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skull – an unstill package, ventilated, evacuated, fibrillated, palpated, catheterised in his polyurethane plastic tent. Lidded eyes scanning the ceiling in coma vigil; muttering delirium; hot, flaccid fingers picking incessantly at the top-sheet; the degradation of tissue; the vital centres irretrievably shutting down. (Entering the darkness; seeing the light; entering the light.) A modern death in a tiled hospital room.
    And yet I was in a position to rewind McGovern to a place in his life – a balmy evening of acapulco gold and sangria, the dogs curled up asleep half on top of one another, William making gazpacho, and then his earnest, comfortable presence in Scott’s canopied Jacobean four-poster – when he seemed inured to unconsciousness and coma and death. Would there be anything in his voice to suggest he could have suspected that blunt-force trauma might be one of life’s surprises waiting further down the road? Any intimation that, deep down, at some hidden level, he suspected that violent death – shards of skull penetrating the brain’s blancmange-like mass, like party wafers; blood vessels contused beyond recognition – was the card he was going to draw?
    Each interview encounter is prefaced by a few inches of test tape, an acknowledgement of the operator’s – my – constant tape-recorder angst. Often the space is filled by the sound of myown voice counting one-two-three-four-blah-blah-blah. Or, if a little drunk (in recent years my usual interviewing condition, no matter how early the hour), a few bars of a bearded old singer-songwriter favourite – something by James Taylor possibly, or ‘Blue’-period Joni Mitchell (‘The Last Time I Saw Richard’, ‘This Flight Tonight’, more often ‘Blue’, songs heavily featured on my marriage’s melancholic soundtrack).
    On many occasions I have made sure the thing is working by recording a snatch of something from a hotel-room television or radio, the juke box in a pub, the air gusting into a taxi, clotted conversational hubbub, the rumble of a train.
    Why is it, I wonder, that these noises, and the accidental, everyday background noises intruding on it once the interview is underway – a door opening or closing, a child calling, a clock striking, an ice-cream van’s chimes, footsteps on a loose floorboard, the clink of cups or glasses, a telephone starting to ring and then being picked up in another room, a window blind unexpectedly snapping up – seem to be a truer record, to hold more of the moment, seem mysterious and powerfully charged, while the words sliding by in the foreground are without exception now as interesting as a wall of wet paint?
    I found the tape with Scott McGovern’s name on it and slipped it into the machine. I heard country sounds – birds singing, the rustle of trees – followed by the pages of a road-map being turned. I fast-forwarded and let the tape run for a couple of minutes until, ignoring the conversation, I recognised the rattle of sangria being poured from the Scandinavian glass jug. I turned the tape over and from the weak halo of echo around the sound could tell the interview was still taking place indoors. I FF-ed again, and when I pressed ‘Play’ knew that by now we were out in the field: Murray, long ago boiled down into fish-glue, could be heard barking in the distance. ‘There were times when I got frightened. Things weren’t going right, so I just went out and got shit-faced. That’s me,’ Scott McGovern was saying. ‘Something goes wrong, I find a bottle. I don’t like it about myself but I’ve done it before and I’ll do it again.’ There was the sound of himdrawing cocaine up into his nose through a strip of magazine page rolled into a narrow tube, and then a protracted silence. And then it started, low at first. The choking sounds. The dry heaves. The wracked sobbing.
    I picked up the phone and, after some stonewalling at his end by Betty Cooper, doing her usual impeccable job of