‘Where are you?’ I say. ‘I need my keys. I locked myself …’

‘Sorry, Rob, can’t help you, I’m out and about all day.’

Stuart does some work for a promotions company and keeps very irregular hours, but under the circumstances I think he could arrange to drop the keys off, so I sound slightly annoyed when I say, ‘Well you’ll have to.’

‘Sorry, lover, got to go,’ he says, and hangs up on me.

Nobody else has keys to my flat, so I’m stuffed.

I phone Jonathan, because he’s borrowed so many of my clothes that half my wardrobe must be at his place. We haven’t spoken for nearly two weeks but he picks up the conversation as if nothing had happened.

‘Did you read about it in the paper?’

‘What?’ I ask, wondering whether, as frequently happens, some major catastrophe has failed to register on my radar. I’m often the last to know about earthquakes, plane crashes or tsunamis.

‘He’s come out.’

I say ‘Who?’ although I know perfectly well who ‘he’ is, Jonathan’s talked about nothing and nobody else for months.

‘Lukas of course. He’s publishing an autobiography …’

‘He’s even younger than we are!’

‘… and apparently it’s all in there, about how he was abused by an uncle on holiday, and had a mental breakdown when he was fifteen, and how he’s not been able to hold a relationship together because of the pain.’

‘Jonathan …’

‘It’s in the Mail today, quite a long extract, and some really yummy photos.’

‘I need to …’

‘I’m going to get him to give me a copy and sign it next time I see him.’

‘Next time?’

‘Yeah, he’s always round Hadley’s.’

‘Look, are you at home?’

‘Why?’

‘I need to come round at lunchtime and get some of my clothes back.’

‘Oh. No. I’m not.’

‘You’re not, or you won’t be?’

‘Whatever. I saw your Stuart down at Straight the other night.’ Straight is a club I’ve never been to, and I didn’t know Stuart went either. It’s at the sleazier end of the spectrum.

‘Oh yeah, he told me he went,’ I lie, ‘and he said it was really funny’

‘Hmm,’ says Jonathan, who always likes to be the bearer of bad news, ‘well it didn’t look like he was laughing from where I was standing.’

‘Can I just come round and …’

‘Oh for God’s sake, Rob, I’m busy. If you need clothes, do what everyone else does. Go out and buy them.’

He hangs up.

Later on I get an email from New Boy asking me what I’m doing for lunch. I tell him that I’m going out to a client meeting. I must be more careful about what I wear to work in future. In two years of dressing sexy and stylish, I have never once been asked on a date, and now I turn up looking like an 80s geography teacher I’m beating them off with a shitty stick. I suppose that answers one question which has been exercising Anna and me for the last few weeks, i.e. ‘Is New Boy gay or straight?’, because I don’t notice him asking her for lunch dates. I am simultaneously elated (at being asked at all) and embarrassed (because it’s him), so I don’t start bragging to Anna, but just delete the email. Then I have to borrow money from her in order to go shopping.