Her brother answers, but he doesn’t remember.

‘You were nine!’ shouts Angela. ‘You must remember. A whole house covered in shells, like the gingerbread house. An old lady made it.’ And then, after a silence, ‘Don’t you remember, Michelle came with us in the car. You liked Michelle.’

Angela leans against the phone box wall, the metal frame digging in.

‘Do you remember my owl made of shells? I used to keep it on the windowsill.’

Angela feeds the machine with silver as her brother talks. Through the panes of phone-box glass the sun is beginning to set. Lisa squeezes herself in. The urine smell blooms up as the door springs shut.

‘I don’t remember anything else,’ says Angela to her brother. ‘Just the house, and Michelle being there. It’s all a blank.’

Angela is pressed into a corner of the booth, hunched over the receiver away from Lisa, her free hand over her face and in her hair.

Lisa looks outwards at the sunset distorted by glass. She lights a cigarette and, when Angela snaps her fingers, gives one to Angela too. The smell of smoke overtakes the smell of piss.

Over the Harbour Arm, the sky is darkening.

‘Nothing,’ says Angela. ‘Nothing.’ And then, ‘No. I don’t want to talk to her.’

She rings off and swipes at the stack of change, sending it flying, then bursts into tears.

Lisa crouches down and picks up the coins by their edges, holding her breath and trying not to touch the floor. She wraps them in a tissue.

‘Let’s get out,’ she says, and pushes open the door.

Angela stumbles into the fresh air. ‘Why doesn’t he remember?’

‘I suppose nine is quite young.’

‘Where could it be?’ sobs Angela. ‘It must be somewhere.’

‘Perhaps the old lady died,’ says Lisa.

This just makes Angela cry even harder. She slams her bag against the phone box. It connects with a smash.

The two friends look at each other and Angela stops crying. Her hands shake as she kneels on the pavement and undoes her bag, pulling out the contents, cradling the shattered fragments of ‘Jacques Derrida’ as she tips them out of their paper sleeve and tries to piece them together on the street.

Lisa watches as Angela fits the pieces over and over again, a jigsaw or a mosaic.

*

The Tracey Emin show is great, but dense, and needs to be seen in stages. Lisa sits on the shoulder of the Harbour Arm where they ate their chips, where she took the photo. You can walk to the end now (the fingers?), which she doesn’t remember being able to do (at least, she doesn’t think they did). There’s still a fish shop on the front, perhaps the same one, its queue snaking out of the doorway. Though tempted, Lisa has opted this time for an overpriced panino from the Turner café, and a decaf latte.