She undoes her buttons. Pulls down her jeans. Pulls off her T-shirt. Pulls the dress quickly over her.

In the space between, when she stood in her underwear, hunched over herself, she felt their silence. A prick of it, a stipple against her skin, the little pointed glances they made.

It is still there, now, on the tarmac, at the frayed edge of the red carpet.

There are velvet ropes either side, and people crowded behind them. There are photographers, and Rose can see people in fancy dresses and suits standing while the flashes go off.

But it’s also a carpet on the street. She can see grubby marks on the paving stones underneath it.

She looks up to where the flashes are. Whoever it is must be famous enough for a photo. But they’re also tiny and far away.

She feels the familiar doubleness that has stalked her trip to London. This is a fantasy, a fairy tale, but it’s also utterly ordinary. Sometimes she feels older than she is, older than she possibly could be.

Rose looks down at her legs, long, bare, white. The fringe of the dress hangs mid-thigh. She doesn’t know how to walk in this, so she walks like she always does, long stepped, dreaming. The sandals they picked for her look different on feet. The gold is now gold, the straps elegant and curved over her ankle.

They fit perfectly.

Rachael and Jacqui clack hard heels in small steps beside her.

She feels the air on her, the warm London air. She watches the people as they get closer, and the flap of her sandals muffles as they step onto the carpet. Her eyes are strange. They put mascara on her. She feels the heat of bronzer on her cheeks. She feels small inside herself.

People are looking.

Rachael and Jacqui notice it. They notice that Rose doesn’t. She fills the same space she did before, an awkward, thin, adolescent space, childlike, boyish, half ugly, ready to be kicked a bit, prodded a bit, poked at and laughed at for not being there, not being right, not knowing who she is or how to use it. Only that space, framed here, in that dress, on this carpet, looks different.

It’s a very strange magic. A turn in perception. The person that you know up close becomes another in a new context. And all those tics, the little oddities, the alien quality of her, become a mesmerising charisma. Rachael is staring too. Half laughing. She can’t tell if she’s witnessing the birth of a star or the moment the curtain is tugged aside by a small dog and all those supermodels are revealed to be shy, damaged teenagers, with a come-hither gaze that, on closer inspection, is a look of pure fear.