The house
Colman visits his parents' house not long after his father's death and his own estrangement from his mother. He is surprised how eerie it seems—"It was strange. It felt like the whole house had died, not just my father. It gave me the spooks. The hall was all quiet and stealthy when it used to shake with music. The post was piled up on the floor" (65). This image shows how Joss's death has left a void in Colman and Millie's life, how his absence is palpable to those who loved him.
Joss playing trumpet
Kay creates a moving, phantasmagoric, dreamlike, beautiful and discombobulating series of images to describe Joss's sensations and thoughts while playing music. This is perhaps the best way to do such a thing, in fact, as she is using a textual medium to convey an auditory one. We feel Joss's loss of extraneous things, his getting to the root of who he truly is. We see and feel his sense of abandon, of pleasure and pain, his creative power.
Colman saving the little girl
At the end of novel after Colman has been slowly coming back to his love for his father, he dreams of rescuing young Josephine Moore—"deaf, curly-haired" (260)—from drowning. He carries her on his back as the "spiral stairs . . . crumble underneath him" (260). This heroic, dramatic image reveals that Colman is now carrying his father's memory, is now responsible for the way people see him. He is "rescuing" him for himself and from people like Sophie. He is letting Joss reclaim his own past.
Bird
At the very end of the novel Millie watches a bird by the sea: "A bird startled her by flying close to her head. It seemed the bird had come right out of her. She watched it soar right up into the sky, faltering and rising again, heard it calling and scatting in the wind" (278). In this beautiful and evocative last image Kay suggests that Millie is, to an extent, releasing Joss (the bird is described in terms of music). She is letting him go so she can move forward, and as Colman is coming toward her, she is going to be moving into a different relationship with her son—a painful, more honest one.
