There is no reason it can’t be fun to make out with a high person, but not when they are very high and you are very not; it is a matter of disagreeing focuses. It was also daylight, too early to be this cooked, and after a very short time, which felt very long, we realised that whatever we were trying to accomplish was not going to get us the traditional result.

I typed a message the next day. ‘I’ve seen you before,’ it said. ‘Coming into the lecture. Fighting about the Brontës.’

I’d always had literary quotes on my dating profiles, my headers saying things like ‘Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again . . .’ But when boys engaged with this and picked up on a reference in their messages, I scrunched my nose up, yuck, those nerds. I always wanted to be messaged by someone like Dan, whose main image had showcased his gamely flaring eyes, with header text that simply said, ‘No thanks.’

I remembered the awful hair, his awful, smoke-stale tonguing, mouth twisting, lips pursing. His awful, knuckled hands.

‘Do you want to try again?’ I wrote.

‘No bud’, he messaged. ‘I’m a one-time special only.’

No one is a one-time special, but it sounded great.

Dan and I did friendship in a way I never had: first an after-uni coffee, then an after-coffee beer, then some after-beer leek dumplings, then an after-dinner dance, then a split crumble of sticky drug squeezed from a squishy capsule that he pretended he didn’t realise he had in his bag; then hours in a bathroom in a bar on Meyers Place with our high beams on, bold beacons casting out for more, then going home dejected in a cab we could not afford.

Home was his Westgarth sharehouse, where he rented a room from a couple who thought he was both ‘too there’ and ‘too not’.

‘So demanding,’ I ventured, rocking back and forth in the yard, where he was doing a very bad job of rolling me a rollie.

He peered at me and went to take a suck of his cigarette, but it was out, and there was no way to relight its saggy middle without scattering the open pouch across the floor.

‘What would you be like to live with?’ he said.

‘Well,’ I said.

‘The kitchen would be a reading space, not a conversation space,’ he said.

I said I had always thought this but, as a boy who lived at home, I had little idea of what might go on inside a kitchen except grabbing things from the fridge and pouring milk over cereal or making my favourite all-terrain meal, Vegemite on toast.

Part of the problem seemed to be that his housemates were a straight couple; he alluded to ‘cultural differences’. Only later did I realise a key cultural difference may have been the inconstancy with which Dan cleaned the house.