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Lang! The underpants were Prada. Thirty bloody quid a go, those underpants. What’s up with you?’ But Emma couldn’t speak for laughter, ‘It’s not funny Em! I’ve been robbed!’

‘I know, I’m sorry—’

‘They were Helmut Lang, Em!’

‘I know! It’s just you . . . so angry, and . . . no clothes . . .’ She crouched over, her fists and forehead pressed into the sand before keeling over sideways.

‘Pack it in, Em. It’s not funny. Emma? Emma! That’s enough!’

When she could stand again they spent a while walking up the beach in silence, Dexter suddenly very cold and coy, Emma walking discreetly ahead, looking at the sand and trying to contain herself. ‘What kind of little bastard steals someone’s underpants?’ muttered Dexter. ‘Know how I’m going to find the little sod? I’m going to look for the only well-dressed bastard on the whole bloody island!’ and Emma collapsed onto the sand once more, head between her knees.

When the search proved fruitless, they beachcombed for emergency clothing. Emma found a heavy-duty sack in blue plastic. Dexter held it daintily round his waist like a mini-skirt while Emma suggested that they cut slits and make it into a pinafore dress, then collapsed once more.

The route home took them along the harbour front. ‘It’s a lot busier than I expected,’ said Emma. Dexter adjusted his face into an expression of larky self-deprecation and marched on past the pavement taverna, eyes fixed forward, ignoring the wolf-whistles. They headed into the

town, and coming up a narrow alley they suddenly found themselves facing the couple from the beach, red-faced with booze and sun, clinging to each other drunkenly as they tottered down the steps towards the harbour. They stared, bemused, at Dexter’s blue sacking mini-skirt.

‘Someone stole my clothes,’ he explained curtly.

The couple nodded sympathetically and squeezed past them, the girl pausing to turn and shout after them—

‘Nice sack.’

‘It’s Helmut Lang,’ said Emma and Dexter narrowed his eyes at her treachery.

The sulk lasted all the long way home and by the time they were back in the room, the fact of the shared bed had somehow lost its significance. Emma went into the bathroom to change into an old grey t-shirt. When she came out, the blue plastic coal-sack lay on the floor at the foot of the bed. ‘You should hang this up,’ she said, nudging the sack with her toe. ‘It’ll get creased.’

‘Ha,’ he said, lying on the bed, in new underwear. ‘So is that them?’

‘What?’

‘The famous thirty-quid underpants. What are they, lined with ermine?’

‘Let’s just go to sleep, shall we? So – which side?’ ‘This one.’

They lay on their backs in parallel, Emma relishing the sensation of the cold white sheets against tender skin.

‘Nice day,’ she said.

‘Til that last bit,’ he mumbled.

She turned to look at him, his face in profile, staring

petulantly at the ceiling. She nudged his foot with hers. ‘S’only trousers and a pair of pants. I’ll buy you some nice new ones. Three-pack of cotton briefs.’ Dexter sniffed and she took his hand beneath the sheet, squeezed it hard until he turned his head to look at her. ‘Seriously, Dex,’ she smiled. ‘I’m really pleased to be here. I’m having a really nice time.’

‘Yeah. Me too,’ he mumbled. ‘Eight more days,’ she said. ‘Eight more days.’

‘Think you can hack it?’

‘Who knows?’ He smiled affectionately and, for good or ill, everything was just as it had been before. ‘So how many Rules did we break tonight?’

She thought for a moment. ‘One, Two and Four.’ ‘Well at least we didn’t play Scrabble.’

‘There’s always tomorrow.’ She reached above her head, turned the light off, then lay on her side with her back to him. Everything was just how it had been before, and she was unsure how she felt about this. For a moment she worried that she might not be able to sleep for dwelling on the day, but to her relief she soon found herself overcome with weariness, sleep creeping through her veins like anaesthetic.

