Hadley looks terrible. His face is sunken, his eyes protruding, his ears sticking out from the side of his skull. ‘Fuck,’ says Jonathan, ‘she looks like Gollum.’ There’s a long crooked wound on the left-hand side of his throat, the edges angry and pink around the stitches. He’s wearing a pair of hospital pyjamas, but you can see how the skin, once stretched by his massive muscles, is hanging off him. It’s only a few weeks since I last saw him, but he looks like a different species.

‘Hadley, darling,’ says Jonathan.

We’ve brought nothing; Jonathan said it would be throwing money away, that we should save it for a wreath.

Hadley opens a gummy eye. ‘Hey, Nate.’

‘It’s Jonathan, actually,’ he snaps. ‘Look. Here’s Robbie to see you. You always did like Robbie.’

‘Aaah …’ He raises a weak hand. ‘The Robster. Good to see you, man. Looking hot.’ He starts coughing. It obviously causes him a great deal of pain.

‘You sound terrible, Hadley,’ says Jonathan, casting a snooty eye over the Get Well cards that crowd the bedside cabinet. ‘You ought to suck a Fisherman’s Friend.’

Hadley laughs, which hurts too.

‘Where’s Nico?’ asks Jonathan.

‘Oh …’ Hadley gestures with a hand that has a drip stuck into the back of it. ‘He’s away … Working …’

‘And we all know the sort of work he’s doing,’ says Jonathan, but quietly, so only I can hear. Then he says out loud, ‘What a shame he can’t be by your side. After all you’ve done for him.’

Hadley’s gone very quiet. A nurse comes over to change a dressing, and we leave.

‘That was unnecessary,’ I say, as we light cigarettes outside. ‘The poor guy is dying.’

‘Yes. Isn’t it marvellous.’ Jonathan inhales deeply. ‘No more fags for Hadley.’

‘You don’t think he’ll come out alive?’

‘I sincerely hope not.’

‘God, what did he do to you?’

‘Oh, nothing much,’ says Jonathan. ‘Just a small matter of threatening to kill me.’

And so the whole story comes out, about how Jonathan’s £3,000 drug debt escalated to the point that Hadley gave him a week to sort himself out, and when the week was up he sent a large man round to Jonathan’s house in the middle of the night to frighten him, and that’s when Jonathan decided that the only solution to his predicament was theft, and went down to Hadley’s gallery to help himself to photographs of vomit. Even though I still can’t fully condone Jonathan’s descent into crime, it suddenly seems like a much more viable option.

‘Anyway,’ says Jonathan, ‘I’ve been punished for it. I felt so bad about the whole thing that I … Well. You know what I did. Silly me.’

This is the nearest Jonathan has ever come to telling me why he tried to kill himself. He likes everyone to think that he’s entirely superficial, and is embarrassed by any suggestion of depth. So am I.

To lighten the mood, we go into Soho for a drink or ten. Jonathan knows everyone in every bar we go in. There’s kisses and hugs and he even pays for a round, which is a first. I suspect he’s still dealing. Obviously his dark night of the soul has taught him nothing.