I stare at it and consider what I might write about it. It reminds me of something, another work, but I can’t quite figure out what.

‘It’s great, right?’ comes a French female voice from beside me. I turn my head to see who’s talking. Oh fuck. It’s the woman I was just looking at.

Agnès, that was her name.

I nod and say, ‘Yes,’ as I take her in.

She’s somewhere between thirty-eight and forty-five and smells refined. Expensive. She has the kind of translucent skin that I recognise from the Fraxel leaflets that are handed to me every time I get a facial, and she’s wearing a navy and cream lace pants suit, the sort that you just know didn’t come from Zara. As for me, I’m wearing a black leather skirt (that did come from Zara), thick black stockings, black boots, a black V-neck, a gold necklace and a pair of dangly earrings I picked up from Topshop. I feel conspicuously inexpensive under her gaze.

She’s watching me like she expects me to say something else. But I don’t want to say something else, I want to leave, so instead I glance over her shoulder; the last thing I need is for Noah to walk in right now.

‘Do you know much of his work?’ she continues. My gaze snaps back to hers and she smiles. God, she doesn’t think I’m a proper buyer does she?

‘Not really,’ I say, running polite reasons to excuse myself through my mind but the only compelling one I can come up with is: bathroom.

And then something truly wonderful happens. My phone starts vibrating in my hand. I look down and see ‘Mum’ flashing up on the screen. Thank god.

‘Oh shit. Sorry, I have to take this,’ I say, holding up my phone.

And that’s true. My mother never calls me. And when she does it’s never good. It means the wheels are falling off again and she needs me.

‘Hey, Mum,’ I say, ‘just a sec.’ I weave my way through the crowd, past the mousy-haired girl by the door who’s greeting people and handing out champagne, and soon I’m outside in the crisp night air where it’s quieter.

The sky is a rich starry-night blue and the yellow streetlights look gold against it.

‘Mum?’

‘Hi,’ she says. Her voice cracks.

‘What’s going on?’ I ask, moving away from the hum of the gallery.

‘We broke up,’ she says.

By ‘we’ she means her and Neville. This is not a bad thing, Neville is a shit – but of course he is, that’s mum’s type. She’s been breaking up with men like Neville my whole life. And you’d think that would have taught me a thing or two about love but I guess there are some lessons that can’t be learned secondhand.

‘Okay, what actually happened?’ I ask.

She starts sobbing. Then mumbling something – I’m pretty sure she just said ‘took my car’.

‘Take a deep breath,’ I say into the phone.