‘I thought I didn’t know your accent.’ He was pleased with himself. ‘You are not from Chittagong.’

‘No.’

They walked into the factory, and the noise hit Hessa like a slap. It was brutally hot, the air choked by desperate sweat and sour chemicals.

The women, packed together in row after row, sat crouched over their sewing machines. The girl closest to the door glanced up. She wore a small dust mask, her eyes above dark with exhaustion. She was very young, Hessa thought, probably lying about her age. No one would check if she was really eighteen: that much they all knew.

On the table to one side of the girl’s sewing machine, a pile of floral material lay in neat shapes. Pink hearts, blue arrows. The girl picked up two pieces, tucked them together and whirred them through the machine. Mummy’s little princess, read a tiny T-shirt.

The woman picked up another two pieces of material, whirr. Pick, whirr. Pick, whirr. Pickwhirrpickwhirrpickwhirr.

‘This is a good factory,’ said the man.

Smile, Casey had said. He has to enjoy showing you around. You need him to flaunt it at you.

And Hessa smiled.

The girl’s hands were rough, nicked here and there by the machines. The air was filled with tiny wisps of thread, gold in the sunlight.

Hessa glanced up at the big windows. The sun sloped in, so that every tiny stitch could be checked. As Hessa gazed up, a supervisor in a black suit paced past, peering at the little T-shirts, the pink hearts, the blue arrows.

Hessa stared around the rest of the room. Huge cardboard boxes were piled up against the fire exit. She imagined this room if a spark caught. Nylon goes up like a torch, she knew. For a second, Hessa saw the place filled with smoke, the sewing machines crammed together making an impossible obstacle course in the dark. She heard the screams. One staircase and a thousand desperate women. That beggar outside: a pleading face, her mouth a gash.

There were no addresses on the big packages, anonymity a habit. Hessa peered and squinted, feeling the camera belt bite her side.

The man was running through the terms. Thirteen hours a day, six days a week, fifty dollars a month, maybe. Bangladesh’s selling point to the world, that figure. They took pride in it even. Pickwhirrpickwhirrpickwhirr, forever.

Hessa leaned against a work table for a second, forcing herself to breathe.

The second woman along the line looked as if she was in her late fifties, but was probably only forty. Her body had shaped itself into a crouch over the sewing machine. She could barely look up, must have sat there for years, in just that shape. A wisp of human in a line of appliances.