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this time. He’s twenty-two, which is an age when a lot of people still play polyrhythms with their bodies for days at a time; drugs help with that. His last girlfriend was a DJ, like Isaac, so she might play from midnight until four and go to bed at five, or she might go to bed at eight in the evening and go back out to play an afterparty at four in the morning, or she might stay up all weekend and then sleep all through Monday. To make two tempos match up a DJ normally just needs to twiddle a pitch control, but in real life they didn’t synchronise very often; for her, though, that was true with everybody she met, so Raf was at no disadvantage. Sometimes they’d improvise a sort of laggard domesticity: when she got a minicab back to her flat at dawn he’d already be cooking a curry, and they’d eat it on her balcony as the sun came up, go for a walk through the dewy park nearby, come back to fuck and smoke weed and watch DVDs until lunchtime, fall asleep until it was dark again, and then meet some friends in the pub. She was gorgeous, with big green eyes like smashed jade, but what he loved most was her detachment from the world: she was vague, almost vaporous, bemused by everything but surprised by nothing. He’d never been so happy for so long.
    Then, in March, she told him she’d decided to move to Berlin. Raf waited for her to reassure him that the flights were cheap enough that he could visit her every couple of weeks, which was about as often as they got to see each other properly anyway. But then he realised that no invitation was implied. That conversation was the most practical he’d ever seen her. Afterwards, he found out from Isaac that she was already seeing someone new, a Brazilian techno producer who was known for playing fourteen-hour DJ sets. Isaac hadn’t intended to tell Raf about it, but he’d taken two good pills that night, and he can’t keep secrets when he’s high, which is why most of the time he does his conscientious best to avoid hearing secrets in the first place, like a spy revoking his own security clearance.
    These six weeks since she left have been like the lowest point of the worst comedown from the filthiest Chinese amphetamines anyone has ever had, although at least for once in Raf’s life it’s as if social expectations have shifted to synchronise with his own cycle: he’s been dumped, so it’s natural that he sometimes sleeps all day and drinks all night. Mostly, the change seems external, not internal. The shift is in the world around him. When you take good ecstasy, it feels as if the drug can pump from solid objects a joy that has always been hidden there inside them but will otherwise seep to their surface only very gradually. Now he feels the opposite: those same objects are desiccated, as if you could stand there with your tongue out for days and not a drop would fall. And it isn’t getting any better.
    Once, Isaac admitted he was scared that one night he might take so much MDMA that all the serotonin receptors in his head would burst like the turbines of a dam and after that last flood he’d never be able to take pleasure from anything again. That’s how Raf is now. And while Isaac keeps saying he’ll get over it, this despondency feels both permanent and territorial, as if joy might still exist somewhere but will never come back to these specific streets, this specific desert, even though she doesn’t even live here any more.
    Five days ago, climbing the staircase to his flat, a staircase he now loathes because of all the times he kissed her there, he wondered what it might be like to leave London himself, and just thinking about it gave him such a mighty feeling of relief he decided then and there that in a month he would leave London. He’s given notice on his flat. This morning, Saturday, he has twenty-five days left, one cycle, before he says goodbye to the city where he’s lived all his life. He hasn’t told Isaac yet or even chosen where to go. Berlin