At school it had intrigued me that Kemp was an outsider, like me, but always looked so cheerful about it, while I scowled and shuffled my way through classes, a ghost of the ghost I would become. I thought he was good-looking. I found his bounciness endearing. I liked seeing him dancing in the corner of school discos in his ruffly shirts and pointy boots. His smile, given out in the general direction of everyone and no one in particular.

I would have quite liked a cat on elastic.

‘You did a lot of onions.’

‘I did. And you were a really good photographer.’

‘Thanks. I try to be. Sure you’re OK?’

‘Definitely. What, you’re a photographer now?’ I ask. ‘As an actual job?’

‘Yes,’ said Kemp. ‘I’m a photographer.’

‘You always had a plan,’ I said.

The lone boy in the dark room without any friends. The New Romantic fan who took brilliant pictures. It had all worked out for him.

He shrugged. Looked slightly amused. ‘Yes, I guess I did. Well, see you,’ he added, and just like that he bounded off again.

I didn’t see him again until approximately fifteen years later. I was on a work’s night out in Camden with the Bookings team from the conference centre, had drunk a whole bottle of rosé and was fending off the ill-conceived chat-up lines of a random Australian. Kemp was on a stag do for an editor at National Geographic and was wearing somebody else’s very Jamiroquai-esque hat. Somehow we ended up chatting wildly at the bar, spring-boarding from people who hated us at school to art to Brit Pop and everything in between. Everyone else melted away, until it was just me and him, drinking and talking. Two former misfits in their late thirties; except I still was one.

I was raptured. I decided after twenty minutes he was the most amazing man in the world; he looked at me after about an hour and said, ‘You know what, I think you’d make a really good friend, Prue Alberta.’ And there we had it. I was Huck Finn to his Tom Sawyer. Charlie Brown to his Snoopy. David Somebody to his enigma. And that was how it began. Our wonderful, highly disappointing friendship. A friendship I had to take as all I could get, when I wanted so much more.

Kemp returns from the kitchen with the glass of water as I am ramming ‘Bollocks’ into a drawer. His jeans have dark sploshes on them. ‘Sorry, you’ve got a fast tap. Some water went everywhere. I used a tea towel.’