‘Are you sure you couldn’t have written the drugs column?’ Susannah asked me. ‘It might be great fun.’

‘I’m quite sure,’ I said. ‘I did some research into the matter.’

*

On the day I conducted this research I had been summoned for an emergency meeting at the office. The magazine was not doing well, of course it wasn’t doing well, no one bought style magazines any more apart from hairdressers, and it was only a matter of time before we worked out how to stick our head in a machine and download our haircuts.

I have always avoided the offices of White Jesus as much as possible. They’re just off Broadway Market on the edge of London Fields, the epicentre of newly rich Hackney, the street with the highest percentage of beautiful young people in all of London. The receptionist is a thirteen-year-old boy with the face of a torturer who we all call Macaulay Culkin. He was wearing a baseball cap backwards, an XS vest that was baggy on him and a thick gold chain that was either a joke or not a joke, either gold or fake gold, just like he was either a teenage rent boy or a diminutive adult journalist – blurred lines were the magazine’s aesthetic and the modus operandi with which it conducted its crimes. He gave me a complicated handshake and sent me off through the messy arrangements of desks to my meeting.

Jonathan shares an office in the basement of the building, the ‘bunker’, with Stev’n. I took the steps down and they both looked up from the table they were sitting round.

Stev’n is a mournful-looking man, with a shaved head and glasses, who looks like he has never seen sunlight. He was wearing one of his expensive shirts with intricate patterns involving skulls and bones. Jonathan, in contrast, has the year-round look of a man at a summer wedding in Italy; he is comfortable in the casual smartness of the wealthy class – he has mimicked their gestures to perfection.

Jonathan stood to shake my hand, the gesture of someone interviewing me rather than a man who currently lived on my sofa. ‘How are you, Paul? Thanks so much for coming in.’

Stev’n was still looking at the papers on the table. He spoke quietly. ‘We’ve got customer surveys, traffic figures from the site, feedback from advertisers. I’m annoyed with you, Paul. Why on earth do we have a books page? No one reads the thing. People who read books don’t know it exists. People who read the magazine don’t read books. Oh, it’s not even that. Some of them do read books. But every fucking magazine under the sun that doesn’t know how to fill a back page sticks a few book reviews on it, some cunt who aspires to be a literary critic. No offence, Paul.’