I put everything away, wash my hands and go back to the boxing match.

Stuart, of course, is nowhere to be seen, and so I spend the next two hours wandering from room to room trying to find him, getting more and more angry and upset, because I’m convinced that he’s in the orgy room.

I spend some time on the dance floor with my shirt off, which is good, because even though I haven’t been to the gym tonight, my abs are still impressive, and I’m so hungry and dehydrated that everything is looking really cut. Eventually I get lifted up on to a podium so I dance around there for half an hour or so, looking down at my shoes and laughing, because when Michael lent me his dead partner’s clothes first thing this morning, he probably didn’t imagine that the shoes would be doing this at two a.m., or whatever the time is.

Then I see Stuart watching me from across the room, his arms folded and a very ironic smirk on his face, so I jump down and put my shirt back on and run over.

‘Having fun?’ he says.

‘Where the hell have you been?’

‘I was at the bar, talking to Joe.’ Joe is the promoter of Straight and half a dozen other sex-and-drugs nights around town. ‘Time we were off.’

I’ve been ready to leave for hours, but I say, ‘Oh, and I’m having such a good time.’

‘Okay, so stay,’ says Stuart. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow.’

‘Wait! I’m coming.’

‘No, really, it’s okay.’

This goes on for quite a while, and then I remind him that he’s got my keys, and for that reason alone (it seems to me) he agrees to come home with me. I want to get the night bus, which goes directly to the end of my street, but Stuart insists on a taxi because, he says, ‘I’m not really a bus person.’

When we get home, he cuts out another two lines of whatever it is, and offers me one. I’m not sure, so he takes his and he’s immediately all over me. I’m tired, and not really in the mood for sex, I was hoping we might actually talk and/or sleep, but no, he’s ripping my new shirt off, the buttons are popping all over the floor, so I think, ‘If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em’, and do the line while he’s sticking his tongue up my arse.

The next thing I remember we’re lying in bed surrounded by travel books and we seem to have decided that we’re going on holiday, and when I ask Stuart to remind me what, if anything, we’re doing, he says, ‘Well, honey, you just paid for it on your credit card so it’s a bit late to change your mind now.’ So it seems that we’re going to Sitges for a week, and it’s a really bad time for me to take time off work, and I get so stressed about the whole thing that in the end Stuart gives me a Valium, and when I wake up around Saturday lunchtime he’s gone.