I didn’t even argue. I had suddenly realised that all I had been doing for the last few years was writing an expensively produced blog. A blog might have had more readers.

‘Think about it,’ said Stev’n. ‘For five minutes. You’ll still have your haircut review, whether you take it or not.’

‘I don’t need to think about it,’ I said. ‘I’ll see you later, Jonathan, will I? Or has your wife taken you back?’

Jonathan looked away from me and said nothing. I turned around and started to walk back up the stairs.

‘Paul?’ said Stev’n. I turned back and caught the Jiffy bag he underarmed towards me. ‘Take it away and think about it.’ It was as heavy as an average-sized human’s ashes. I put it in my satchel and left.

Later that evening Jonathan knocked on my door and asked if I’d thought more about the package, if he could have a look at it. I pulled it out of my bag and tossed it to him, and he poured the contents onto my bed, sachets of capsules and pills, fake cocaine, weird herbs, lurid spice, all with garish packaging, connotations of radiation and supervillains, of the origin stories of mythical monsters.

‘I did consider it,’ I admitted. ‘I was thinking perhaps I don’t need to do the drugs, I could just imagine what they’re like from the packaging and the press release. I mean, drugs can only have so many effects, don’t you think? I can just describe them all in terms of what I’ve done before. I could actually become the great drug critic – I could supply the critical vocabulary by which all drugs are subsequently judged.’

‘You would have to do some first.’

He was shaking out a white powder now, onto my bedside table.

‘Man, if you want to be a lab rat, do it in your own bedroom. The living room, I mean.’

‘This is just a zingy alternative to the Bolivian marching powder.’

‘I bet it’s one molecule away from hillbilly bathtub crank.’

Jonathan rolled up the note he had pulled from his wallet and held the thin tube out to me. ‘You try,’ he said. ‘It’s your job.’

‘No. I am sacrificing my payday for the good of others.’

‘It would only be the people who read the legal high reviews in White Jesus who would suffer. You could argue they were asking for it. It’s not like anyone who really needed to live would die.’

‘You’re not making me feel better about my book column.’

‘Have you written the London Review of Haircuts yet?’

‘No.’

‘Well, why don’t we go out and do it together? Mary’s on at the bar. We can do it gonzo style.’