I remember Kit and Steve were bonding over terrible bosses one morning, a well-worn topic – Kit disliked his line manager, called her the Cold Fish, and over time this was abbreviated to the Fish; Gretchen, out on the deck, worked for the Psycho; and now they’d settled on a name for Steve’s, a fitness freak: Iron Snake.

‘What about you, Jamie?’ Kit asked.

‘Oh, my line manager’s a great girl. I really like her.’ There was an echo of our conversation about fathers: his a waste of space, mine decent.

‘It’s probably you that’s the one with the nickname,’ Steve said. ‘Come on, spill. What do they call you over at Starbucks?’

‘It’s not a Starbucks,’ I muttered.

‘Maybe they call you the Escort?’ Kit said. ‘They do know you’re a kept man?’

I felt myself flush. So Melia had told him. What had I expected? Presumably, she’d given him the impression the information had come via Clare.

The two of them guffawed. As they riffed on other words absurdly unsuitable for a middle-aged bloke – gigolo, playboy, cocksman – I gave up and went to join Gretchen outside. Under a fresh spring sky, the river shimmered with light, almost as if it were heat, almost as if the temperature, which was low enough to cause cold water shock all year round (yes, I’d read up on it), wouldn’t cripple the strongest limbs and cause a gasp reflex that drew filthy water into the healthiest lungs.

She was sitting with her eyes closed and head back, hair lifting onto her face in the breeze.

‘Gretchen? Are you asleep?’

‘No.’ She acknowledged me through a squint. ‘If you close your eyes, you can pretend you’re on holiday, not on your way to spend the day with a nest of vipers.’

Jesus, the trip was a real pity party this morning. ‘Is work really that bad? Why don’t you move somewhere else?’

Gretchen opened her eyes and I expected her to take the opportunity to talk once more of the gin distillery of her dreams, but to my astonishment, tears brimmed. ‘Oh, I’m looking, don’t worry. I wish I could take time out in between, but I can’t afford to. There’s no one to bail me out.’

So she knew too. They’d discussed my unusual situation, and far from considering me an asset-free vulnerable as they might if I were the woman in the relationship, they’d decided it was unfair that I should be subsidized when they were not.

‘It’s not a bailout when you’re a long-term couple who care about each other,’ I said, and it was surely the hypocrisy of my own words that took my breath away and not the bracing river air. Clare still believed I was attending sessions with Vicky, a ruse I’d extended by claiming to be interspersing them with networking events, but their usefulness as an alibi was due to expire. I’d need a new hobby of some sort, something Clare wouldn’t be tempted to join me in (taxidermy, perhaps).

Gretchen was not to be roused from her gloom and so I went back inside, slipping into a seat at the back rather than rejoining the men. Melia’s disgruntlement with work was one thing – I shared her pain because I was besotted with her – but to hear constantly how these young adults thought themselves entitled to jobs more prestigious and better paid than those they’d actually earned was tedious. Grow up! It was a reminder, I supposed, that friendships born of convenience were as flimsy as the pages of our Metros.

As we approached Tate Modern, a series of reflections in the glass made the city tip to the side, the Millennium Footbridge like a ladder to the sky, the people climbing, heads down, unable to escape the slanting water.

I could see it would start to scare me, the river, if I let it.

*

If I was a little glum at work after this commute, Regan trumped me – and Gretchen. She trumped all of us. ‘I’m being thrown out of my room next week. The original friend is coming back from travelling.’

‘Well, a curse on Original Friends,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know it was a sublet.’

‘They’ve said I can sleep in the utility room but there’s no window and the boiler’s dodgy.’ Regan pushed up her sleeves. She had a tattoo of a spider on her left forearm, its legs encircling her arm like binds.

‘No, you don’t want to die of carbon monoxide poisoning.’

‘I know someone with a spare room, but it’s right near where that kid was just shot. Did you read about it? In a car park in Plumstead? That’s why it’s cheap, I suppose. You might get gunned down.’ She earned, I knew, precisely 40p an hour more than I did, but that did not raise her rate to the living wage, which in London was currently £10.55 an hour. ‘My mum wants me to leave London and come home. She thinks there are gangs going around stabbing people every second of the day.’

‘It does feel like that at the moment,’ I agreed. ‘But you probably need to have provoked them in some way and I don’t think you’re in any danger of doing that, are you?’

There were a succession of coffee orders and we lost ourselves for a while to the grinding and hissing and thumping of the machine – it got noisy in that café, sometimes you’d think we were bricklayers or electricians. When we were clear again, I said, ‘Let’s put a notice up here. Room Wanted.’

As Regan hooted at the notion of a physical, handwritten notice stuck with a pin to a board, and asked if maybe I had a spare room, ideally one with an actual window, I wondered what she would say if I showed her a picture of 15 Prospect Square, with no fewer than nine windows visible from the street. No, if the water rats’ reaction was anything to go by, I was better off keeping the grandeur of my accommodation to myself.

‘People still read things on paper,’ I told her. ‘Otherwise we wouldn’t have a shop full of flyers and leaflets, would we?’ As if to disprove this, I took a card payment from a customer who apologized for not having cash for a tip. People used contactless for purchases in the pennies. We’d turned money invisible, rid ourselves of the vulgarity of its metallic chink, and yet I’d never heard people talk about it more. I’d never known it so hungered for, so fetishized.

On the way home, alone for once, I noted Clare’s text about ordering a takeaway while remembering with a stab of guilt the leftover bread and pastries Regan took home most days. As we passed One Blackfriars, its silver-blue skin bruised with evening shadow, I studied the commuters around me. Who of them had just been paid a bonus and who was spiralling into debt? Could the woman in the floral silk wrap dress reading the Booker Prize winner pay her rent? Was the balding guy covertly watching porn on his phone set up for a comfortable retirement? What did they make of me? It was impossible to tell a pauper from a prince in this city.

*

‘Should we take a lodger?’ I asked Clare, as we unpacked a dozen tacos delivered from the food market by a boy who didn’t speak English. I’d tipped him a fiver.

‘Why would we do that?’ she said.

‘Just, you know, there’s a housing crisis. We’ve got spare rooms.’

She grimaced. ‘Yeah, but we help in other ways. We pay forty per cent tax.’

‘You do.’

She took a bite of taco, expertly keeping the contents from dripping down her top. ‘Do you seriously want a total stranger wandering around the place?’