She goes home in September. Manila is a long way from Manchester. I don’t know what will happen after that.

Once a moth came into her room. It fluttered round the light bulb and landed on a cupboard.

Back home, some people reckon moths are dead friends or relatives come to visit, she told me.

I’m an atheist.

She’s Catholic.

Hello Granddad, she said to the moth.

One night she asked me to play her a song. Choose something that makes the hairs stand up on the back of your neck, she told me. Then she disappeared into the bathroom, leaving me kneeling next to the rack of CDs.

I chose ‘I Am Trying To Break Your Heart’ by Wilco. I bought that album (‘Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’) the week after an old girlfriend broke up with me. I would listen to it every day, sometimes two or three or four or five times.

“I am an American aquarium drinker,” it opens.

I was living, then, in my friend’s one-bedroom flat: sleeping on her foldout sofa-bed, my first year out of university, going nuts. I’d wait until the friend left for work and play it on her stereo. I would arrange the best three photos I had of my ex-girlfriend on my knees and look at them.

When she came out of the bathroom, she said: Well? and we lay on my bed and I played it for her.

Now it would remind me of her, too, I thought.

A song, it seems, collects memories like dust. A song, it seems, goes round in a circle eventually. It is always on repeat.

Now that’s a first line, I whispered to her. “I am an American aquarium drinker.”

When it finished she asked for a copy.

Now it would remind her of me, too, I thought.

Last night I was sitting here, checking my e-mails, and listening to ‘Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’ (track one), when I heard a buzzing coming from the desk behind my laptop. It was a moth, on its back, humming, its wings against the desk, going round in circles, trying to right itself. I got an old till receipt and tried to slide it underneath – to flip the moth the right way over – but I just nudged it under a tangle of wires.

The moth fluttered. It got itself out again.

Again I tried to get that receipt under it, but it fell still.

Goodbye Granddad, I thought.

She will read this.

She goes home in September.

Chris Killen was born in 1981, and is currently living in Manchester. He recently completed his first novel. For more information please visit: www.thebirdroom.org.uk.

© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.