Eventually I settle for one of those endless news channels, the kind with a ticker moving along the bottom of the frame: ‘Aston Villa signs Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber to be its new chairman’, ‘Bus crash in Eastbourne kills nineteen people, seven of them trombone players’. The headlines are so dull, you’re forced to alter them to keep yourself awake.

Dull is good, though. Hypnotically tedious. Maybe if I fix my eyes on the screen, I’ll drift into a catatonic state and re-emerge a month or two from now, when hopefully I’ll know what to do again, and how to get on with the rest of my life.

I wish I liked alcohol more, or cigarettes. Instead, my favourite things are weak instant coffee and cheese and crackers. If only my tastes were different, I could be well on course for an early death by now – not in a depressing suicidal way, but in a way that would be indistinguishable from having too much fun. I’d like to die of Too Much Fun, if only to spite Drew. I don’t want to give the bastard any chance to feel sorry for me.

On the world’s dullest news channel, there’s a policeman talking about the Billy Dead Mates murders. He looks a bit like that newsreader Matthew Am-something-something. Coincidentally, this man also has an unpronounceable surname that has appeared in a box beneath his face: DS Sam Kombothekra of Culver Valley Police.

As someone who lives in Rawndesley, I probably ought to be more worried than I am about this serial killer on the loose. He’s killed twice so far in the Culver Valley. Selfishly, I allowed my concern to dissolve when I read an online news report saying that Billy Dead Mates was targeting pairs of best friends.

That rules me out as one of his victims, I thought, and lost interest immediately. The three best friends I’ve had in my life so far were all chronically disappointing. The first was loyal but so dull she made me want to scream. The second was unreliable – a shape-shifter; less a person in her own right than a series of complex calculations. She told me what I wanted to hear, then walked over to someone else and told them the opposite.

My third best friend was Sarah Durdy. Sarah was a high-status girl at our school: a Tier One. I was a middling Tier Two: I was clever, wore good clothes and had a healthy and fearless disrespect for authority; on the other hand I was unpredictable and, because I didn’t care about anyone else’s status, I often mixed with the lowest-ranking people.