The apartment was lesson one on New York living. She’d been sent photos of the place, and in the photos it didn’t look too bad. Not a palace, but OK. When she unlocked it, she quickly saw that she’d been duped. Well, she was used to being duped by now, wasn’t she? The apartment was north-facing, so the living room felt cold – it was freezing, this time of year in New York – and was permanently dark. The kitchen had about a year’s worth of grime on every surface, so she had to take a whole day to clean it. The apartment was at the top of the building (she hadn’t even considered this) with a lift that someday soon was due to be fixed according to a couple of the other residents, so she had to climb six flights of stairs when she got home at the end of the day, and she was worn out.

Lesson number two was the Sweaty Stefan situation, which she believed she had escaped. But no. When she started her waitressing job to pay the rent on the apartment while she sussed out her traitorous whore of a mother, she found that this new Sweaty Stefan was called Mike Hodder, and the only difference between Stefan and Mike was the hair colour. Stefan’s had been brown. Mike’s was dyed yellow-blond. Both were greaseballs with wandering hands.

The other waitresses, who were experienced, older, hard-eyed and wary of Mike’s overtures, watched Suki endure the pats, squeeze-pasts and leers for about a week and then one of them, Pammy, a red-haired middle-aged mother of three girls of around Suki’s age, said: ‘What you doin’ here, hun?’

‘What?’ Suki stared at her over the griddle where she was flipping burgers. She wasn’t bad at the job. She worked hard. And as for what she was doing in New York, that was her business, and she was going to attend to that real soon. So what was Pammy saying?

‘Come on. Square peg, round hole, that’s what I’m thinkin’.’

‘Meaning what?’ asked Suki. She felt irritable. It was smoking hot in the kitchen, she was sick of grease and burgers, and Mariah Carey was warbling grace notes out of the radio over the sink. Later, Suki would be up to her armpits in that same sink, washing dishes and cooking utensils. Shit, she hated this job.

Pammy hitched a hip on to the counter, slapped the tea towel over her shoulder and folded her arms. ‘Meaning you’re too pretty for this. You could work anywhere and do any damned thing you wanted.’

Suki stared at Pammy.

‘Burger’s burning,’ said Pammy.

Suki got back to the burgers, flipping, flipping. The smell of greasy meat wafted up over her in a noxious cloud. ‘Like what?’