I get as far as the gym door before I can persuade my feet to stop, and even then I’m sure my kit bag is actually trying to pull me inside, but I turn around and get on a bus and I’m re-reading the text Jonathan sent me earlier, and it’s obvious now that this wasn’t a shoe crisis. Or at least, if it was, it was a particularly bad one.

‘He called 999 just before he became unconscious,’ says the ward sister, who won’t let me see him until she’s ‘filled me in’ a bit. ‘He’s taken an overdose of sleeping pills. Did you know that he was taking them?’ She sounds like she’s accusing me of something. I almost say, ‘Darling, we’re all taking them,’ because I haven’t had a night without Valium for weeks, but what comes out is, ‘No, he never mentioned it.’

They’ve pumped his stomach and now they’re waiting for him to come round. They won’t know for a while what exactly he took, but whatever it was was washed down with red wine. If he comes round –1 don’t like the ‘if – there may be some brain damage. I can hear Jonathan saying, ‘Oh fuck, does that mean that I won’t be able to co-ordinate accessories any more?’ and I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. He’s lying on a hospital bed with a ventilator mask over his face and a drip in his arm.

‘I’ll leave you with him,’ says the nurse. ‘If anything happens, just press the button.’

Nothing happens.

I sit with Jonathan for an hour, staring at him, occasionally holding his hand, looking out of the window at the amazing view of London spread out before me. It’s vast and impersonal and I wonder how I ever thought I could make a home here. Night is falling and the street lights are on. I look for landmarks but the angle is unfamiliar and I can’t work out where I am at all.

My phone beeps. It’s a text from Stuart, with the usual arrangements for tonight. I start replying, but the sister hurries over and tells me I can’t use my phone on the ward, I’ll have to go outside. So I just turn it off and don’t bother to reply and sit back down by Jonathan’s bed.

The possibility that Jonathan might die, might have wanted to die, hits me hard, and I almost bring something up from my stomach, something cold. We have not been good to each other. I have not been good to him. He asked me for help when he was in trouble and I turned him down. For all I know he’s been through hell over that money he owed to Hadley, and he’s obviously been taking more drugs than are good for him, otherwise we wouldn’t be here. I cut him out because I had problems of my own, and now my oldest friend is unconscious in a hospital bed and I can’t help feeling that it’s partly my fault. I should have been with him. We should have got each other through our troubles, taking the piss and bickering because that’s the only way we can show that we care, but instead life and clubs and boyfriends and jobs became more important than friendship and I forgot what Jonathan really means to me. And why, just perhaps why, he has been such a pain in the arse in recent months.