Ed jumped to his feet. “Hey, Annie! Annie!” he called. The chair went over, but he saved the rum. “Annie!”

“Ed!”

She was laughing. He heard her call his name all the way across the concrete. But when the rickshaw pulled up in front of him in a cloud of advertisements like coloured smoke and tissue paper, it wasn’t Annie between the shafts, only some other girl with big legs who looked him up and down ironically.

“Hey,” he said. “Who are you?”

“You ain’t ready to know,” said the rickshaw girl. She jerked her thumb over her shoulder. “Your squeeze is in there.”

At that moment, Annie Glyph stepped down onto the concrete. Those missing three days she had put to use, and had herself made over—an investment unknowingly underpinned by the humiliated Bella Cray. The cut was radical. New clean flesh had flourished like magic in the tailor’s soup. The old Annie was gone. What Ed saw was this: a girl not more than fifteen years old. She wore a calf-length pink satin skirt with a kick pleat at the back, and a bolero top in lime green angora wool that showed off her nipples. This she had accessorised with a little gold chain belt, also block-heeled sandals in transparent urethane. Her hair, a blonde floss, was done up in bunches with matching ribbon. Even with the shoes she was less than five foot two and a half inches tall.

“Hi Ed,” she said. “Like it? It’s called Mona.”

She looked down at herself. Looked back up at him and laughed.

“You like it!” she said.

She said anxiously: “You do like it, don’t you?” She said, “Oh Ed. I’m so happy.”

Ed didn’t know what to say. “Do I know you?”

“Ed!”

“It was a joke,” he said. “I see the resemblance now. It’s nice, but I don’t know why you did this.”

He said: “I liked you the way you were.”

Annie stopped smiling.

“Jesus, Ed,” she said. “It wasn’t for you. It was for me.”

“I don’t get this.”

“Ed, I wanted to be smaller.”

“This isn’t smaller,” Ed said. “It’s Pierpoint Street.”

“Oh, great,” she said. “Fuck off. It’s what I am, Ed. Pierpoint Street.”

She got back in the rickshaw. To the rickshaw girl she said, “Take me away from this fucker.” She got down out of the rickshaw again and stamped her foot. “I love you Ed, but it has to be said you’re a twink. What if I wanted to be fucked by someone bigger than me? What if that was what I needed to get off? You don’t see that, that’s why you’re a twink.”

Ed stared at her. “I’m having an argument with someone I don’t even recognise,” he complained.

“Look at me then. You helped me when I was down, only I found out too late that being your mother was the price. Twinks always need a mother. What if I didn’t want to be that anymore?”