I shrugged. Once again Pierce had turned my interview into an interrogation of me. I was still trying to mentally accommodate his admission about Night Traffic. A fraud. It was a fraud. And I did not yet know my response to that. There are journalistic clichés: ‘stunned’, ‘shocked’, ‘reeling’, ‘taken aback’. Those would work, but not well. It was more a troubling in-between state, waiting for feedback that isn’t coming, and feeling nothing in the meantime. Being lost, and getting out your phone to check the map – but it doesn’t load. You see the little dot marking your location, but on a field of grey. And here he was drilling information out of me. I was pitted with the sense of having shared too much from my own darkness. Pierce was impressive, for sure. The unembarrassed way he questioned, the way he handled the answers – that ‘very good answer’ there, a bit of positive reinforcement to help the subject, me, along, making me want to share more. A natural journalist, whereas I had spent a decade scraping by and pretending.

‘The first time was very much what you’d imagine, you know,’ I said. ‘I was frightened …’

‘How was it confusing?’

I drank from my beer. ‘There’s a moment, a time when you don’t know what’s happening – you’re being mugged but you don’t know it for sure just yet, you haven’t figured it out, you don’t know what this guy, this stranger, wants – you don’t realise that the rules have been … that they don’t apply any more, that different rules apply, different roles. It’s confusing. You’re moved very quickly from one situation, a normal situation, to an abnormal situation, and it takes some time to catch up. And the second time – the very fact it was the second time, it had happened before, made it different. I knew what was going on, but … it was still a very confusing experience.’

In truth, the second time had not been confusing at all. My emotions, at the time, had been very clear – more than clear, blinding, revelatory. Only in retrospect did I feel conflicted about what had happened and began to see that my reaction had been … perverse. ‘Confusing’ was a handy word to slap on that mess. Pierce was, once more, looking at me to expand, and I didn’t feel inclined to.

‘Let’s talk about you,’ I said. ‘I’m supposed to be the interviewer.’

‘Why?’ Pierce said. ‘You’re not recording.’

Not as far as he knew. ‘I assume you’ll want to go on the record at some point.’