A period of numbness followed. I went to the corner shop and bought twelve cans of Stella. I smiled at the man behind the counter and said ‘cheers’ when he gave me my change. I walked back to the flat and put the cans in the fridge, except one, which I opened. I looked at the kitchen table, where the contents of my bag were still neatly laid out. I did not feel despair, or anger, or depression. I didn’t feel much of anything at all – just emotional tinnitus, a rising, meaningless clamour within, drowning out any effort to put together a coherent reaction. I did not feel that all was lost: on the contrary, one of the sickly aspects of alcohol’s deadening of consequence was that there was always hope, deluded hope – not hope at all but hope substitute, hope methadone, the dull synthetic buzz that left you thinking that perhaps you still might be able to turn around that 2,000-word profile that was due first thing in the morning, when it is already nine thirty in the morning and not one word has been committed to the screen. Not hope, then, but a continued flight from the implications of what had happened.

One ugly truth: I was now obliged to go out and spend the evening with Pierce, on the possibility that I might be able to do something to recover from the loss of the recordings. I could get his confession again, maybe, or at least a couple of quotes that I might be able to use. Some shreds of a feature that I might be able to take in to show Eddie and Polly on Thursday, or Friday if I decided to go to ground tomorrow. Even as alcohol shuts down my ability to understand anything coherent about the future, it has the extraordinary effect of stretching out that future, so that the eighteen or so hours between now and my appearance in the office tomorrow might be for ever, enough time to do anything, to achieve anything, to right all the wrongs and mishaps that were piling up around me.