‘We’ll need to get her a pass.’

They smile. They nod. They give her a pass. She clips it to the neck of her T-shirt. With the pass she only feels more exposed. She’s wearing jeans, a T-shirt, trainers. Titch said the office wasn’t formal, but this place is formal. Titch is wearing a dress and heels. Rose feels too young.

Her arms cross in front of her stomach. Her long fingers touch the skin of her wrists. In the lift, she sees herself in the mirrored walls. She leans close to Titch.

‘I don’t think I’m dressed right,’ she says.

Something in her tone makes Titch look at Rose properly for the first time that day. She doesn’t look away or look down. The faintest touch of triumph creeps into her expression as she says,

‘You’re fine.’

After a slight pause, she adds, ‘You’re beautiful.’

With her face made up and her hair perfect, Titch is like someone from the telly. She looks like someone Rose’s mother would have wanted to be.

‘So are you,’ says Rose.

She can see the flush rise up Titch’s neck. Her eyes keep steady on Rose, though. At most they crinkle at the corners. Then her hand moves quickly, grasps Rose’s, and squeezes it.

‘You’ll be great.’

The lift doors open. The office is a wide, open-plan space. It doesn’t look that special, but the figures who move between the desks walk with confidence, and are dressed in a uniform of effortless cool. Most are women, but the few men aren’t like men Rose knows. They look like they’ve been assembled with care, with bright shirts buttoned at the top collar, ironic jackets and glasses with thick square rims.

Rose takes it in with two simultaneous narratives running in her head. Part of her sees something surprisingly ordinary next to the exoticness of the rest of London, while another part sees these people move with a kind of phosphorescence trailing in their wake, an enchantment borne of knowing exactly who and where they are, and having no doubt that they belong there.

Titch stops as she enters the room and Rose bumps into her. She turns, smiles, walks on, up to a girl at a computer at the edge of the room.

‘Rachael.’

The girl is white-skinned, with dark hair, almost black, and it falls in thick silky sheets around her face. She is pretty. She has the things pretty girls have – the eyelashes, the lips. Her skin is smoothed with well-applied foundation. But when she gives them her attention, and when the hair falls differently round her face, Rose sees that Rachael’s jaw is heavy, and her neck thick, and when she turns a certain way her nose looks funny.

But she is pretty. She dresses like she’s pretty, and her eyes sparkle like she’s pretty as Titch makes the introductions.

‘Rose is seventeen,’ Titch is saying, ‘and she’s very talented, and she’s staying with me. So look after her.’