I should have walked out of that photo shoot when they only wanted me in my little black dress and the smile that I have been perfecting since I was fifteen years old. I should have told them to stick their magazine cover, and I should have chosen you, and chosen friendship and – even if it was beyond my power to find you a man like Christian, who was always your idea of the perfect man – then I should have told you once in a while that I could not have done any of it without you. I should have been kinder.

‘All these people,’ someone murmured respectfully in the row ahead of us, and I recognised her as a photographer who ten years back had been the Ecstasy-chugging, Kate Moss-skinny, platinum-haired toast of Soho, and was now a middle-aged frump with some old dad by her side. ‘It’s exactly what Mary would have wanted.’

Exactly wrong, lady! The irony of this packed church was that Mary would have wanted none of this major drama. Too much of a fuss, right, Mary? When David Bowie died, Mary was very impressed by how little fuss there was – a direct cremation, they called it. No flowers, no service, no big send-off, nothing like this, Mary. Bowie’s body went straight from the hospital to the crematorium in a cheap coffin and then the ashes were returned to his next of kin. Mary thought that was the way to check out. ‘When I go, I’m going like Bowie,’ she told me, and I had worked up the nerve to mention it to Mary’s mother in our short, frosty phone call when she asked me to say something at the funeral. At first Mary’s mum did not understand what I was talking about.

‘A direct cremation is what David Bowie had,’ I said. ‘It’s what they do with the homeless. And it’s what Mary wanted.’

‘The homeless and David Bowie?’ snorted Mary’s mum, and I could imagine the henpecked dad in the background, ready with a docile ‘Yes, dear,’ to whatever his wife decided. ‘Mary was neither homeless nor David Bowie.’

It was stupid of me to even suggest a direct cremation. Mary’s mother was a conventional soul who was always a little sniffy about the digital dating business her daughter and I had founded together. But to tell you the truth, when Mary’s mother and I had that conversation, I was aware of how much easier it would be for me to be spared the ordeal of a big funeral, and all those disapproving faces, and all the terrible weight of guilt and grief I felt for my dead friend. Good old Tara, eh Mary? Always thinking of herself! Even now! So here is your big day in church, Mary, and I am sorry it is not a white wedding with a guy who looks, thinks and loves like Christian, and I am sorry you did not get another fifty years, and I am so sorry it ended the way it did between us, and I am sorry because I know in the end anyone gets sickened by all those useless apologies that can’t erase the past. Sorry is just kindness that arrives too late.