‘Can’t say.’ He turned the gain up to about half-strength and pressed the ‘play’ key. The machine began to emit the usual ‘white noise’ and machine noises and the gentle susurrus of his breathing; nothing else. I was embarrassed for him, wished he hadn’t started this nonsense, wondered how I could help him talk his way out of the letdown.

‘D’you hear it?’ he asked suddenly.

‘Oh, Christ, he really is barmy,’ I thought, making an apologetic grimace at him, as one does to chaps who point out pink elephants in the corners of a room. He turned up the gain – and I heard it. A soft, infinitely distant twittering, then a chuckle and a protracted cackle which rose and fell in an oddly odious way.

He tinkered with the volume and speed-controls here and there and played with the ‘cue’ and ‘review’ keys until suddenly, rising clear and sweet over a tangle of gibberish, a laughing voice quite clearly said:

‘FILTH! Filthy sot! Filthy sot! Filthyfilthy filthyfilthy filthyfilthy,’ on a rising scale which ended with a bat-like shrill which hurt the ears. Eric pressed the ‘pause’ key and looked at me, his eyes brimming with happy tears.

‘That’s my mummy,’ he said. ‘She worries about me a lot.’

There was a time when a remark like that would have given me no trouble: I would have tossed off a rejoinder both witty and respectful, but I am no longer the man I once was. All I could find to say was, ‘Really?’

‘Oh, yes,’ he said, ‘she usually comes on before the others start and says something playful.’

‘Others?’

‘Oh, lots of others. Let’s try.’

He fiddled with the knobs and things again and, in a little while, isolated a hoarse, gin-soaked voice, choking with passion, which said ‘De profundis clamavt ad te, Domine’ again and again in tones of bitter reproach.

‘Not anyone from antiquity,’ said Eric. ‘That’s the sort of Latin that Irish priests still learn in their seminaries today. The speed’s not quite right; he sounds lighter than that if one can hit the exact speed.’

‘Oscar Wilde on his death-bed?’ I couldn’t help asking.

‘Do you know, you might be right, I really think you might.’

We did not have much more luck, if that’s a suitable word, from then on. Someone did some peculiarly unpleasant laughing, Eric’s mother came through again in a flurry of animal noises and seemed to accuse him of having practised something which would have brought a blush to the hairy cheeks of old Krafft-Ebing himself (‘She will have her little joke,’ Eric murmured uneasily) and, near the end, a still, small voice delivered a message plainly intended for me, concerning a matter which Eric could not possibly have known about, and with which I do not propose to trouble the reader at this point. Or ever.