After three days the sight of my devices rendered me physically ill. The thought of resurrecting them added grave weight to the mantle of dread slung over my shoulders, so I sold the lot back to Zahir. We struck a deal for my office-supply hoard. I ended up with a second-hand phone and enough cash to keep Majid, and me, off my back for the rent while I plumbed a new source of income.

Zahir agreed to scroll through my phones before he wiped them, to look for contact from Deeandra Foyle or anyone representing CrashChannel. He hauled the last case of printer paper and the portrait of Bez to his car and rang me from his shop.

"Naw pet," he said. "Nothin' here but some right hard feelings for you, Christ man. Woulda thought you'd killed someone, way these gits'r ragin'."

I plugged the Uber app into my new used phone and vowed temporary abstinence from all recreational chemicals until my debt was settled.

For the next six weeks Majid and I seldom spoke, rarely shared space. Evenings when he finished driving I passed him on the stairs, snatched the keys from his hand and got behind the wheel while his seat was still warm. Then I was in motion, a four-door muscled pump burning petrol and pushing punters like bad blood through the circulatory system of London at night.

Driving after dark was a form of sacred meditation I mastered in Maddasyn's hometown of Champaign, Illinois. There I could set out in any direction without engaging my brain beyond baseline demands, accelerator and brake, distance and time. When the only FM signal coming in strong was evangelical preaching screamed in Spanish I turned back and followed the white lines home on the wrong side of the road.

Milepost therapy was impossible to practice in the lurching chariot-race traffic of North London. Night after night I obeyed summons from small screens, hustling to fetch and shuttle silent riders who sat lively as luggage, necks bent over another out-of-body social experience driven by paddling thumbs.

If you stay out late enough and often enough in a place like London, you'll soon connect with the wrong sort of people. It's a mathematical certainty.

That's how I met Polly's bridesmaids, three round loud women wearing pink POLLY'S POSSE T-shirts and twinkling penis necklaces. They filled my back seat and bellowed over one another to tell me how they fell out with the bride. Standing on the pavement Polly glared at her hen-do mutineers and held the retching maid of honour's hair, I'M THE BRIDE sash splashed with vomit, plastic tiara cocked like Biggie's crown.

The breakaway trio tipped in cash. One hung a heavy arm over my shoulder and dropped a clear capsule full of crystalline grit into my lap.

She said it was probably MDMA.

It was most definitely MDMA.

Four rides later my heart filled with warm honey hot sparks and stars, ballooning and bursting again and again. Each act of transportation became a sacred mission, every face a beloved friend.

I chatted and laughed like a batty hostess right up to the moment my Anglo-orientation of keeping left was overridden by the aberrant Yankee practice of bearing right.

The rearview mirror framed my screaming passenger's gold tooth flashing in the headlamps of oncoming cars, a dozen dying yellow suns supplying electric power to silver paisley galaxies on her green saree. I swung the car up and over the kerb.

Flinching under a furious chorus of horns I limped the Audi back into orthodox traffic, slipped down a side street and made hasty reparations by hiring another Uber to come carry my terrified fare the final mile home.

Her new car arrived. I held the door and apologised through a clamped rack of stressed enamel and tingling gums.

"Low blood sugar," I lied. "I'm a diabetic."

She shook her head and clambered into the waiting Vauxhall.

"Bakavāsa girl," she said. "You're fucking mad."

She waved me off with a jittery hand and slammed the door on her embroidered saree. The parrot-green hem flapped like a weird pennant as she rode away into the night.

Emboldened by my low-speed brush with death I abandoned the car and went walkabout, lit up and humming like a funfair ride. I felt the strongest pieces of me collect, connect and fuse. I abandoned problematic fragments that didn't fit and stomped ahead in pile-driving strides, filling my new skin, welcoming the latest evolution of me.

Nothing could drag my mood, not the catcalling uni slobs at the kebab shop, not the breaking news of a suicide bomber blowing up the supporting act at Five Ways' homecoming performance in Norwich.

I fell against the wall laughing at the televised report. Stony faces turned on thick necks, a poison garden warm with scorn but I couldn't stop riding the peak of my high.

The uncanny butterfly effect that shut Sir Peanut out of Five Ways' tour arguably opened the sliding door that spared his life. Instead of being onstage when the bomber struck, Stephen was safe in Swindon with a fellowship of confirmed losers, drinking bad coffee and journaling about his runny feelings.

That news report was the first time I saw Vincent, on a television bolted high on the greasy wall of a kebab shop.

