26

I wake up with a hazy recollection of the night before. Last thing I remember, I was counting the traffic lights on the drive home from Brixton, where I’d been clubbing with Bip and Ban in a musty-smelling vault. A club with frenetic music – boof boof boof, whiiir, weep, boof – and overly familiar people. Everyone kept offering me sips of their water. I stayed only until I was certain I’d fall asleep the moment I got home to bed. The girls bundled me safely into a minicab in the wee small hours of the morning.

My head is beginning to wrap itself around the idea that we crashed Jordan’s work party last night when someone knocks at my front door.

BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG.

‘Gracie!’ A voice calls through the slightly ajar reception window. It sounds like Faith. ‘Gracie, this is serious. Let us in.’

I pull my dressing gown around my state of half-undress. The leather skirt is on the floor. My legs are still ensconced in the tan control-top tights. I’m braless under the strapless red top, and I’ve slept in the make-up I applied with the girls’ help last night. I pause briefly at the mirror in the hallway. I look like a prostitute at the end of a long shift.

As I open the door, daylight blinds me. I rub my eyes and my hands retract covered in blue eyeliner. Faith is at my door, and she’s here with someone else, and that someone is… Oh my Lord, Harry is here.

‘Thank you,’ Faith says, passing by me briskly and plonking herself down on the sofa. She’s wearing low-slung velour tracksuit bottoms – the trendy sort – a sporty singlet and a hooded top. Her long, blonde mane is in a high ponytail. Her face is devoid of make-up. Presumably, Faith was out last night at The Tricycle Club, but she looks like she’s just returned from a health spa. ‘You’ve really done it this time,’ she says, slapping a large yellow envelope on my coffee table. ‘Even for you, this is good.’

From the front door, Harry clears his throat. ‘It’s nothing we can’t sort out, Gracie.’ His appearance is as rumpled as I feel. He’s wearing a wrinkled shirt and muddied jeans (it must have been some wedding). His eyes are bloodshot when he removes his sunglasses. He gives me one of his trademark grins. ‘May I come in?’

Embarrassed to have left him standing – embarrassed that the tan control tights, with reinforced toes, are visible beneath my dressing gown – I stutter, ‘Sorry, Harry, of course. Come through.’

He comes inside my flat and into my front room, where he takes a seat in the armchair opposite Faith.

I take immediate leave for the bathroom.