“Is that Andrea? I’m sorry he’s not, dear. He’s spending Christmas in New York. How are you? London, isn’t it? Rather you than me, dear.”

“Do you have a number for him?”

“I don’t, but he calls us every Sunday after Evensong.”

“I’ve a new number. Can you pass it on?”

“A new number? Another?” Her voice rising a little. “Are you all right, dear? Richard and I worry about you, you know, you and Peter. The world’s just so very big, isn’t it? But I suppose you like it. London, all the shows and exhibitions, so much to offer a young person … You will wear a warm coat, won’t you? Don’t be going out without one.”

Two cans of Stella and a £1 pizza for tea. London with everything to offer and nothing to spare. Unrelenting in its teachings, the bank letting you go over your overdraft, then charging you 16 quid for it, so when your rent fell you went over again and they charged you again. Caught and fined when you jumped the barrier on the underground because you were a quid short of the fare and you didn’t want to be late and lose another job.

Life a national insurance number, a golden reference from Uncle Darren, and the long weekends spent in dark clubs, the black-haired, blank-faced girl dancing on the podium; weekends spent like coins thumbed hard into slots machines, which paid out with blaring jingles and a dazzle of lights, three-day comedowns, strangers’ bodies, the grasped-for moments of self-forgetting always just beyond reach. Moving from one circle of people to the next. Two weeks is how long it takes to shrug a friend, unless you owe them money, of course.

I owed everybody money. I didn’t wear a warm coat. I was a knife, a blade. I cut. I was cut. I didn’t know the difference. A new address, a new agency, a new SIM card. A set of friends abandoned. Another adopted. Rinse and repeat.

Coke and pills, drinks, a smoke, a vally, then a fit of some kind on the bathroom floor of a stranger’s house. Like the old lady who swallowed a fly, I wriggled and jiggled. Em was standing in the doorway, in a black dress, holding a black phone. “Not possible, Andy,” she said into the receiver. “Not possible.”

But it wasn’t even that that did it. I missed her. Peter too, but Em most of all. I’d have kept at it if I got to see her again. Truth is, I only ever followed in my mother’s footsteps as far as the foothills of the Appetites. Never scaled her heights. It wasn’t in me. It wasn’t moral strength. I just didn’t have the stamina.