Dexter lay for a while looking at the ceiling in the blue light, feeling that he had not been at his best tonight. Being with Emma demanded a certain level of behaviour, and he was not always up to the mark. Glancing over at Emma, her hair falling away from the nape of her neck, the newly tanned skin dark against the white sheets, he

contemplated touching her shoulder to apologise.

‘Night, Dex,’ she murmured while she could still speak. ‘Night, Em,’ he replied, but she was already gone. Eight days to go, he thought, eight whole days. Almost

anything could happen in eight days.

Part Two

1993–1995

Late Twenties

‘We spent as much money as we could and got as little for it as people could make up their minds to give us. We were always more or less miserable, and most of our acquaintance were in the same cond ition. There was a gay fiction among us that we were constantly enjoying ourselves, and a skeleton truth that we never did. To the best of my belief, our case was in the last aspect a rather common one.’

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

CHAPTER SIX

Chemical

THURSDAY 15 JULY 1993,

Part One – Dexter’s Story

Brixton, Earls Court and Oxfordshire

These days the nights and mornings have a tendency to bleed into one another. Old-fashioned notions of a.m. and p.m. have become obsolete and Dexter is seeing a lot more dawns than he once used to.

On the 15th of July 1993 the sun rises at 05.01 a.m. Dexter watches it from the back of a decrepit mini-cab as he returns home from a stranger’s flat in Brixton. Not a stranger exactly, but a brand new friend, one of many he is making these days, this time a graphic designer called Gibbs or Gibbsy, or was it maybe Biggsy, and his friend, this mad girl called Tara, a tiny birdlike thing with woozy, heavy eyelids and a wide scarlet mouth who doesn’t talk much, preferring to communicate through the medium of massage.

It’s Tara he meets first, just after two a.m. in the nightclub underneath the railway arches. All night he has noticed her on the dance floor, a broad grin on her pretty pixie face as she appears suddenly behind strangers and starts to rub their shoulders or the small of their backs. Finally it’s Dexter’s turn, and he nods and smiles and

waits for the slow dawn of recognition. Sure enough the girl frowns, brings her fingers close to the tip of his nose and says what they all say now, which is:

‘You’re famous!’

‘Who are you then?’ he shouts over the music, taking both her small bony hands in his, holding them out to the side as if this were some great reunion.

‘I’m Tara!’

‘Tara! Tara! Hello, Tara!’

‘You’re famous? Why are you famous? Tell me!’

‘I’m on TV. I’m on a TV programme called largin’ it. I interview pop stars.’

‘I knew it! You are famous!’ she shouts, delighted, and she cranes up on tip-toe and kisses his cheek, and she does this so nicely that he’s moved to shout over the music, ‘You’re lovely, Tara!’

‘I am lovely!’ she shouts back. ‘I am lovely, but I’m not famous.’

‘But you should be famous!’ shouts Dexter, his hands on her waist. ‘I think everybody should be famous!’

The remark is without thought or meaning, but the sentiment seems to move Tara because she says ‘Aaaaaaaah’, stands on tip-toe and rests her little elfin head on his shoulder. ‘I think you’re so lovely,’ she shouts in his ear, and he doesn’t disagree. ‘You’re lovely too,’ he says, and they find themselves caught in a ‘you’re lovely’ loop that could potentially go on forever. They’re dancing together now, sucking in their cheeks and grinning at each other and once again Dexter is struck by how easy conversation can be when no-one is in their right mind. In

the olden days, when people only had alcohol to fall back on, talking to a girl would involve all kinds of eye-contact, the buying of drinks, hours of formal questioning about books and films, parents and siblings. But these days it’s possible to segue almost immediately from ‘what’s your name?’ to ‘show me your tattoo’, say, or ‘what underwear are you wearing?’ and surely this has got to be progress.

‘You’re lovely,’ he shouts, as she grinds her buttocks against his thighs. ‘You’re really tiny. Like a bird!’

