Anyway, the new pictures felt too intimate, too dangerous, to show to Helena. ‘A bit,’ Petra said noncommittally, and escaped the conversation by wandering off to the kitchen to make coffee.

Evidently a lot had changed inside her in the past three years. She’d done a lot of fantasy portraiture in the past – hyperreal glossy beauty that maybe teen girls would like. Once upon a time she’d imagined illustrating her own books with them and selling a bazillion copies. When she’d taken up her new tablet with that flush of new-start energy, she hadn’t had any product in mind, but maybe it’d be nice to do a comic or story featuring her strawberry-gloss girls – not for publication, just for her own enjoyment, she didn’t really know – but instead of pretty, her mind and her hand started to deliver damaged faces and scarred bodies. She’d had no idea where they were coming from, but that memory of long-gone witch-Petra lighting candles on the Melville hilltops made her realise: maybe they had been inside her all along.

She’d shown Vincent the pretty ones first, the ones she’d done before; the ones she’d collected in her portfolio that had been roundly rejected – well, she’d given up after four firm and fulsome ‘no’s, so she couldn’t really class the rejection as round. The cherry-lipped zodiac girls, their blush and limpid eyes and the sunlight effects playing over their sexy-cute freckles; their teen-dream bodies and lustrous fantasy hair. They were you, imperfect and shy, but perfectly turned out, like in the final scene of a cheesy, unironic romance movie. But cocooned with him in her bed, his nakedness and his utter acceptance of her nakedness making her feel safe, she’d scrolled across to some of the newer stuff. Beautiful Poppy drowning in a pool of pills; Clara, bruised and cut and still defiant; Elise with her corporate tattoos gone wrong, infected and seeping; and especially Tatia, with the demons in her eyes. She wasn’t sure what was compelling her to channel these feelings, run septic nails across the idealised portraits, but it was almost as if just making pretty pictures wasn’t enough anymore – she was compelled to gouge deep and find the blood beneath the surface.

‘Jesus,’ he’d said. ‘These are insane.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she’d flinched, sweeping them away. ‘It’s just something—’

But he’d caught her hand and stayed it. ‘No, I mean they’re incredible. Hot, to be honest,’ he said, running his foot up her calf, shifting it up past her knee. ‘They’re dirty. Hardcore. Where do they come from?’ He didn’t have to say, I never imagined pictures like this coming from someone like you. The way he’d scanned her with his eyes, reassessing her, said it all. That’s what she’d made herself into – neutral, depthless, normal, trying to fit in, trying to blend. It was a process that had started years ago, that sensitive young girl’s first flinch away from personality, and continued still today, the process of normalisation and homogenisation exacerbated by the searing self-consciousness of being a migrant.