‘Let me give you the address anyhow,’ Anne insisted. ‘I don’t like the idea of your being alone too much.’

‘Fine. Write it down for me before I go.’

He knew he had to take some speed soon or involuntarily take up Anne’s offer to ‘lie down for a few hours’. He did not want to swallow a whole Beauty, because it would take him on a fifteen-hour megalomaniac odyssey, and he didn’t want to be that conscious. On the other hand, he had to get rid of the feeling that he had been dropped into a pool of slowly drying concrete.

‘Where’s the loo?’

Anne told him how to get there, and Patrick waded across the carpet in the direction she had indicated. Once he had locked the bathroom door Patrick felt a familiar sense of security. Inside a bathroom he could give in to the obsession with his own physical and mental state which was so often compromised by the presence of other people or the absence of a well-lit mirror. Most of the ‘quality time’ in his life had been spent in a bathroom. Injecting, snorting, swallowing, stealing, overdosing; examining his pupils, his arms, his tongue, his stash.

‘O bathrooms!’ he intoned, spreading out his arms in front of the mirror. ‘Thy medicine cabinets pleaseth me mightily! Thy towels moppeth up the rivers of my blood . . .’ He petered out as he took the Black Beauty from his pocket. He was just going to take enough to function, just enough to . . . what had he been about to say? He couldn’t remember. My God, it was short-term memory loss again, the Professor Moriarty of drug abuse, interrupting and then obliterating the precious sensations one went to such trouble to secure.

‘Inhuman fiend,’ he muttered.

The black capsule eventually came apart and he emptied half the contents onto one of the Portuguese tiles around the basin. Taking out one of his new hundred-dollar notes, he rolled it into a tight tube and sniffed up the small heap of white powder from the tile.

His nose stung and his eyes watered slightly but, refusing to be distracted, Patrick resealed the capsule, wrapped it in a Kleenex, put it back in his pocket and then, for no reason he could identify, almost against his will, he took it out again, emptied the rest of the powder onto a tile and sniffed it up as well. The effects wouldn’t last so long this way, he argued, inhaling deeply through his nose. It was too sordid to take half of anything. Anyhow, his father had just died and he was entitled to be confused. The main thing, the heroic feat, the proof of his seriousness and his samurai status in the war against drugs, was that he hadn’t taken any heroin.