Again, I took this as a slight dig at Karl, who had a peculiar habit of being relentlessly chipper in groups. He wasn’t really like that in private. It was as though he had two distinct personas. In public he was Mr. Joke-A-Minute, filling silences with whistled snatches of lift music. She was absolutely right: it really could get on your tits. I didn’t mind it getting on my tits but I didn’t want it getting on other people’s tits, if you see what I mean, Dr. R (maybe because it would reflect badly on me?). I wanted Ness to like Karl. We always want our female friends to like our partners in just the right way.

‘Have you ever been depressed?’ I asked. I was curious.

‘Umm . . .’ she said, but she shrugged her shoulders and had to think about it. No one likes to confess to not having felt depressed because that makes them seem insensitive and superficial, but on the other hand no one likes to say that they’ve been Prozacked up to the eyeballs, waking up wailing every morning at the prospect of another twenty-four hours to live through, because that makes them sound unhinged. You have to have felt just the right amount of misery to be socially acceptable to the Establishment, don’t you agree?

‘I always think of all the people who have it much worse than I do.’

I blew the blue smoke up into the blue sky. Yes, I could believe she did that. There was a slightly Edwina Currie-ish side to her, a no-nonsense, put-on-an-extra-jumper kind of mentality. It was the opposite of indulgent and I liked that, but it showed a thickness of skin that I’d noticed elsewhere in her character. Leah could be openly rude to her and it was like it meant nothing; she never reacted. She’d brush it off, seemingly unaffected. I would have been incredibly hurt or angry had someone spoken to me that way. Other people’s relationships are anathema – face it, Doc.