The cocaine mixes very nicely with the champagne, and I’m feeling quite cheerful when we hear a siren whooping from downstairs. We run to the window and lean out and we can see the paramedics loading a stretcher into the back of the ambulance. One of the paramedics is really good looking, with a shaved head and an earring, and when I mention this to Jonathan he wolf-whistles and shouts out, ‘Oi, mate, my friend fancies you!’ The paramedic looks up and scowls which is quite sexy and I smile and wave, thinking that this might defuse the situation, but he just shakes his head. This is when I notice that the person on the stretcher actually has the blanket pulled up over the face and is therefore almost certainly dead. I pull my head in quickly and pull Jonathan in after me, just as he is drawing breath and opening his mouth to say something ‘funny’. Jonathan’s funny remarks, which he tends to say very loud when he’s had a drink and a line, quite often cause fights, and I have no desire to get into this kind of trouble on my first night in my new home.

‘What the bloody hell are you doing?’ says Jonathan, and I say that I don’t want him saying anything stupid. And he says, ‘Like what? You think I’m going to shout out, “You’ve got a big stiff one there, mate!”’ then he looks a bit sheepish, because obviously that’s exactly what he was planning to say.

Then Jonathan gets upset because he says he’s never seen a dead body before, which isn’t strictly true because there was that time we saw someone being loaded into an ambulance at the back of Fire, and everyone said he was dead as well, but Jonathan was so out of it that night that he couldn’t remember his own name, let alone details like this. He starts crying and saying that if he died nobody would find him for weeks, and so to cheer him up I say we can share the last line. He cuts it into two, one rather bigger than the other, and no prizes for guessing which one goes up his nose, but at least he stops talking about death and starts talking about Madonna instead. He spends the next twenty minutes telling me a long and involved story about how he managed to get six tickets for her shows in Holland which he is now selling for a vast profit on eBay. I know that the coke has really kicked in when he tells me that the lyrics to ‘Confessions on a Dance Floor’ are very spiritual and that he’s thinking of going over to Kabbalah and changing his name to Habakkuk.

Jonathan says he needs to go online to check the status of his auction, and that he will make us some more drinks if I get my laptop up and running, which fortunately doesn’t take very long because I have mobile wireless broadband, which I only ever seem to use when Jonathan comes around, because most of the rest of the time I use the internet at work. But he persuaded me that I had to have it at home, which is convenient as he no longer has internet access at home, what with the chopping up of the credit cards and other ‘cashflow problems’, all of which will be remedied if he manages to make the expected profit on the Madonna tickets. As soon as I have the computer unpacked and plugged in and connected to the outside world, Jonathan starts happily surfing away, checking his emails, his Gaydar profile and various other profiles that I have never even heard of, chuckling away to himself as he writes replies. When I try to see what he’s writing he shields the screen with his hand, which is a bit much seeing as it’s my computer he’s using, but I say nothing and have my drink quietly on the landing. I presume that these are the ‘irons in the fire’ he was talking about.