(‘Is it still stealing,’ asked Gabriel, ‘if you steal from a psychopath?’ ‘Yes,’ I said.)

The diversification was not what he had expected. Oliver had explained it to him the first time that he had visited Gabriel’s flat. At that time, he had only a mattress, a toaster, a television and an armchair, and they made love on the floor by the doorway; he hadn’t been able to wait. ‘I’ve been working on it,’ Oliver said, ‘and some of it won’t be easy.’ One of his hands was in Gabriel’s hair, and the other traced the lines from his hips to his groin, down and up and back down. ‘Some of it may be undignified,’ he said.

Gabriel, wanting to please him, smiled. ‘Dignity’s overrated,’ he said.

It would only be temporary, Oliver promised. ‘And then,’ he said, ‘your career really can take off.’

No. The work was not what he had expected.

Most of it involved waiting. He drove small, silent girls to hotel addresses, then waited for them to re-emerge. He was abandoned in houses devoid of furniture to wait for a courier to drop something off. In a haggard flat in Croydon he delivered a rucksack to a man with the look of a shaved cat, who invited him in and locked the door. ‘I’d like you to dance for me,’ the man said.

‘Excuse me?’

‘Just a little dance. And then you can go.’

A second man appeared, then, smiling at the first. Gabriel understood from the smile that they knew one another well. There was something about the second man that frightened Gabriel more than the first, an authority in the way he moved through the room. He checked the rucksack, took a beer from the fridge, and lay down on the sofa.

‘Is this the errand boy?’ he said. ‘Oliver’s?’

‘Yes. He’s going to dance for us.’

The second man started to laugh. ‘Our friend Oliver,’ he said. ‘You tell him that we’re looking forward to catching up.’

Gabriel fled from the room and flipped the lock, the laughter at his back. He crashed down a dim hallway and out into the evening. When he finally phoned Oliver, back in his flat with his hands still shaking, Oliver apologized, and said that those guys could be difficult. No, he shouldn’t have to see them again. On the phone, Oliver was rasping and vague, as if he was just waking up, and Gabriel sensed then that something was waking in him, too, something which he had supposed was gone, but had only ever been sleeping.

And so it couldn’t last.

Gabriel had heard rumours of Oliver’s financial predicaments. Oliver often asked Gabriel if the Coulson-Brownes were good for a few thousand more: ‘Make them guilty as hell,’ he said, although Gabriel had known better than to try. Once, when lamenting the state of his Camden flat to Pippa and Kris – the creep of mould behind his bed frame, and the traffic noises outside, and the lonely stream of water which constituted the shower, which meant that you could only ever wash one limb at a time – he expressed his envy for Oliver’s flat on the Thames, and the women glanced at each other, eyebrows raised.

‘For all I know,’ Pippa said, ‘Oliver is flat-out broke. It’s all on finance.’

‘Count your wages with care,’ Kris said. ‘Seriously, Gabe.’

All the same, Gabriel was surprised when Oliver arrived at his doorstep at seven o’clock one morning, rolling two TUMI suitcases and smiling broadly.

‘Would it be too much,’ Oliver said, ‘for me to crash here, just for a little while?’

‘Of course not,’ Gabriel said, and hopped from the threshold and into Oliver’s arms.

‘Fucking landlords,’ Oliver said, crushing Gabriel more tightly than he had expected. They retreated back to bed, and a month later, with Oliver’s suits in the wardrobe and his toiletries expanding across the windowsill, Gabriel came to the happy conclusion that Oliver didn’t intend for the little while to end any time soon.

It was a difficult spell for Oliver’s business. ‘It’s social media,’ Oliver said. ‘People think that they can do it all themselves.’ He had relinquished his office in Aldgate, and worked on a laptop in the corner of Gabriel’s flat. Whenever Gabriel walked past, Oliver appeared to be on YouPorn or Mr Porter, which could, Gabriel appreciated, constitute research. Besides, Oliver’s difficulties bestowed Gabriel’s role in their relationship with a new importance. He was no longer the tag-along, indebted to Oliver for his contacts and charisma. He could support Oliver as Oliver had once supported him.

And Gabriel could admit it: Oliver needed a lot of support. Oliver, it transpired, was addicted to alcohol and cocaine, and Gabriel was addicted primarily to Oliver; then, as an inevitable accompaniment, to Oliver’s own addictions, at first for Oliver’s approval, and later – as tended to be the case – because he couldn’t stop doing them.

The days were so long. He woke at eleven a.m., nauseous, and before he opened his eyes he sensed the impending dread of nothing to do until eight. On bad mornings, once he was upright, a plume of blood fell from his nostrils and onto his lap. He and Oliver would greet the day with a few Screwdrivers – ‘Like they do in New York,’ Oliver said – and amble to the pubs on the canal for lunchtime, or else walk down to Regent’s Park and collect a few bottles of wine on their way. Oliver bought cocaine from an old acquaintance in Barnsbury, and when they felt that it was necessary – that it was the only thing that would do the trick – they would meander along the water and up to the estate, shielding their eyes from the glass towers and the wide, bright spaces at King’s Cross. They would wake back in the flat, or in their favourite spot beside the allotment garden, and evening would be upon them. Gabriel didn’t mind this in the summertime, when it was still light outside, but in the winter he was startled by the darkness and his own obliviousness to the time. He missed a number of jobs this way, and he knew that those clients would never work with him and Oliver again.