12 years he’d been there, and now he was moving on.

“End of era and all that shite,” he said as I filled a bin-liner

with some of the junk that inevitably accumulates after

 

spending more than a decade living in one place. I could tell

apprehension was creeping in a little; not so much the

moving out part as the moving in with someone else. It

 

wasn’t emotional as such, because the last year had been

all about drinking and talking, about how he was sick of

‘this fucking flat’. But we’d had a lot of laughs, a lot of nights

 

fucked-up on this and that, listening to loud music at 3

in the morning and putting the world to rights. I still had the

spare key. When I was living in a hostel I would come round

 

during the day while he was at work, let myself in and make

coffee and write crap poems with titles like: ‘Coming on

the Face of God’. Emptying a drawer, we found the little

 

mirror that we had used as the chopping-board for powders.

Scratched, smeared and cracked, it shattered as I dropped

it in the bag. Like us, it tried not to reflect too much.