‘Do you know what you did?’ he says, and his voice has a clipped fury to it he’s never heard in himself.

Her expression doesn’t change. It itches inside him. It makes his skin crawl, like looking at something naked, or skinned. He’s never known anyone who looked at him like she does. No defences in place. Yet she makes him feel like the weak one. He’s disgusted by himself.

‘Do you know what you did?’ he repeats, pushing himself further into anger.

A small, confused dip of the eyebrows.

‘You’ve got him sacked.’

Not a flicker.

With a sense of release, he looks at her and finds that no, she wasn’t what he thought. He thinks of how easily she changed. How she probably sucked Yannis’s cock. His anger is more natural to him now. He reaches for the angriest thing he can say.

‘You lying cunt,’ he says.

He feels ridiculous. And all she does is take a step closer to him. She smiles at him, a stupid look on her face like she doesn’t even know he hates her.

‘Fuck off,’ he says. She’s still moving in. He pushes her with the heel of his hand at her shoulder. ‘Fucking pricktease.’

He turns to go before he has to see her reaction.

The good thing about hating being at home and being ashamed to go into school, Rose finds, is that she can spend the day with Aaron. It’s like old times. Sometimes they walk down to the bridge, down through the woods. They sit in the hollow like they used to. They share a joint. Rose tells him about the places she’s been.

‘On the Tube, you have to stand, because there’s too many people. You have to stand right pressed up against them. If you get off at Holborn, the escalators are the longest. You’re on them for about five minutes. When you look down, the bottom of the escalator is tiny.

‘If you get off at Covent Garden, there is only a lift, and everyone presses into it. You have to move forward to fill in all the gaps. Then when you get out, that’s where all the shops are. There’s all the big shops, and then all these others as well. They’re all the clothes shops. It’s like Silverways, only outside.

‘If you go out, to a bar, there are drinks that cost twelve pounds each. At a restaurant, there are meals that cost hundreds. I had a meal, where there were two of us, and it came to two hundred pounds.’

‘Is everyone rich?’ says Aaron.

Rose nods. She knows what they would say. She asked Archie, and Titch. They both said they weren’t. But she’s seen their houses, and their clothes. She’s seen the cupboard at the magazine, where new stuff is just chucked in a heap. She is learning, though. She’s learning that they believe what they say.

‘They don’t say they are. They just look after you,’ she says. ‘They give you things. Anything you want.’