I’m not there – it’s one of the few nights I’ve bothered to go home, for warmth and for another handout. Spike was the one to find him and I get nightmares imagining what Ham’s face looked like, that red beard surrounding bloodless blue lips. We hold our own funeral service, decorating a bench on the Prom with flowers we nick from Tesco. Then we get high to take away the pain. This time, it’s heroin, and by the end of the night I can’t picture him anymore. Death isn’t that unusual on the streets but it’s enough to freak Zoë out and she disappears from Brighton to get clean.

So now it’s only Spike and me. We can’t bear to go to the Prom because it reminds us of Ham, so we mostly hang out on our favourite tomb behind St Nick’s church, chasing oblivion.

Today is no different. Till I realize I’m dying, for the third time.

Except this time it’s not on purpose.

‘Spike . . . I’m crashing . . .’

He’s out of it. Snoring.

Christmas shoppers are walking past, scowling and tutting, like we’ve walked into a church in the middle of a funeral and started swearing.

My funeral?

They are my only hope, the tutting people. I know my ICD should protect me again. But the wave of fear that’s travelling through me convinces me I can’t survive this. That whatever shocks my black box might generate, it won’t be enough.

That without help, I will die.

Unexpectedly, I don’t want to.

My limbs won’t co-ordinate and my mouth is spouting gibberish. Come on, come on! Shout, scream, anything.

‘Help me. I’m fucking dying here!’

I come round in the ambulance, more sober than I’ve been in months.

‘Back with us, then, lovey?’ A paramedic older than my mother pats my hand. ‘Don’t worry. You’re going to be fine, now. Till the next time, at least.’

Narcan. It has to be. Other junkies talk in awed tones about the miracles it creates: about dead men walking again, blue-faced corpses pinking up within seconds of receiving the Lazarus drug.

‘Can you tell me who you are?

‘Joel. My name’s Joel.’

‘Good lad, Joel. And can you tell me the date?’

‘December. 2003. Is it the twelfth? Fourteenth?’

‘The twenty-first but you’re near enough. How do you feel?’

‘I feel . . .’ Relieved. And very nauseous. ‘I want to be . . .’

‘All right, lovey,’ she says, managing to get a cardboard dish under my mouth in time to stop any vomit hitting the floor of the ambulance, though some runs down my chest.

I claw at my stinking T-shirt, trying to pull it off. The paramedic does it for me, raising my arms and rolling the fabric up. She has tinsel wrapped around her neck. I hadn’t even realized it was so close to Christmas.