I uttered my confession the night of the skiffle band, when I got way too drunk. It was just before I threw up in Kemp’s chemical toilet. Not long after, I think, I told him about Jonas, in Tenerife. Not all of it, but some of it, and I was so drunk I don’t know exactly what I said, and I have no recollection of his reaction. But I said something, and I never dared bring it up again and when he tried to, I shut him down. I shut him down as quickly as when he tried to take a photo of me once, sitting at the tiny table in his houseboat, eating late-night sour cream-and-onion Pringles. His view of me in real life was bad enough; I didn’t want it recorded – for him to witness my face and all that lay behind it when I wasn’t even with him.

All these confessions were black marks against me. Cherry, how I felt about my mother, Jonas … They were my bad deeds, my unnatural thoughts, my shame and my errors in judgement. They were the dark and ugly waters of my past. The reasons – more reasons – that he could never love me. And I never even told him about Finsbury Park, where the black deeds all started, where I received my tainting, as a fourteen-year-old girl; where what happened to me became more indelible than my birthmark, more difficult to hide, more impossible to pretend it isn’t still here.

The bus belches me out on to the street at Knightsbridge. I don’t go to Selfridges or Harvey Nics; I don’t have that much courage. Instead, I head into Zara, and I’m intimidated as soon as I’m through the doors. They are all here: the mirrors and the beautiful ones – customers, shop assistants – and it’s far too shiny and bright in here for me, so I keep my head down. I’m on a mission, after all. I walk past the line of changing cubicles to get to the shoe section – trying not to think about all the beautiful young girls, like dolls in boxes, inside them. The shoes twinkle under diamond lights and it doesn’t take me long to find the perfect pair: pale gold, strappy sandals, high.

‘They’re stunning,’ says a leggy brunette, all of about eighteen, with perfect skin, who is head-tilting at a pair of silver wedges. ‘You should defo try those on.’

‘I will,’ I say. And when I do, sitting next to this ethereal creature on a faux-leather footstool and feeling like an absolute gargoyle, I smile. These are my Cinderella shoes. I have my Cinderella dress. I can be that girl. That woman. That woman who is going on a third date, ready to blow Salvi’s mind. Gargoyle can scrub up, I think, with a little confidence and the right attitude. All you have to do is put it on.