Dexter Mayhew’s drug-fueled nightlife

Dexter Mayhew’s drug-fueled nightlife is a pattern of seeking disinhibition, company, and relief that repeatedly gives way to anxiety and shame. The contrast is clearest on 15 July 1993: an expensive club and its welcoming crowd seem to promise effortless friendship, but as the drugs wear off, Dexter becomes frightened and hollow, and reaches for vodka. His nights do not resolve the loneliness that draws him into them; they sharpen his desire for Emma Morley even as he believes she would not approve.

Context and Early Signs

The book presents Dexter’s relationship with drugs in more than one register. In one conversation with Emma, he grins and proposes that they take E together. Emma feigns ignorance, then says she is not suited to mind-altering chemicals, recalling that once leaving the lid off Tipp-Ex made her think her shoes were trying to eat her. She prefers the natural high of alcohol. Dexter calls E disinhibiting. The exchange makes his interest in drugs part of the intimacy between them: he proposes a shared experience, while Emma answers with comic scepticism and a preference of her own.

A later private recollection makes clear that his experimentation extends beyond this suggestion. While considering which secret to disclose to Emma, Dexter thinks of several he could choose, including that he smoked heroin with Naomi. He also remembers having fast, unhappy sex with Emma’s flatmate Tilly Killick while Emma was out buying fairy lights. These are thoughts about concealed acts, not confessions made in the conversation: he is weighing what to reveal and how he might appear, with a choice that could expose him as shallow or seedy. The distinction matters. His nightlife is connected not only to intoxication but to concealment, sexual opportunism, and the management of his image in front of Emma.

In a letter from a hostel in Bombay, Dexter writes to Emma while drunk, saying he has been drinking beer at lunchtime. He describes India as an experience and jokes about the things available in chemists without a prescription, but does not identify a substance or say that he used one there. The letter does show the breezy, performative tone with which he recounts excess: he announces his drunkenness, turns it into a joke, and folds the account into a message meant for the more careful letter-writer he admires. It sits alongside, rather than proves, his drug use elsewhere.

The Night of 15 July 1993

By 15 July 1993, nights and mornings have begun to blur for Dexter. At 5:01 a.m., he watches sunrise from the back of a decrepit minicab returning from a flat in Brixton. He has spent the night with a newly met group of people, including a graphic designer whose name he cannot quite remember and Tara, a small woman who communicates through massage. He first meets Tara after two in the morning, in a nightclub beneath railway arches. She rubs the shoulders and backs of strangers on the dance floor, then turns her attention to him. She recognizes him as famous; he responds with playful flattery, and they fall into a loop of calling one another lovely.

The club feels safe and socially effortless to Dexter partly because it is populated by attractive, middle-class people whom he thinks he belongs with. It is expensive and supposedly upmarket, but he rarely pays for anything. The people around Tara offer him gum, water, and Marlboro Lights, ask about television, and listen as he shares salacious gossip about famous people. Dexter quickly imagines a future of friendship with them: holidays in a camper van, beach barbecues, and a group that will keep meeting. In the moment, belonging seems to require almost no work. The ease is also fragile: a brief silence makes him remember the day ahead and feel the first panic of the night.

The group returns to dancing, but the scene changes before long. The smiles and nods now seem less like pleasure than attempts to reassure one another that the fun has not ended. When one person calls the music bad, everyone stops dancing at once, as though the spell has broken. Dexter anticipates the journey home, the cab drivers outside, the empty flat in Belsize Park, and the sleepless hours he expects to spend washing up and rearranging his records. His fear is not answered by another club or another group. He wants company, and his thoughts turn to Emma: he feels a sudden rush of love and decides to take a cab to Earls Court to tell her how much he loves and desires her, even if they only sit and talk. He also thinks she would not understand or approve of his state. The wish to reach her and the impulse to keep her separate from this life coexist.

When the High Fades

At the flat, the company sprawls across a huge four-poster bed covered in synthetic tiger skins, beneath a mirror. People rest against one another, listen to music, kiss, and trade personal revelations they may regret in the morning. Dexter enjoys the apparent closeness, and the group’s talk of picnics and lazy Sundays extends his fantasy that these new acquaintances will become lasting friends. But the drugs have gone by the time Tara continues massaging his neck. What had felt relaxing now registers as hard jabs and pokes; her face seems pinched and menacing to him. He notices the white paste between her teeth and feels dread, fear, and shame rise as a sticky chemical sweat.

Dexter sits up, shivers, and drags both hands down his face as if trying to wipe something away. The morning outside becomes sharply distinct: blackbirds sing on Coldharbour Lane, the music has stopped, and someone asks for tea. Dexter feels hollow, like an Easter egg. The sequence turns the night’s promise of uncomplicated pleasure inside out. The same body that had been absorbed in dancing and massage is now tense and frightened; the social ease that seemed permanent has left him alone with the day he has been trying not to face.

Repetition, Relationships, and Consequences

The episode’s ending makes clear that the collapse of one intoxication does not produce an immediate break from dependence. At the refrigerator, Dexter sees a bottle of vodka and drinks two inches of it, washing it down with sour apple juice. He winces and swallows his chewing gum with the drink. When someone calls for tea again, he picks up the milk carton and weighs it in his hand, beginning to form an idea. The detail does not establish what he will do next, but it places alcohol inside the same morning as the drugs’ aftermath: as fear and physical discomfort return, he reaches for another intoxicant.

His longing for Emma provides a counterpoint to the temporary connections of the night. With Tara and the people in the flat, he enjoys a sense that friendship can happen instantly, without the careful questions and awkwardness he associates with earlier encounters. Yet when silence breaks the group’s spell, it is not one of these new friends he most wants to see. It is Emma, whose familiar presence carries both desire and the possibility of being judged. Dexter’s concealed heroin use, his proposed shared E experience, and his anxious turn toward her disclose different sides of the same tension: he wants intimacy, but his habits and secrets complicate the trust it requires.

The account also sets celebrity against private instability. Strangers recognize Dexter from television, and he uses gossip and charm to keep their interest; in the club, he appears to belong among the confident people who gather around him. At dawn, however, he cannot remember a new acquaintance’s name, anticipates an empty flat, and feels panic at the day ahead. The movement from recognition to hollowness gives his drug-fueled nightlife its recurring shape: a brief performance of freedom and connection followed by the return of dread, secrecy, and the need to find another way not to be alone.