‘Thanks,’ said Patrick, slipping hastily out of his overcoat and jacket and rolling up his shirt sleeve. Jesus! There was a black bulge in his skin where he had missed the vein round at Chilly’s. He’d better not let Pierre see this sign of his incompetence and desperation. Pierre was such a moral man. Patrick let the sleeve flop down, undid the gold cufflink of his right sleeve, and rolled that up instead. Fixing was the one activity in which he had become truly ambidextrous. Pierre came back with one full and one empty glass, and a spoon.

Patrick unfolded one of the packets of coke. The shiny white paper was imprinted with a pale blue polar bear. Unlike Pierre he preferred to take coke on its own until the tension and fear were unbearable, then he would send in the Praetorian Guard of heroin to save the day from insanity and defeat. He held the packet in a funnel and tapped it gently. Small grains of powder slipped down the narrow valley of paper and tumbled into the spoon. Not too much for the first fix. Not too little either. Nothing was more intolerable than a dissipated, watery rush. He carried on tapping.

‘How are you?’ asked Pierre, so rapidly that the question seemed like one word.

‘Well, my father died the other day and so . . .’ Patrick was not sure what to say. He looked at the packet, gave it one more decisive tap, and another flurry of powder joined the small heap already in the spoon. ‘And so I’m a little confused at the moment,’ he concluded.

‘How was he, your father?’

‘He was a kitten,’ Patrick intoned rhapsodically. ‘And he had such artistic hands.’ For a moment the water went syrupy and then it dissolved into a clear solution. ‘He could have been Prime Minister,’ he added.

‘He was in politics?’ asked Pierre, narrowing his eyes.

‘No, no,’ Patrick replied, ‘it was a sort of joke. In his world – a world of pure imagination – it was better if a person “could have been” Prime Minister than if he was Prime Minister: that would have shown vulgar ambition.’ There was a faint metallic ringing as he directed the jet of water from his syringe against the side of the spoon.

‘Tu regrettes qu’il est mort?’ asked Pierre shrewdly.

‘Non, absolument pas, je regrette qu’il ait vécu.’

‘Mais sans lui, you would not exist.’

‘One shouldn’t be egotistical about these things,’ said Patrick with a smile.