We end up pissed at my place, Jonathan chopping out lines of coke on the kitchen table. He’s necking vodka that he’s found in my fridge, and telling me some story about how he went to a club in north London called Piss, where men were lying with their heads in the trough, for everyone’s convenience.

‘You know me,’ he says, ‘I can’t pee if there’s anyone else around, so this was my worst nightmare, but eventually I’d drunk so much I was past caring, and if I didn’t go I was going to wet myself, so I just think what the hell and stand over this old bald bloke in a rubber vest who’s lying there in all the muck. And I’ve got it out and I’m about to piss in his mouth and he looks up at me and turns his head to one side and says “No. Not you.”’

Jonathan starts laughing hysterically.

‘No! Not you!’ He puts on a silly old queen voice. ‘No! Not you!’ He knocks back a large neat vodka. ‘My God,’ he says, ‘I’ve put up with a lot of rejection in my life, but that really takes the biscuit.’

I’m laughing too, but now I realise that Jonathan is crying, or at least it looks as if he might be. It’s so hard to tell.

‘Don’t take it to heart,’ I say. ‘There’s plenty more fish in the sea.’

We carry on drinking and doing lines and when I wake up in the morning, Jonathan is cradled in my arms like a drunken child.

I’m on autopilot at work these days. People occasionally say ‘You’re very quiet’ but that suits me. I’m there to earn a living, not to make friends. Anna keeps her distance. Derek watches me like a hawk. Simon sometimes brings me cups of tea or stops for a chat, or sends me jokey little emails that usually end by asking me out for lunch, but I’m always too busy.

I don’t have a sex life any more, not since Stuart left. I don’t even wank. I go to the gym and I see people looking at me, smiling at me, looking over their shoulders as they walk towards the sauna or the steam room, but I can’t be bothered to follow, and eventually the offers dry up. Even Sauna Slut isn’t waving his willy at me any more. I feel like a beautifully sculpted block of ice.

Sometimes I go to a gay sauna, in an attempt to thaw myself out. There’s one up the road from the flat, and it’s always busy, any hour of the day or night. The minute I walk in, I’m surrounded. I’m not the only gym body in the place – there are maybe three or four of us, each the focus of a sort of feeding frenzy. I move from the changing room into the shower, from shower to sauna, from sauna to steam room, from steam room to maze, from maze to cabin, always with a school of hungry scavengers around me. I let them feed. If I take a bit of Tina, or a bit of GHB or Viagra, whatever’s on offer, I can get it up, which is what they want. But I never come. When they realise they’re not going to get anything out of me, they move on, to make way for others.