I turn my back to let her get dressed. ‘Is this going to be your first time?’ I ask the wall, which doesn’t answer. ‘Make sure you take one of the pills that knocks the edges off, and just let them get on with it. It’ll be over before you know it.’ I hear a gulping sound, like she’s just come up for air. I turn around to face her and she’s sitting on the side of the bed, dressed in clothes that are more suited to a slut like me. I watch as her small body is racked with sobs that won’t come. She’s doing a really good job of battling them.

Then I hear her voice, trying to steady itself as it speaks. ‘Magda no allow.’

I wonder who Magda is, or was, but don’t want to get drawn into any conversation that might weaken her for the night ahead; she’s going to need all her fight, so I laugh and say, ‘Whoever the fuck Magda is, she deprived you, big-time. You might even find you enjoy it!’

‘You are that shape of girl, but that is not I,’ she says in her crystal-clear Enid-Blyton voice, her English archaic and bookish. Miss High and Mighty is back and I’m glad; she can go some way towards protecting herself that way. Irina comes back into the room with her bag, and in silence the older woman gestures to the younger to sit on the chair in front of the mirror. I watch as her fingers slide over the wide planes of nubie’s face, sweeping powder over her high cheekbones. She applies lip gloss and mascara, and asks Nico to stick out her tongue. She then takes a toothbrush from her bag and scrapes it down. Maybe the princess has a bad smell in her mouth, maybe her insides are rotting.

Nico’s eyes are open and she is staring blank-eyed at the image of herself in the glass, and I wonder if she has managed to erase the outside world. A good trick that one: eyes open, yet unseeing. The men wouldn’t know the difference. They wouldn’t like closed eyes; it would remove their power over us, that submission they like to imagine they see as we lie beneath them.

When the makeover is complete, Nico looks almost old enough to be going to work on the night shift. A soundless giggle plays out in my chest. The layer of foundation on her face mutes her natural glow, the powder on top cheapens her and she looks better able to handle the coming night. Irina hands her the pill and a glass of water.

‘No thank you,’ she says.

Irina tells her she may need it later, and puts it into a pouch in the glossy patent leather handbag, an exact replica of the one she gave to me. The Handbag Girls.