It should come after everything else, but I find that I don’t want things to end like that, as they did. Perhaps that is what led me to tell this story that is not a story: the chance to rearrange, alter, change; to make things end differently. The four of us remained extremely close for another year but we did not go away together again as we did that Christmas or the following summer (I will come to that later). Sahra and I began to see less of Luke and Nicole. There had been a time when all four of us had wanted the same things, had wanted to do the same things. We rarely noticed who proposed something and who went along with it. Then an element of give and take entered into our dealings; we became conscious of saying ‘no’ to each other. Sahra and I, for example, stopped taking E – we felt it was fucking up our heads but the more we took the less easy it became to tell how – which meant that there was a peak of intimacy, of rapture, the four of us could never reach together again.
