‘It’s all right. You can keep them.’ He pats his round pot of a stomach. ‘They’re no good to me.’

I put the photo carefully back down on the table. ‘How did you two meet?’

‘Oh, dear, that’s rather a long story.’ Michael sits down, pours the tea. ‘I’ll tell you one day, if you’re really interested.’

‘I am.’

‘But not today, if you don’t mind.’ He hands me the tea; his hands are shaking slightly, making the spoon rattle in the saucer. ‘I don’t feel like wallowing in the past. I want to hear about you. About young people.’

‘I don’t feel very young at the moment.’ I want to tell him about Stuart, about Jonathan, about work, but I’m ashamed.

‘Nonsense,’ he says. ‘You’ve got your whole life ahead of you.’

I have a sudden flash of the next twenty years spent in clubs and gyms, fending off unwanted threesomes, struggling through the come-downs, watching my body decay and doing everything I can to disguise it, waking up one day in my forties and looking like one of those middle-aged men with shiny faces and starved bodies who haunt the clubs like ghosts.

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘I suppose so.’

‘Youth is wasted on the young,’ says Michael, putting a hand briefly on my knee. ‘But try to be happy, if you possibly can. I really recommend it.’

‘And are you happy, Michael? Here?’

He looks around, shrugs, lays his hands out open on his lap. ‘I’m all right. I had my share of happiness.’

When I leave, after an hour, I promise that I’ll come to see him more often. The bus home takes forty minutes.

Jonathan is making excellent progress, say the doctors, and he’ll be out by the middle of the week, and it’s up to his friends to make sure that he looks after himself.

He’s sitting up in bed with his headphones on, wearing a particularly offensive grey hoodie covered in brightly coloured death’s heads and dollar signs. He’s reading, or at least looking at the pictures in, a book.

‘He’s so much like me,’ he says, pulling out his earphones. ‘We were both bullied at school. We both had fathers who hit us. It’s amazing.’ He puts the book down, breaking the spine. It is, of course, Lukas’s ‘long-awaited’ autobiography, simply entitled Me.

‘Hello, Jonathan.’ I kiss him, and give him a bunch of enormous chrysanthemums. He receives them like a diva taking a curtain call.

‘Oh my God, thank you, thank you so much,’ he says, going into Gwyneth Paltrow Oscar speech mode. ‘Have my people put them in water.’

He seems well enough to answer a few burning questions.

‘So, Jonathan. What the hell happened?’

‘You know how it is,’ he says, ‘I just never know when to stop.’

‘The nurse told me that you’d taken a massive overdose of Valium.’

‘Oh, she’s always exaggerating.’

‘Washed down with red wine.’

‘Yummy,’ he says, without much enthusiasm.

‘What was that for? Just to make sure you did the job properly?’