At peace with the cosmos and enrobed in holy dopamine I rolled back to the car ripping chunks of a large lamb shish straight from the bamboo skewer with my teeth. Godzilla with a resting heart rate razing the streets of Tokyo, gulping down army tanks and bloody city buses, giving precious few fucks.

I opened the car door and mounted up on the American side. The MDMA doubled my vision, casting a duplicate steering wheel above my knees. I covered one eye to make it disappear. Locked the door and reclined the seat to await restoration of stereopsis before driving home.

Many times when we were on the road Maddasyn and I threw back the seats and slept in her Escalade, just like this. Caddy camping, she called it.

The night we left Champaign for Las Vegas she told me that the two of us were 'in the car'.

"That's what American convicts say," she explained. "It means we're like, a tight unit. Like close to family."

Maddasyn came to Oxford on an obscure fellowship. Something on the sociology spectrum with a focus on prison reform. The stripper-spelling of her first name offended me deeply, almost as much as her atrocious English. Every sentence was run through with bad grammar and ruined a second time when the word 'like' leaked from between her perfect teeth.

I forged a sham friendship with our third suitemate, a pale vapour from Canada who slept with a stuffed giraffe and compulsively sucked her split ends like a psychopath. Maddasyn's absence, however, made it impossible for me to exclude her as the odd one out. The girl was never home.

If Maddasyn wasn't monopolizing the meeting rooms at the Social Sciences library, interviewing former inmates with terrible haircuts and worse tattoos, she was away on the train to parlay in person with banged-up Category-A lags in Belmarsh, Woormwood Scrubs, Wakefield or Strangeways.

I spent days hyping plans for a debauched outing to tantalize the Canadian, Mia? Maya? whatever, until she bought in. Then I was forced to follow through and curate a legendary night out, a grand odyssey designed to leave Maddasyn eternally butthurt over not being invited. I planned to come stumbling home with the Canadian at some ungodly hour, happy and battered, firmly bonded like besties with endearing nicknames, awash in anecdotes of high adventure and close calls with bad men. I had just turned twenty-one and now there were no strings attached to the small fortune my grandfather left me.

The Canadian outfitted herself in tragic flats and a great flapping jumper. I cut the tags off a short skirt, chose murder-me heels and a crop top from my closet and told her to change.

"Let your hair down and lose the shoes," I said. "We're not handing out Watchtower tracts. We're meant to spread mayhem."

We were in the city less than two hours when the Canadian became so sick I feared she had been spiked. In fact she hadn't eaten since breakfast and had never once been drunk before. On the train back to Oxford she apologized, sobbing over her eating disorder and the strict religious upbringing that prevented her from acquiring the stamina, experience and alcoholic hit points needed to hang like a pro.

I dragged her back to our suite. Maddasyn opened the door as I fumbled with my keys, struggling to hold the Canadian upright. Together we dumped her in bed and folded her limbs to form the withered H of the recovery position.

Outfitted for a cosy night in, Maddasyn had fashioned a nest on the sofa in the front room, laptop and boring books cluttering the coffee table, open bottle of red within reach.

"Do you never take a break?" I asked, sincerely impressed.

Maddasyn shrugged, pushed her hands through her hair and drew a Biro from behind one ear.

"I never took school serious til now," she said. "Back home I was halfass goin after my master's, teachin creative writing at like a juvenile tenchen-cenner. My advisor told me bout this fellowship and it seemed like, perfect for me. Where I come up there's like, a lotta generational carceration. The Merican penal system, like it causes like so much harm, you know?"

Maddasyn asked if I would read her thesis outline. We put on some music. Finished the wine. Opened another bottle and before it was empty we were clicking together like the cold black parts of a lethal instrument, a maniac's rifle built from a briefcase on a rooftop.

She kicked off her Notre Dame sweatpants and squeezed into a frightfully tight ensemble that nearly had me back to hating her again. After a quick welfare check to ensure the Canadian was still breathing the two of us left the suite and waged a blitzkrieg campaign on local pubs.

We came stumbling home at some ungodly hour happy and battered, singing rude rugby songs, firmly bonded like besties.

Maddasyn invited me to come home with her to spend Christmas in Illinois. She had a research interview lined up there on Boxing Day, a state prisoner doing life. Not a laughable U.K. twenty-year time-out but a genuine American cage-to-grave life sentence for murder.

Of course I said yes. I was eager to exist undercover and off the grid, beyond the range of my sister and my parents and their constant badgering for a cut of my inheritance.

I packed a bag and left England without knowing I was seeing Oxford and the strange Canadian for the last time.