It all rested on Pierce’s confession. No: it all rested on my recording of Pierce’s confession. That was everything, my muscle, my back-up, my leverage. Without the recording, the confession was inconsequential. It might as well have never happened. It would be his word against mine, a proven liar accusing an unproven liar. A degenerate, desperate drunk, accusing an acclaimed author. I had two recordings of the interview, but only one included the confession, and little else mattered. Or rather, I assumed it included the confession. But I had blacked out. Had I lost or damaged the DVR? One evening a few months ago I had spilled most of a can of Stella into my then-laptop. What my reaction had been at the time, I don’t know. Maybe I hadn’t even been aware. I discovered the accident the next morning, confronted with a soggy, sticky keyboard and a black screen. Hundreds of documents, hundreds of photos and hundreds of pounds, gone.

The other danger was that the recording had never happened. I was habituated to fuck-ups with interview recordings – it had happened with Quin. Button not pressed, wrong button pressed, low or dead battery and no spare, low memory, background noise, microphone in the wrong socket … In recent months I had made a comprehensive survey of ways to fail to do this essential part of my job.

And there was … a fear. I had not laid eyes on the DVRs since parting from Pierce. I needed to check the recordings. But the other Need had me. I could not do it.

It’s hard to explain this incapacity. Why not just look, find out? Because if I had fucked up, but I didn’t yet know that I had fucked up, the fuck-up had not truly happened, not yet. Drink helps see things this way – the drink, the Need, means that I can sit here on the sofa, paralysed with low-grade anxiety and fear, but able to deal with those problems because I have drink. Meanwhile the disaster, the possibility of disaster, is all conditional and abstract and positioned safely in a range of possible futures. It’s susceptible to the kind of anaesthesia that drink provides.

What alcohol provides to the alcoholic is delay. It doesn’t make your problems disappear, but it does defer them – it delays the point at which you will have to care about them. The price of this service is steep, but it always looks like a good deal at the time. ‘At the time’ is all that matters. Addiction is a kind of time travel, or the opposite of time travel: the obliteration of all the bad decisions that have led to a moment, and all the possible consequences and horrible unfoldings of that moment, so that only the moment exists. The past is soothed and the future postponed.