He was in when I got back, lying on the sofa under a single Postman Pat duvet cover that had belonged to a previous resident. There were childhood remnants in all of our flats which someone had been too sentimental to throw away. Jonathan’s boots were peeping out, and he was watching EastEnders. ‘How do you make Netflix come on?’ he asked.

‘Our TV isn’t well educated enough,’ I told him.

He turned it off. ‘Fuck it, then. Normal TV is bollocks now.’

‘Any news on Julia?’

‘Oh, don’t mention her. I’ve had a bad enough day.’

I have known Jonathan since we met on our magazine journalism degree at the London College of Printing, which wasn’t such a comic idea in the last year of the last millennium, before they changed its name to sound less archaic. Jonathan has always been an entrepreneurial spirit. He sold Spanish cigarettes and Dutch ecstasy on campus, and by our final year he was wearing Paul Smith suits to seminars and the pub. He had started working for White Jesus in the summer of our second year, which was where he met his wife Julia, two years his senior and the only daughter of a surgeon and a psychiatrist. It was at this time he began to insist on being called Jonathan rather than Jonny. She had thrown him out a month ago and he had been living in our living room since. I still hadn’t got to the bottom of what he had done that was bad enough to be thrown out by Julia. They’d always been proud of being sexually adventurous; so I didn’t think it was infidelity, unless there was some line of etiquette he’d overstepped. According to him, they were just ‘working some stuff through’.

He turned up one night with a bottle of Jameson’s and a bag of ice. I was touched at the time that he’d chosen me to come to, though I wonder if he had anyone else, or if I was just the softest touch he knew. We barely saw each other outside of work functions these days: Jonathan, the advertising director, is also de facto publisher of White Jesus during the frequent absences of the millionaire who owns that title and the magazine. I couldn’t afford to go to Jonathan and Julia’s wedding, on a Greek island; and Monica preferred to avoid them after that one time when they’d tried to inveigle us into an orgy with them. I never went to the magazine’s offices if I could help it.

‘Where’s Mary?’ I asked.

‘She’s in her room with that little twerp she hangs out with.’

‘They’re not…?’

‘They might be.’

*