Clio took a final drag of the joint and handed it back to her. The roof thumped with bass beneath them.

‘Nah. Go on. This is what I’m into. I wanna hear how people got radicalized.’ The way she spoke, the ‘r’ came out like a purr. ‘Women especially, eh. How we found it. You’re doing magic.’

It seemed to Sammi like a weird thing to say, but her voice was foreign honey; not like the flat London vowels that dragged out of everyone else’s mouth. And she was pretty, and Sammi liked her, so she took a drag, held it in for a second, felt the burn, and started talking again.

‘Right, well. You sure, yeah? So, I just hung around there at first, and I think a couple of them were like, what is this kid doing here, you know? But Constance, she was always trying to include me. At first I was just, like, making the coffee, putting the copies in the envelopes for subscribers, and then, if any of them had tapes of interviews they wanted typed up, they’d get me to do it. I was better than them as I was doing typing at school, see. And I was superkeen. I did not make a single mistake. I’d spend hours after school listening and re-listening to these interviews – with poets, with politicians, with campaigners. Almost all of them black women. Local women. I’d sit in the office, and there was always someone in there, something happening. It was volunteer-run, obviously, so them usually brought they kids in with them – it was always one person’s job to look after the kids in the room next door. And sometimes other women in the area would come in, and have a cup of coffee, and moan about their men, or them not able to pay rent, or something. And I was just sitting there, taking it all in. I got ideas above my station, mate. I went to the careers adviser and told her I wanted to be a painter and, failing that, a journalist.’

‘What did she say to that?’

‘She said I’d been getting really good scores on my typing, had I thought about secretarial work? Pfff. I told this to Constance and she was, like, fuming. Next day, they’re giving me my own column in the magazine. “Little SisterHood”. They told me to write about it, and I did, and then I would write about everything like that, every month. The pressures that teenage girls feel, that sort of thing. People loved it.