Her skin requires the most work – cleanse, tone, moisturise, treat, cover. As a teenager, she didn’t see why her face should demand hours of attention while everyone else got by with a splash of water, but there have been plenty of lessons learned since then, and now she just gets on with it. Next, she pulls a new packet of contact lenses out of the vanity unit. She hasn’t worn Seabreeze Blue before. She dabs one, then another, with her index finger, and places them over her corneas. She stares at her reflection in the bathroom mirror and allows herself a smile.

The colour reminds her of the Indian Ocean, somewhere her dad would take her every now and again when the farm work quietened down. But she hasn’t got time to let those memories solidify, so she blinks them away and moves her focus to her hair. Deep ruby red, shorn at the back and spiky on top; she might be a lonely spinster, but at least she’s got a badass hairstyle.

Work is less than two miles away, and on a sunny day she might walk it. But the weather is bitter today, bulbous clouds holding in last night’s freezing temperatures, so Kat heads in the opposite direction towards Clapham North tube station. It’s two stops on the Northern Line to Clapham South, then a fifteen-minute walk through an expanse of million-pound houses to her job at Groom & Bloom.

Amazingly, training as a dog groomer had been her mum’s idea, when Kat was back from Australia and struggling to work out what to do next. Kat had spent fifteen years on her dad’s farm in the outback, a place called Wandering two hours south-east of Perth. There were no professional groomers out there, so she became responsible for looking after the many dogs on the farm.

Life back in the UK had been so different that she couldn’t imagine merging the two worlds, but as soon as her mum suggested getting a grooming qualification, she’d realised it was a way out of Newbury, and the suffocating side of her family. Her stepfather had paid for an intensive course – Javier is always happy to throw money at a problem – and a month later she was qualified. Her first job was as assistant to a mobile dog groomer, but without a driving licence, her career progression stalled as soon as she started, so when a role came up at Groom & Bloom, she applied.