The trophies they had been winning all year were now lined along the middle of the table among the condiments. The new BAFTA mask took pride of place, positioned between the salt and pepper and a bottle of ketchup. (Old-school glass bottle because Matty was a stickler for ‘standards’.)

‘What’s the rush?’ Johnny said. ‘Can’t we just enjoy this for a bit?’

‘You’d think.’ Clover sighed. ‘But sadly not. Liam sprang it on me last night that he wants to debut the next project at Cannes.’

‘What?’ Matty looked horrified. As their researcher-slash-PR and marketing person, it was her job to know the international film festival schedules by rote. She dealt with the paperwork, admin and T&C for each one and as such, she immediately knew this meant an eleven-month turnaround. That was possible for bigger production teams, but for Honest Box, with just the three of them . . . they overlapped on duties to such an extent that their job titles were often more honorary than anything. They each made coffee, ran the post office trips, picked up a camera or sat at the edit decks when required.

Which was just how they liked it. Liam had suggested Clover use some of her budget to grow the team, but she was convinced it was the intimacy of their unit that gave their projects such a distinctive, raw voice. The three of them had all been at Leeds Film School together, although they hadn’t become friends until the final year when they were put together to collaborate on their graduation project. It had been an inauspicious grouping. They were all so different: Johnny, a grungy tech-head who’d been kicked out of boarding school not for the usual drugs or fighting offences, but ‘consistently sleeping in’; Matty, a willowy locksmith’s daughter whose ambition had been sharpened to a point after she’d had to fund her degree working behind the bar, while Clover and her trust-fund friends caroused on the other side of it . . . And yet, these two people she wouldn’t have chosen as friends had quickly become her closest confidants. Now, they too were almost family.

The girls lived ten minutes apart from each other in Battersea, with Johnny ten minutes away by motorbike in Shepherd’s Bush (or ‘Shay Boo’, as Matty liked to call it). There wasn’t much distinction between a work meeting – such as this – and hanging out. It invariably involved lounging around in Clover’s kitchen, sitting on worktops and drawing smiley faces on the misted windowpanes.