Melancholy again, he sighed and crossed to the kitchen, moving slowly like a man recovering from surgery. The massive fridge was full to overflowing with bottles of an exciting new brand of upmarket cider. As well as presenting the show (‘Car-crash television’ they called it, apparently a good thing), he had recently expanded into voiceovers. He was ‘classless’ they said, also apparently a good thing, the exemplar of a new breed of British man: metropolitan, moneyed, not embarrassed by his masculinity, his sex-drive, his liking for cars and big titanium watches and gadgets in brushed steel. So far he had done voiceovers for this premium bottled cider, designed to appeal to a young Ted Baker-wearing crowd, and a new breed of men’s razor, an extraordinary sci-fi object with a multitude of blades and a lubricating strip that left a mucal trail, as if someone had sneezed on your chin.

He had even dipped his toe into the world of modelling, a long-standing ambition that he had never dared to voice, and which he was quick to dismiss as ‘just a bit of a laugh’. Only this month he had featured in a fashion spread in a men’s magazine, the theme ‘gangster-chic’, and over nine pages he had chewed cigars or lain riddled with bullets in a number of tailored double-breasted suits. Copies of the magazine were accidentally scattered round the flat, so that guests might casually stumble upon it. There was even a copy by the toilet, and he sometimes found himself sitting there and staring at his own photo, dead but beautifully tailored and splayed across the bonnet of a Jag.

Presenting car-crash television was fine for a while, but you could only crash the car so many times. At some point in the future he would have to do something good as opposed to so-bad-it’s-good, and in an attempt to acquire some credibility he had set up his own production company, Mayhem TV plc. At the moment Mayhem only existed as a stylish logo on some heavy stationery, but that would surely change. It would have to; as his agent Aaron had said, ‘You’re a great Youth Presenter, Dexy. Trouble is, you’re not a Youth.’ What else might he be capable of, given the breaks? Acting? He knew a lot of actors, both professionally and socially, played poker with a few of them, and frankly if theycould do it. .

Yes, professionally and socially, the last couple of years had been a time of opportunity, of great new mates, canap'es and premieres, helicopter rides and a lot of yammering about football. There had been low points of course: a sense of anxiety and crippling dread, one or two instances of public vomiting. There was something about his presence in a bar or club that made other men want to shout abuse or even hit him, and recently he had been bottled off-stage while introducing a Kula Shaker concert — that was no fun. In a recent what’s hot and what’s not column, he had been listed as not-hot. This not-hotness had weighed heavily on his mind, but he tried to dismiss it as envy. Envy was just the tax you paid on success.

There had been other sacrifices on his part. Regretfully he had been obliged to shuffle off some old friends from University, because after all it wasn’t 1988 anymore. His old flatmate Callum, the one he was meant to start a business with, continued to leave increasingly sarcastic messages, but Dexter hoped he’d get the idea soon. What were you meant to do, all live in a big house together for the rest of your lives? No, friends were like clothes: fine while they lasted but eventually they wore thin or you grew out of them. With this in mind, he had adopted a three-in, one-out policy. In place of the old friends he had let go, he had taken on thirty, forty, fifty more successful, better-looking friends. It was impossible to argue with the sheer volume of friends, even if he wasn’t sure he actually liked all of them. He was famous, no, notorious for his cocktails, his reckless generosity, his DJ-ing and his after-after-show parties back at his flat, and many were the mornings that he had woken in the smoky wreckage to find that his wallet had been stolen.

Never mind. There had never been a better time to be young, male, successful and British. London was buzzing and he felt as if this was somehow down to him. A VAT-registered man in possession of a modem and a mini-disk player, a famous girlfriend and many, many cufflinks, he owned a fridge full of premium cider and a bathroom full of multi-bladed razors, and though he disliked cider and the razors gave him a rash, life was pretty good here, with the blinds down in the middle of the afternoon, in the middle of the year, in the middle of the decade, close to the centre of the most exciting city on earth.

The afternoon stretched before him. Soon it would be time to call his dealer. There was a party tonight in a huge house off Ladbroke Grove. He had to see Emma for dinner first, but could probably get rid of her by eleven.

* * *

Emma lay in the avocado bathtub and heard the front door close as Ian set off on the long journey to the House of Ha Ha in Putney to perform his stand-up act: fifteen unhappy minutes on some differences between cats and dogs. She reached for her glass of wine on the bathroom floor, held it in both hands and frowned at the mixer taps. It was remarkable how quickly the glee of home ownership had faded, how insubstantial and tatty their combined possessions seemed in the small flat with its thin walls and someone else’s carpets. It wasn’t that the place was dirty — every single surface had been scrubbed with a wire-brush — but it retained an unnerving stickiness and a smell of old cardboard that seemed impossible to shift. On their first night, after the front door had closed and the champagne had been opened, she had felt like bursting into tears. It’s bound to take time before it feels like our home, Ian had said as he held her in bed that night, and at least they had their foot on the ladder. But the idea of scaling that ladder together, rung by rung over the years, filled her with a terrible gloom. And what was at the top?

Enough of this. Tonight was meant to be a special occasion, a celebration, and she hauled herself from the bathtub, brushed and flossed her teeth until her gums were sore, sprayed herself liberally with an invigorating floral woodiness, then searched her sparse wardrobe for an outfit that didn’t make her look like Miss Morley the English teacher on a night out with her famous friend. She decided on some painful shoes and a small black cocktail dress that she had bought while drunk in Karen Millen.