‘Can you tell me about it?’

He looked from her eyes to her lips, away to the wall, opened his mouth, took a long breath in. ‘I’d rather not. Sorry.’

She tried not to feel stung. ‘It’s honestly none of my business. But I genuinely hope you feel better soon. And I’ll help if I can. Okay?’ He smiled, a little patronisingly, but she pressed on, dogged as Helena when she’d found a mission to be on. ‘If you want to talk about it, I’m here.’

‘Sure.’

To deflate the tension, she proceeded to whitter on about the gap in British pop culture that kept on tripping her up at pub quizzes and game shows because she hadn’t grown up here, and who the hell were Squidgy and Flumpy and Mr Dick anyway? Some time while they were talking, they went back to bed and she passed out wrapped around him.

6 ‘He had Metamuse tickets?’ Suki’s voice rose a couple of octaves from its usual smoky undertone and she sounded, for a moment, like a teen discussing a Cinnamon Dolls reunion tour. ‘How?’

The lone browser – Freddie from Gravity’s End, the sci-fi bar across the road, who hung out here every Monday before opening time, mainly to observe Suki and never to buy – looked up from the magazine rack. He had a mop of curly black hair over a thin frame that might have been quite a sexy hip-dishevelled look if he had a dash more self-confidence to go with it. As it was, though, he was more annoyingly furtive than intriguingly aloof. His glance darted back to Wonder Woman when Petra’s glance crossed his.

‘Won them, apparently. But he says he doesn’t even remember entering the contest.’ Petra tried to arch back in her stool behind the counter – she was stiff and sore and replete and dozy after the weekend – but it was hard to do since the designer stool’s seat was a minuscule scooped disc of white plastic.

‘I couldn’t believe it when I heard they were even running a season here,’ Suki said.

‘Wait – you knew and you didn’t tell me?’

‘I only read about it on Art Forum about six months ago. Tickets were long gone. But why here? That’s the weird thing. I mean, Paris, Tokyo, Oslo, Boston… and Leamington Spa.’

‘Maybe Jouval and Barnes have some connection here? Maybe Olivia said, “Hey, why don’t we tour in Leamington instead of London this time? I can work in a visit to my nan.”’ Olivia Jouval and Rashida Barnes were Metamuse’s founders, who faced their publicity with tightly guarded and highly curated personae – as far as the doting art press could see, they had no past and no personal life beyond their slick masks.

Suki laughed, a deep throaty sound that turned into a raking cough. ‘As if.’

Petra shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Anyway, why not Leam? It’s a cool town. Hip and happening. I only just learned that Stormzy used to live here.’