‘But I’m strong as an ox,’ she shouts back over her shoulder and flexes a neat bicep the size of a tangerine. It’s such a great little bicep that he is moved to kiss it. ‘You’re nice. You’re sooooo nice.’

‘You’re nice too,’ he fires back and thinks, God, this is really going just incredibly well, this back and forth, just so well. She’s so small and neat that she reminds him of a little wren, but he can’t summon up the word ‘wren’ so he takes hold of her hands, pulls her towards him, shouts in her ear, ‘What’s the name of that tiny bird that fits in a matchbox?’

‘What?’

‘A BIRD THAT YOU PUT IN A MATCHBOX YOU CAN FIT IT IN A MATCHBOX A TINY BIRD YOU’RE LIKE A LITTLE BIRD CAN’T THINK OF ITS NAME.’ He holds his finger and thumb an inch apart. ‘SMALL BIRD TINY YOU’RE LIKE THAT.’

And she nods, either in agreement or to the music, her heavy eyelids fluttering now, pupils dilated, her eyeballs rolling back in her head like one of those dolls his sister used to have and Dexter has forgotten what he’s talking

about, is unable for a moment to make sense of anything, so that when Tara takes his hands and squeezes them and tells him once again that he really is lovely and that he must come and meet her friends because they’re lovely too, he doesn’t disagree.

He looks around for Callum O’Neill, his old flatmate from University and sees him pulling on his coat. Once the laziest man in Edinburgh, Callum is a successful businessman now, a large man in expensive suits, made wealthy by refurbished computers. But with the success has come sobriety; no drugs, not too much booze on a weeknight. He looks uncomfortable here, square. Dexter crosses to him and grabs both hands.

‘Where are you going, mate?’

‘Home! It’s two in the morning. I’ve got work to do.’ ‘Come with me. I want you to meet Tara!’

‘Dex, I don’t want to meet Tara. I’ve got to go.’ ‘You know what you are? You’re a lightweight!’

‘And you are off your face. Go on, do what you’ve got to do. I’ll call tomorrow.’

Dexter hugs Callum, and tells him how great he is, but Tara is tugging on his hand once again, and so he turns and allows himself to be led through the crowds towards one of the chill-out rooms.

The club is expensive and supposedly upmarket, though Dexter rarely pays for anything these days. It’s also a little quiet for a Thursday night, but at least there’s none of that scary techno marching music here, or those scary kids, the bony shaven-headed ones who take their shirts off and leer in your face with their teeth bared, their jaws

clenched. Instead there are mainly lots of pleasant, attractive, middle-class people in their twenties, people he belongs with, like Tara’s friends here, lolling around on big cushions, smoking and talking and chewing. He meets Gibbsy, or was it Biggsy, The Lovely Tash and her boyfriend Stu Stewpot, and Spex who wears spectacles and his boyfriend Mark who, disappointingly, seems to be just called Mark, and they all offer him their gum and water and Marlboro Lights. People make a big deal about friendship but it really does seem incredibly easy here, and soon he is imagining everyone hanging out together, going on holiday in a camper van, having barbecues on the beach as the sun goes down, and they seem to like him too, asking him what it’s like, being on TV, asking him what other famous people he’s met, and he tells them some salacious gossip and all the while Tara perches behind him, working on his neck and shoulders with her tiny bony fingers, giving him little shudders of elation until suddenly for some reason there’s a pause in conversation, perhaps five seconds of silence, but just long enough for a flash of sobriety to take him by surprise and he remembers what he has to do tomorrow, no, not tomorrow, today, oh God, later today, and he feels the night’s first shiver of panic and dread.

But it’s okay, it’s fine, because Tara is saying let’s go and dance before it wears off, so they all go and stand in the railway arches in a loose group facing the DJ and the lights, and they dance for a while in the dry ice, grinning and nodding and exchanging that strange puckered frown, eyebrows knitted, but the nodding and grinning are less