Jefferson stopped the taxi a few blocks beyond the bridge and Patrick sat down on the rubber floor mat with his back against the door.

‘How much you want?’ asked Jefferson, leaning over the driver’s seat.

‘Oh, five bags. And get a couple for yourself,’ said Patrick, handing over seventy dollars.

‘Thanks,’ said Jefferson. ‘I’m gonna lock the doors now. You stay outta sight, right?’

‘Right,’ said Patrick, sliding down further and stretching out on the floor. The bolts of all the doors slithered into place. Patrick wriggled around for some time before curling up in a foetal position with his head on the central hump. After a few moments his hip bone was persecuting his liver and he felt hopelessly tangled up in the folds of his overcoat. He twisted around onto his front, rested his head in his hands, and stared at the grooves in the floor mat. There was quite a strong smell of oil down at this level. ‘It gives you a whole new perspective on life,’ said Patrick, in the voice of a television housewife.

It was intolerable. Everything was intolerable. He was always getting into these situations, always ending up with the losers, the dregs, the Chilly Willys of life. Even at school he had been sent every Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, when the other boys joined their teams and played their matches, to remote playing fields with every variety of sporting misfit: the pale and sensitive musicians, the hopelessly fat Greek boys, and the disaffected cigarette-smoking protesters who regarded physical exertion as hopelessly uncool. As a punishment for their unsporting natures, these boys were forced to make their way round an assault course. Mr Pitch, the overwrought pederast in charge of this unwholesome squad, quivered with excitement and malice as each boy crashed myopically, waddled feebly, or tried to beat the system by running around the wall at the beginning of the course. While the Greeks splattered into the mud, and the music scholars lost their spectacles, and the conscientious objectors made their cynical remarks, Mr Pitch rushed about screaming abuse at them about their ‘privileged’ lives and, if the opportunity arose, kicking them in the bottom.

What the hell was going on? Had Jefferson gone to fetch some friends so they could beat him up together, or was he simply being abandoned while Jefferson went to get stoned?

Yes, thought Patrick, shifting restlessly, he had hung out with nothing but failures. Living in Paris when he was nineteen, he had fallen in with Jim, an Australian heroin smuggler on the run, and Simon, a black American bank robber just out of prison. He could remember Jim saying, as he had searched for a vein among the thick orange hairs of his forearm, ‘Australia’s so beautiful in the spring, man. All the little lambs frisking about. You can tell they’re just so happy to be alive.’ He had pushed the plunger down with a whimsical expression on his face.