I keep hearing the tune. Not out loud, of course. It’s just that some mornings, usually when I’ve had too much to drink the night before, I wake up at first light and find it running through my head: Mete üöbik oo tänabu. It’s been more than twenty-five years. And I only heard it once, or at the most twice. In any case nobody died of it, as far as I know. The music probably isn’t fatal, no more than any other of those things that stay with you, the smell of toast, say, or the mauve fluttering the gasfire used to make when you lit it, or the scrape of a stylus across the shiny black grooves of a vinyl record. Remember how the silence before the track started used to be amplified, too? You could probably kill someone using memories if you kept at it long enough.

          I used to keep all the essentials of life on a rug in front of the fire: a jar of coffee, a jar of Coffee-Mate, an electric kettle, bread, butter, honey, a toasting-fork improvised out of a wire coathanger, books and papers, a scattered trail of LPs that led to the stereo. The records mostly belonged to Luke, who had thrown out my Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits and my Crime of the Century and my Tubular Bells, and was taking charge of my musical education. After an evening in the pub, we would end up in my room, which was bigger than Tobias’s on the other side of the passage and more conveniently situated than Luke’s attic-room. I would sit by the gasfire and make coffee while Luke hung over the stereo, so he could take off a record halfway through a track when he decided he’d grown out of it, and Tobias, as usual after a few pints, thrashed about heavily on the bed, claiming to be possessed.