. She was 90-something. She said, 'I'm so very tired,' so her daughter said goodbye to her and five minutes later it was all over."

Throat cancer stripped my grandfather to a husk. In his last few weeks he weighed nothing and kept spitting bits of that nothing into a little plastic bucket with a crackly lid. They fed him on bottles of Guinness.

I visited the hospice only once, the day before he died. I was 17, with hair and a motorbike. On the temple of my crash helmet I had painted a black bullet-hole dripping vermilion blood.

I liked Keats' line about being half in love with easeful death.

Withered and tiny on a bank of pillows, my grandfather was watching cricket on the television above his bed. We discussed Lillee and Thomson. His voice was a wisp, like the noise of burning paper. Every word was a fierce effort. He made that effort to make me feel less uncomfortable.

When I left, he gave me two bottles of Guinness and asked me to put a bet on the horses for him. He had a little black book in which he kept a record of form. I wrote down the name of the horse, also the type of bet I had to ask for because I had never been into a bookmaker's. They called them turf accountants.

On the way home, I thought of not laying the bet and keeping the money. The only thing that stopped me was the thought that the horse might win. It lost by a huge margin a few hours before my grandfather died. I didn't go to the funeral because I was playing cricket.

"Fancy a drink?" asked the prison warder when we had towelled and dressed.

"We might as well," I said.