‘I’m here for a jacket,’ I told her. I feel a jacket will set off my usual T-shirt-and-leggings combo and make me feel a little more together for my counselling session. Or at least not such a fucking fraud. I love clothes – I’ve loved them since I was a little girl and I looked through Nonna’s giant mail order ‘club’ catalogues, marvelling at how the models could be transformed from one thing to the other just by what they wore: twinkling party-goer, tousled beach babe, efficient office girl – but I am not brave enough to wear the ones that really make my heart sing. The beautiful ones. Because I am not beautiful. I am not brave enough to go anywhere, either. And the stories I have to tell would not inspire or delight a soul.

‘Lots came in at the weekend. Let me show you,’ Maya said, directing me away from the beautiful dresses I can never resist looking at to Workwear, where I was ready to choose a workaday plain black office jacket, but Maya persuaded me into a smart grey hip-length blazer with white stripes, which, she said, complements my skin tone and honey-coloured hair. It’s chic, and I feel it provides me with just the right protective barrier I need.

It’s making me very hot, though. I’m currently wearing it sitting opposite a TFL counsellor, somewhere inside a red-brick building in Spitalfields, and I have the sleeves pushed up like Simon Le Bon in the ‘Reflex’ video.

Verity Holmes, BACP registered, accredited counsellor, is wearing possibly the prettiest pair of shoes I’ve ever seen. They are velvet T-bar, blocked-heeled sandals – in floral and polka-dot print – with burgundy bows along the T-bar and the heels wrapped in a kind of floral silk. They are amazing. She’s also wearing a full cotton skirt, white with London buses on it, which I know to be Cath Kidston, and a purple T-shirt topped with a pendulous necklace of wooden beads. She looks about thirty-five. She has nice curly auburn hair. I have my leggings and long T-shirt and flip-flops on, like I do every day in the summer, but I’ve painted my nails for this occasion, and I have the jacket.

I’ve got Verity Holmes’s name written on a piece of paper on my lap. She gave it to me when I came in. I’m worried I should have given her something with my name on, but surely she already knows it. She tucks two sprigs of spiralled hair behind each ear; she crosses and uncrosses her legs, displaying those beautiful shoes. She’s kindly pretending she hasn’t noticed the birthmark, but I know she’s clocked it. I’ve barely given it one coat today, so Verity knows what she’s dealing with. The hope is I won’t feel such a fraud if she can see I’m already a flawed person. That I have issues.