Thirteen years old, she was already tall and bony. She loved fucking but she had an awkward walk and big feet. She did her hair the way they all did then, in lacquered copper waves so complex they could receive the test tone of Radio Universe. When she smiled her gums showed; when she boarded that rocket she never looked back. Worked her way down through the Swan and out to Stevenson’s Reach. Then on to Lila y Flag, L’Avventura, McKie, LaFuma RSX, where she hit the wall a little and was forced to rest a year with a sweet alien boy from You’re Worth It. There she took the package, opting – from the hundreds of Monroes on offer – for the soft-look Marilyn photographed in black and white by Cecil Beaton at the Ambassador Hotel, 1956. Suddenly she was five foot three, with a kind of receptive liveliness and flossy blond easycare hair that always smelled of peppermint shampoo. After that the journey got easier for her: its inner and outer trajectories seemed to match. She was so happy! Magellan to O’Dowd, Pixlet to Oxley; The Discoveries, The Fourth Part, The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista; Massive 49 to Meniere’s World; Tregetour, Charo, Entantiodroma, Max Party, Gay Lung and Ambo Danse. American Polaroid, American Diner, American Nosebleed. Oxi, Krokodil, Waitrose Two and Santa Muerte. By then, her suitcase contained: tampons, fourteen pairs of high heel shoes, the dress she left home in, yellow rayon with a faux-Deco feel, which she never wore again. That girl had a sweet way of laughing. Drunk, she’d explain, ‘I love shoes.’ She would follow you anywhere for two weeks then follow someone else, until she’d scattered herself like small change across the Halo and down into Radio Bay. There, where the Beach stars fell away like a cliff over nothing, she fell away too, with a laugh on her face and her arms spread wide to everything.

If you asked Irene to describe her favourite memory, she would bring out a little hologram cube about an inch on a side—