We drank too much, we realized that. We weren’t teenagers any more, but we acted like them. No kids, no real responsibilities; lives that weren’t entirely grown up. While we talked and talked, I realized we were never going to be more than friends. Sometimes I’d pass out on his bed, though, with him on the floor, and wake, a befuddled twit, in the early hours, to stare at him sleeping for a while, before making my way home.

‘So, how are you?’ he asks me. ‘Really?’

‘Fine, thanks.’ I always say that, even if I’m not. People don’t want to hear the truth, do they? That you are ill, or mightily pissed off with life, or dying inside. ‘Fine, thanks’ is the British way of saying, ‘I can’t begin to tell you how I’m really feeling …’

‘And you? Are you still going away on photography assignments?’

During our friendship, Kemp went abroad on trips for National Geographic magazine; he came back again. We’d see each other for a while; then we wouldn’t. That was a good thing. It kept me out of the danger zone. His lengthy absences gave me back enough control not to launch myself at him, weeping like a lunatic and making feverish declarations of undying love when he got back and nonchalantly invited me to the King’s Arms again.

‘Yes, I’m still off on my travels now and then. Got to make a living, you know.’

‘Right. Great. Good.’ He lived in another world and always had. A place of mystery and adventure and self-discovery. He would send me postcards, while he was away – of jungles and beaches and cities and desert plains. He would write ‘Wish you were here!’ but I knew he never meant that. There was something about me he liked enough to make me his friend, but he didn’t wish I was there.

There were women, sometimes, in some of these places. A text would buzz on his phone, in the pub, and he would glance at it quickly and then turn his phone over. He told me he had occasional one-night things, in these far-flung locations. With women he would never see again but sometimes gave his number to. I would nod and smile, say things like ‘Good for you’ while dying inside. I hated the thought of him being lonely, but I hated those women more.

‘What were you doing in the tube to get all dusty like that?’ I ask. It’s so hard to look at him. Every minute we ever spent together is the space between us he doesn’t even notice.

He grins. ‘I’ve been down at the Kingsway Exchange.’

‘What on earth’s that?’