‘Bruv, bruv, I can’t do this with you. You’re a nice guy but you’re blind to what’s going on here. Which is you people living miles away from the problem and telling people like me who have to deal with it that there is no problem.’

‘You people? That’s me, is it?’

‘Not all the way, man. Not all the way. But I know where you live. I don’t see you down in Forest Gate, man, do I? I don’t see you all the way down where I am.’

‘Come off it. I live in Dalston. Right by the market.’

‘You live in Dalston now. Not Dalston fifteen years ago, when people could afford to live there.’

‘Well, what about feminism? Equal rights for women? Why’s that a problem?’

‘Oh, bruv. I love women. Equal rights is fine. But that’s not what it is, is it? It’s an agenda that has no interest in a man like me. You know, I’m not doing this with you. We play football together. I like it like that. Let’s keep it that way.’

But shortly after that he stopped coming to football. I followed him for a while on Facebook. He kept getting banned for arguing with the people who accused him of being a white supremacist, and then he was gone for good. And now I don’t know where or how he is.

*

Friday in the local. After months of working for free, Mary was offered a wage at the record company doing their online marketing and PR. We were celebrating: Nathan, me and Jonathan, who was still ‘a week away’ from moving out, as he had been for months now. Although he was always still in a crisp white shirt (he took a bag of them to the cleaners every week and kept them hanging up in his office), he was becoming shabbier in other ways. He seemed torn one week to the next between being clean-shaven and having designer stubble. I saw him going to work one day wearing a pair of new white trainers with one of his suits, a combination he had pointed out to me scathingly in the past: web designer getting married, he called it, or wake at the indie disco. Without Julia he had lost the strength of his certainties. And because of his downfall I’d lost the will to kick him out. We’d all be forced out soon enough.

Nathan must have been wondering why so many of the nights he now spent with Mary were in the company of her two older housemates. He got quieter as we got louder, and abruptly stood up and said he was going.

‘Don’t! Stay!’ said Mary. ‘Let’s carry on back at mine.’

‘No thanks,’ he said, and walked out.

‘I better go after him,’ she said.

‘Leave him alone,’ said Jonathan, but she went anyway.