‘I had an uncle who got the shakes,’ Pierce said. ‘He used to stay with us at Christmas. Divorced, and my cousins had their own families by then and didn’t want to know. I don’t have any colourful stories about him. He didn’t get shitfaced and fall about or anything like that. It was painfully clear that he was on his best behaviour, for us, for his brother. By the middle of the afternoon his hands would be shaking so badly he was barely able to roll a cigarette. He died when I was a teenager – when he was only in his fifties.’

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to associate myself with Pierce’s tragic uncle, and I didn’t know what else I could say. What I wanted to do was to come up with a story that would pass off the shaking as something other than what it was, but my mind was blank, nothing came. I could not construct an alternative universe in which the comparison was unfair. It was fair. All I could do was stay quiet.

‘I must admit, I don’t often think about that uncle,’ Pierce continued. ‘Remembering him now, what comes to mind is … He was my father’s older brother but you would never have guessed that from looking at them. Sure, he looked older, more beaten-up, but he completely deferred to my father, let himself be ordered about, nagged, all very meekly. Almost like a child.’

‘Maybe he wanted that,’ I said, and I was surprised to find myself talking at all, and interested to know what I was going to say next. ‘Someone taking charge. A voice outside the head.’

Pierce stared hard at me, not with and not without kindness, as if slightly refracted by a thick layer of invisibly transparent material between us.

‘Quin told me you were a drunk,’ Pierce said.

I had never been called that before. The word was there, always at the periphery of my thoughts about myself, but I put great effort into excluding it.

‘He said you were steaming drunk when you met him, and that you smelled of old booze,’ Pierce went on. ‘He wasn’t impressed. You know him – a monk. Fresh pomegranate and plain yoghurt for breakfast, cycling everywhere. Determined to see in the singularity. Your thingie, your Dictaphone, was out of batteries and you tried to make notes. The interview was full of mistakes and quotes lifted from other places.’