Later, I remembered the gasp that went up, followed immediately by shouts and uproar, and the click-click-click of the camera shutters as the delighted paparazzi got the scoop of a lifetime. I remembered the balmy London night smell was eradicated in a second, replaced by the oily pungent stink of gloss paint – it was gloss; the bastard wanted it to be almost impossible to get off. The venue staff had to call an ambulance and take me away to make sure it hadn’t poisoned my blood. You couldn’t just wash off gloss paint, as I discovered – the hard way.

The A&E nurses were amazing. They stripped me off and sponge-bathed me with white spirit, which was cold and stung like buggery, three of them wiping me down as fast as possible to minimise the exposure to both the paint and the astringently toxic white spirit. I was too shocked to cry, but all I was thinking about was Pete.

I yearned for my twin then, with a longing stronger than I’d felt in all the years since we’d fallen out. I’d have rung him then and there and begged him to come and see me, thrown myself on his mercy, apologised till the green on my face turned to blue, but I was too busy vomiting into a cardboard kidney bowl.

The paint was so difficult to get out of my hair that I told them to just shave it off. All of it. I didn’t want it.

I’d have got them to shave my skin off too, if they could.

Everything was ruined.

From the peak straight into the trough.

Spike and Webbo came to the hospital with me that night – Marsh had to take his folks to their hotel and Matty had apparently crashed out somewhere, too stoned to be any use. After my hosing-down, we gave statements to the police in a small, private visitors’ room. They had to keep the windows wide open, because even after a long, hot shower to wash off all the white spirit, my skin still stank of it to the point that the fumes were making everyone else feel slightly dizzy too.

It was in every pore. I felt as if the spirit and the paint were coating my internal organs too, as if I’d been glossed inside and out. My scalp was the only place that felt clean, and I kept obsessively rubbing my newly bald head. I was dressed in paper knickers, braless in hospital scrubs and borrowed flip-flops, my launch-party black dress now in an incinerator somewhere. I felt like a convict.

‘They’ve caught him, right?’ Spike demanded when the two policemen turned up.