There are waiters going round with trays of drinks, they’re all wearing tight black T-shirts and black jeans, and I’m pretty sure that one of them is the Romanian gypsy that I saw with Hadley in Soho a few weeks ago, but I could be wrong because they all look the same. Perhaps Hadley has imported an entire Romanian village, or encampment, or whatever they live in. They are working the room very efficiently and there is so much drink that I am already wondering if I might have to have flu tomorrow morning, and spend a few extra hours in bed.

Hadley fights his way through the crowd to welcome us, and he’s grown quite a lot since the last time I saw him. The material of his grey Abercrombie and Fitch T-shirt actually appears to be thinner than his brick-red skin, which has got thicker, probably as a result of too many sunbeds. His biceps are so pumped up they look like bags of rocks, with thick white veins crawling over the surface.

‘Nate, Robbie,’ he says. Nate? ‘Great you could come.’ His eyelashes are wet, his eyes twinkling brightly blue, like doll’s eyes stuck in the wrong face. Jonathan offers to kiss him on the cheek, but Hadley pulls back, and instead grabs my right nipple and tweaks it hard. ‘Help yourself to anything you like,’ he says, ‘but not Nico.’ He nods towards one of the interchangeable bits of foreign trade. ‘He’s mine. Say hello, Nico.’

Nico manages to say hello in a way that sounds flirtatious and contemptuous at the same time; I must perfect that. All his clothes are expensively frayed, and don’t actually cover much of his body. I can see a thick bush of pubic hair filling the gap between his shirt and the waistband of his trousers. It looks very warm, and I’m tempted to stick my hand in and find out, but he’s already turned his back on us to take a phone call.

‘I have to go, Hadley,’ he says. ‘I need money.’

Hadley peels off three twenty-pound notes. ‘There you go.’

‘I need more,’ he says, and gets another forty.

‘He’s got to pay his college fees,’ says Hadley, who might be blushing but it’s impossible to tell. ‘And I owe him for a job. He’s working for me.’

I’m dying to ask in what capacity, but I don’t feel I know Hadley well enough yet. I have my suspicions and ask Jonathan as soon as Hadley is out of earshot.

‘So is Nico a rent boy?’

‘Of course he’s not. He’s a very talented photographer.’

‘And is he working for Hadley?’

‘Yes, that’s what he said.’

‘And what does Hadley do, exactly?’

‘I’ve told you before, he runs his own PR company,’ says Jonathan, burying his nose in his glass, but I think that Hadley is a drug dealer. Hadley has started to loom very large in Jonathan’s life recently, and we’ve already had one row about him, in which I said, ‘It’s all “Hadley this, Hadley that” with you these days,’ and Jonathan said, ‘Hadley has a lot of connections,’ and I said, ‘So does a box of Lego,’ and we left it at that. Jonathan thinks that Hadley can do something for him; Jonathan is always looking for people who can do something for him, because he’s too lazy to go out and look for a job and is just waiting to be discovered. As what I’m not exactly sure; he has a degree in graphic design and nothing on his CV so if he does have hidden talents, he’s hidden them very well. As such he’s probably ideal for PR.