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had been any kind of scientist he would realise that results can’t just be magicked up to suit his convenience. But then if he’d been any good at his lab bench he’d not have gone into management, I thought uncharitably.
    After all of this I really wasn’t in the mood for work, so I fed Terry again. The hamster was very uncomplicated, and didn’t comment on me shovelling more rodent mix into his dish but instead started stowing it away in his cheek pouches against potential future famine. I stood and watched as he shuttled backwards and forwards from the bowl to the back of his cage where he thought I didn’t know he kept his secret stash of food. He was in fact the sixteenth hamster I’d had since I’d been an undergraduate – all of whom had been called Terry. There’s not much call for animal research in experimental quantum electrodynamics, but I liked to keep him nearby anyway, just in case I ever needed him. I expect the animal protestors down the road would happily club me over the head and liberate Terry, but he seemed quite contented to me. To be honest, I wouldn’t have minded being clubbed over the head either.
    I sighed and slammed back into the chair and looked once again at the results on the computer, rubbing my temple which had begun to pound. Even this was crap and annoying: something weird was showing up at low-strength magnetic fields. It was almost like a moment where the readings had stopped entirely. Must be a blip.  It wouldn’t be surprising, my equipment had mostly been built by me over the years and was rather erratic. I fiddled around in the raw data for a while but couldn’t find any explanation other than a fault in the recording device, so gave it up and ran the whole set again using some equipment I wheedled from another researcher. I sat and watched it running for a couple of hours before I gave it up and went home.
    I was stupidly nervous on the drive back to the village, worried that I would slip straight back into the bottle when I walked in the door, so as soon as I came in I concentrated on tidying up the destruction I had managed to wreak two weeks before, eventually lugging six bin bags of broken junk over to the dustbins. Outside, the sun had broken through the low clouds and I stopped for a second to watch the cat half-heartedly stalk a starling across the lawn. The bird flew off. 'Bad luck, mate,' I said to Fergus, who sat down and licked a paw as if he hadn't really been trying to catch it.
    On a whim, I went back inside and whipped from room to room, snatching up all of Sarah’s things, and then all the things that reminded me of Sarah, before packing them away into big cardboard boxes.
    As I grabbed the last handful of CDs something small clattered to the floor. I reached down and picked it up: it was an old audio tape. Sarah's Mix Tape 1999 announced the slender strip of label.
    God, I remembered this. It wasn't long after Sarah and I had got together at University when I'd decided to make her a retro compilation of songs that we'd danced to, or that I liked, or that frankly I thought would make me look cool. I'd had to borrow a crappy old boombox from someone down the corridor, but eventually I'd produced this.
    In the intervening years the paper cover had been lost and I couldn't remember what was on it now. I hadn't known she'd kept it all this time. My throat closed and I flicked the tape onto my desk, before grabbing a big pile of post that my wife must have opened whilst I was away and shoved it into the
last box.
    The house looked quite bare with all her stuff gone. When the boxes were full I jammed them into our bedroom, stacking them systematically between the bed and the door. I removed my clothes and stuff and stripped the bed – I wasn’t going to be using this room anytime soon. Finally I pulled the door shut and stepped across the landing to the tiny spare room that I now set up as my temporary sleeping quarters: a single bed, narrow wardrobe, old