Five minutes after we did some more the first doses began to work and it became clear we had made a terrible mistake. The rest of the night melted into a garish puddle. There was a visual effect to the combination of drugs I had taken which made me keep turning my head to catch the sun rising behind me, but I could never catch it in time. Women’s faces were lit by morning dawn that quickly turned into night. I felt as if I was in a time-lapse video, watching myself fast-forward through every night I had left on earth. We continued to talk to the faces that appeared before us, but we made less sense than usual, and the shiny green ants that crawled across them were distracting and counterproductive to good repartee. The fake MDMA we had taken had none of the warmth of real MDMA, no feeling of empathy, of love; and at the same time there was none of the devilish humour and euphoria of acid or mushrooms. There was only visual disorder and vicious energy. If I had taken these drugs on my own, they would perhaps have broken me, had me clinging to a lamp post in terror outside, but at least with Jonathan around we could try to make light of them, revel in their awful indignity and pretend the experience was comic. Mary had gone from being amused to being appalled by us, but consented to our request for quadruple gin and tonics for the price of singles; it was the only thing, we said, that might cure us, and she must have hoped we would knock ourselves out before she finished her shift and had to return to the flat.

‘These must be the worst drugs I’ve ever tried,’ I said, or he said, it was hard to tell.

‘They are really, really bad. But do you remember when we went to that weekend party in Cornwall with the Scottish philatelist?’

‘He had a medicine bag full of liquids… and pipettes… and penny farthings.’

‘All his drugs were just numbers. 2ci, 2cb, i c deadpeople.’

‘They’re beckoning to me too.’

When we got back to the flat everything was much harder. Jonathan found a single Valium, took it and conked out. For a long time I leaned out of my bedroom window smoking, looking down on the people below like a vampire about to swoop on them. For a moment I understood what it was like to be truly evil, the loneliness of it, the thrill of exclusion. There was some kind of creature climbing up the wall of the kebab shop across the road, an angel, or something crueller than that. A tower block in the distance had the square jaw of Elvis and the sideburns to match. When he opened his eyes I turned away and took to my bed.

*