Above the table is a photo, of a cottage like the picture in the bathroom. Not just ‘like’, but almost identical, down to the roses, the thatch, and the curl of smoke. Rose can see the clean bright white of the walls, the black of the half-timbered frames around the door and the windows. It’s disorientating – as though something she imagined has been made real. She’s never seen anything so pretty.

Rose asks, ‘Is that the house from the toilet?’

Titch smiles. ‘Yes. I did a pen and ink from the photo. Not very good so I hid it away.’

‘Is it real?’

Titch is startled. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Is it a real place?’

Titch smiles. ‘That’s my other house.’ She hesitates. ‘In the country.’

Rose stares at her. ‘Really?’

Titch smiles again, a different smile this time, wide and helpless and unable to conceal her pleasure in Rose’s innocence. ‘Yes.’

Titch gives Rose a key, and makes sure her phone is charged. They will head in together, but Titch says she may have to stay late. She gives Rose a little folded paper map of the Tube, with their stop circled in blue pen.

‘It’s straight down on Piccadilly,’ she says.

It’s much better this way round. Starting at a small station above ground and then getting out at Covent Garden, still deep underground, but always rising. Escaping rather than descending.

They step out of the station into bright sunshine. The street is busy. Busier even than the train. Not busy like the high street at home, but busy like the outside of a football ground, or a corridor in school on lesson changeover. Busy so you can’t cross the flow of people, who move fast, in bright, summery dresses, in light jackets and shorts, in sunglasses. All beautiful, all young.

They cross, and walk up towards Titch’s building.

Rose moves slowly, her head tilted up. The buildings are tall, the roads narrow. The shops are bright, glossy. Like the inside of a shopping centre, but outside. Not like a high street at home, with charity shops and newsagents, and Burger King and Marks & Spencer. The windows have sparse, elegant displays. A coffee shop has a queue out into the road.

Titch’s building has glass doors. A man and a woman behind a desk, then the lift. It’s not quite as impressive as Rose had hoped. She thought it might look more like one of the shops.

But Titch smiles at the people behind the desk, and they smile, and say, ‘Morning,’ and they walk up and Titch says, ‘This is Rose.’ And Rose wakes up.

They look at her. She blushes. She’d felt invisible, but now the thought that people will meet her and ask her name and she will have to talk to them changes everything.

‘Rose will be here for the next four days on work experience.’

She swallows, and the movement flutters on through her gut. In her stomach, a familiar, burning hunger stirs.