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I got to the door of my one-bedroom apartment and fumbled for the key – fumbled because suddenly the idea of avoiding people, or of not avoiding people, or of even having to consider the question one way or the other, was making me feel apprehensive, and vulnerable. It also occurred to me for the first time that I had no idea how this situation was going to develop, and that potentially it could develop in any direction. Then I was thinking to myself, oh shit, if something weird happens here, if anything goes wrong, if bad stuff happens, if things get ugly …

But I stopped myself short and stood motionless for awhile, staring at the brass inset on the door with my name on it. I tried to gauge how I was reacting to all of this, tried to calibrate it in some way, and I decided pretty quickly that it wasn’t the drug at all, it was me. I was just panicking. Like an idiot.

I took a deep breath, put the key in the lock and opened the door. I flicked on the light-switch and gazed in for a few seconds, gazed in at the cosy, familiar, slightly cramped living space I’d occupied for more than six years. But in the course of those few seconds something in my perception of the room must have shifted, because all of a sudden it felt unfamiliar, too cramped, a little alien even, and certainly not a place that was very conducive to work.

I stepped inside and closed the door behind me.

Then, with my jacket barely off and draped on a chair, I found myself taking some books down from a shelf above the stereo system – a shelf where they didn’t belong – and putting them on to another shelf, one where they did belong. Next, I was surveying the room, feeling edgy, impatient, dissatisfied about something – though what exactly I didn’t know. I soon realized that I was looking for a starting point, and I eventually found one in my collection of nearly four hundred classical and jazz CDs, which were strewn everywhere about the apartment, some out of their cases, and of course in no particular order.

I alphabetized them.

In one go, in one uninterrupted burst. I gathered them all on to the floor in the middle of the room, divided them into two separate piles, each of which I then subdivided into further categories, such as swing, be-bop, fusion, baroque, opera and so on. I then put each category into alphabetical order. Hampton, Hawkins, Herman. Schubert, Schumann, Smetana. When that was done I realized that there was nowhere for them all to fit, no one place that would hold four hundred CDs, so I set about re-arranging the furniture.

I moved my desk over to the other side of the room, creating a whole new storage area where I could put boxes of papers that had previously occupied shelf space. I then used this space to house the CDs. Next, I repositioned various free-standing items, a small table I used as a dining area, a chest of drawers, the TV and VCR unit. After that, I reshelved all of my books, weeding out about a hundred and fifty: cheap-edition crime, horror and science-fiction novels that I would never read again and could easily get rid of. These I put into two black plastic sacks, which I got from a cupboard out in the hallway. Then I took another sack and started going through all of the papers on my desk, and in the drawers of the desk. I was fairly ruthless and threw out things I’d been keeping for no good reason, stuff that if I died my unfortunate executor would have no hesitation in throwing out either, because what was he going to do with it … what was he going to do with old love letters, pay slips, gas and electric bills, yellowed typescripts of abandoned articles, instruction manuals for consumer durables I no longer possessed, holiday brochures the holidays of which I hadn’t gone on … Jesus, it occurred to me – as I stuffed all of this garbage into a bag – the shit we leave behind us for other people to sort out. Not that I had any intention of dying, of course, but I did have this overwhelming impulse to reduce the clutter in my apartment. And in my life too, I suppose, because I then set about organizing my work materials – folders full of press cuttings, illustrated books, slides, computer files – the underlying idea being to get the project moving in order to get it finished, and finished in order to make room for something else, something more ambitious maybe.

When my desk was all tidied up, I decided to go into the kitchen for a glass of water. I was thirsty and hadn’t had anything to drink since I got in. It didn’t occur to me at that point that I rarely drank water. In fact, it didn’t occur to me at that point that the whole set-up was odd – odd that the kitchen hadn’t been my first port of call on arriving home, odd that there wasn’t already a can of beer in my hand.

But neither did it occur to me as odd that on my way across the living-room floor I should stop briefly to re-align the couch and the armchair.