‘I never told anyone that, but I’m telling you. What I’m saying is that there’re two sets of rules. There’re the ones you follow, and the ones you make. Now, anyone might succeed by the first set, if they work hard and keep their head down. And I mean “might”. You could work for ever, do nothing wrong and never make it because your boss secretly wants to fuck you, or you once stood on the chairman’s toe at the company picnic. But the second set . . . get them right, and you can really win big.’

‘I don’t know . . .’ Jessica said, but it was the token resistance of a woman who has already made up her mind to sleep with you, and wants to protect her reputation.

‘Are we agreed?’ Francis asked.

‘We’re agreed,’ I said, and was surprised by the sound of my own voice.

‘Fine. Then I’ll find a buyer,’ Lisa said, and extinguished her cigarette, as if placing a hot wax seal on a decree.

It was simple. The preceding weeks had eroded our resistance, and so the collapse came all at once. Soon after that, we said our goodbyes. I think each of us wanted to get away, to consider alone the implications of what we had decided. I could not sleep for my excitement. The pressure that had been building inside me, the pressure of confining this idea to my head as it swelled and expanded, had been released in a glorious burst.

The next several months were devoted to the accomplishment of our plan, and it filled the void left by money. The four of us drew close to one another in our secrecy, and we felt what men who fight together in the army must feel: the bond of constant danger, and the simple fact of having to trust another with your own welfare. We stopped discussing Michael, and lost our taste for his affectations. The purpose that took hold of our lives drove us forwards, and we shook off our self-pity like a period of hibernation.

When the holidays arrived, we all headed down to London. This was the time that Francis first introduced me to the East End strip club where I met Misha, the girl who became my model. He was living in a flat on Old Street that Lisa had rented for him on a two-month lease over the Easter break. Lisa lived in Docklands, and Jessica’s parents had a house in Fulham. I saw one or other of them almost every day. We each developed our own areas of responsibility, in accordance with our natural skills, and we had weekly progress meetings, more out of excitement than with a genuine purpose of coordinating our efforts. We met in a greasy spoon café near the Embankment, an ancient place with curling linoleum floors and Formica tables edged with brown stripes where cigarettes had been left balanced on the side. The place had been chosen because it was roughly equidistant from our homes, and Jessica joked that it was better than the pub next door because it gave Francis no excuse to drink during the day. It was an oasis of neglect among the tall, sterile shops and offices, and the streams of efficient lawyers and bankers walked by the door without ever looking in. It was perfect, as the other patrons, dirty and curling like the linoleum, pretended we did not exist. They all seemed to be in their own worlds of private grievance, and we never felt self-conscious about either the plan or Francis’s occasional bursts of heartfelt pretension.