‘I remember,’ said Patrick soothingly.

The rush was over, and like a surfer who shoots out of a tube of furling, glistening sea only to peter out and fall among the breaking waves, his thoughts began to scatter before the onset of boundless unease. Only a few minutes after the fix he felt a harrowing nostalgia for the dangerous exhilaration which was already dying out. As if his wings had melted in that burst of light, he felt himself falling towards a sea of unbearable disappointment, and it was this that made him pick up the syringe, finish flushing it out and, despite his shaking hands, begin to prepare another fix.

‘Do you think the measure of a perversion is its need to be repeated, its inability to be satisfied?’ he asked Pierre. ‘I wish my father were around to answer that question,’ he added piously.

‘Why? He was a junkie?’

‘No, no . . .’ said Patrick. He wanted to say, ‘it was a kind of joke’ again, but resisted. ‘What sort of man was your father?’ he asked hastily, in case Pierre followed up his remark.

‘He was a fonctionnaire,’ said Pierre contemptuously, ‘Métro, boulot, dodo. His happiest days were his service militaire, and the proudest moment of his life was when the Minister congratulated him for saying nothing. Can you imagine? Each time someone visited the house, which was not often, my father would tell the same story.’ Pierre straightened his back, smiled complacently, and wagged his finger. ‘ “Et Monsieur le Ministre m’a dit, Vous avez eu raison de ne rien dire.” When he told that story I used to run from the room. It fill me with disgust, j’avais un dégoût total.’

‘And your mother?’ said Patrick, pleased to have got Pierre off his own parental case.

‘What is a woman who is not maternal?’ snapped Pierre. ‘A piece of furniture with breasts!’

‘Quite,’ said Patrick, sucking a new solution into his syringe. As a concession to Pierre’s medical advice, he had decided to take some heroin rather than further delay the onset of serenity with another chilling shot of cocaine.

‘You have to leave all that behind,’ said Pierre. ‘Parents, all that shit. You have to invent yourself again to become an individual.’

‘Right on,’ said Patrick, knowing it was best not to argue with Pierre’s theories.

‘The Americans, they talk all the time about individuality, but they don’t have an idea unless everybody else is having the same idea at the same time. My American customers, they always fuck me about to show they are individuals, but they always do it in exactly the same way. Now I have no American customers.’

‘People think they are individuals because they use the word “I” so often,’ Patrick commented.