The Bee Flats. They'd come up with the name in Paul's dingy basement flat, which always smelled dank and foisty no matter how many Glade Plug-ins Paul threw at it. Jacko always felt a little ill the day after he'd spent time at Paul's, the damp air permeating his already overworked alveoli. The copious amount of weed they smoked obviously didn't help matters.

They were proud of the name as it combined their shared interest in music and their love of bees, which they'd had since visiting an apiary their first year in high school. They'd "brainstormed" for ages that night, with the few synapses that were still firing after sharing a quarter of Random Darryl's Mega Skunk and a bottle of Pusser's rum. They had even designed their logo - a bee wearing sunglasses and headphones lying squashed on some tarmac with tiny tyre tracks across his back.

Within a week they'd written and started rehearsing three of their own songs, and had fifty t-shirts printed with the band name and bee logo very vivid against three pastel backgrounds. After selling the vintage Gibson Les Paul - the last thing he had to remember his absent father by - and buying the van, Jacko had even had enough money left to buy a neon sign. £420 that had cost, but he figured it would get them noticed when they gigged. 

One year on. "Musical differences" and then the admission from Paul that he'd been seeing Kathy, the barmaid from the Royal, who he knew Jacko had always fancied but had never had the guts to actually ask out, had broken up the band. 

Then the hospital tests and the diagnosis that Jacko feared but had known was coming. Pages of unrecorded lyrics now lying in a box in his garage, along with 47 t-shirts, rotting away, much like he was. And a broken neon sign which when switched on now just read The BeeF.