Georgina was my best friend. My only friend, actually. She had a steel-hard glare to rival mine. The ability to dispatch jeering school mates with a curt ‘Fuck off!’ She had been my friend for precisely four months, three days and six hours. Before that, I hadn’t had one. I was not the sort of girl other girls wanted to be seen with. I was not popular. I was not funny. Actually, I was funny, but my sense of humour seemed to be an acquired taste. I was certainly not pretty. It wasn’t the greatest truth – not to be pretty – when you’re fourteen, but hey, other truths are worse. Mum used to lie to me about it all the time – when she was our mum. She’d tell me I was lovely, but I wasn’t. Her words meant little. She meant little. She’d meant little again earlier this evening, when she’d visited us, meaning she was faithless, groundless, insubstantial … for the very last time. And I was ugly. I was a freak with a stellar line in eye-rolls and that steely stare that could strike you dead at twenty paces. I could see people off, if they started. And Georgina could, too. We made an excellent team.

‘Medium or large, Roo?’ asked Georgina as we watched the floss swirl round the stainless-steel pan. Something being made out of nothing. Sustenance out of air. My family and my friends called me Roo. I liked that. It was much better than Prudence or The Prude, or The Freak or Ugly Fucker – all names thrown at me across the playground or in the dinner queue when I was minding my own business adding to the slops bin or getting seconds of cornflake tart and custard. School kids could be so charming, couldn’t they? Other girls got dates and snogs and phone calls in the evening that they took while sitting on the stairs in the hall, the curly phone cord wrapped round their eager fingers; I got, ‘What happened to your face, freak?’ or, ‘Did someone punch you at birth?’ What joy, being a slightly plump North London schoolgirl with a massive heart-shaped birthmark on my face, lurking tonight like a stamped-on mouse under three layers of Maybelline’s finest (colour-matched for me in Boots by a simpering blonde in a white coat) and a supplementary slick of Rimmel’s Hide the Blemish.