It’s a crisp day, cold air and quiet, dull sky, and Vee arrives early to the cafe where she’s meeting Leonie, even though she knows Leonie will be late, because she always is. She had parked round the corner from Leonie’s Chelsea flat, and taken the bus to Oxford Street.

It’s cool to sit in a cafe in Carnaby Street – Carnaby Street! – and feel as though she’s in the middle of where it’s all happening, even though the coolest thing is that Leonie will soon be here. Vee is full of fizz at the thought of her friend, and their plans for today. And she’s walked past boutiques that she wouldn’t dare go into, places like ‘Gear’ and ‘Pop’, where the stars shop; just passing the doors makes her feel special.

She’s not special. Not special-looking, anyway. She has taken the odd self-portrait, watched as her face emerges from the chemical bath in her darkroom under the stairs. (Dad says she can convert the spare room, if she likes, now that she’s making a living from photography, but she sends her films away to be developed, most of the time, keeps the little darkroom for mucking about in. She likes the way it holds her younger selves, reminding her of how far she has come.) Looking at photographs of herself, she’s come to the conclusion that she is utterly unremarkable. Nothing is odd or wonky or out of proportion. Nothing like Leonie’s great, straight nose, her too-big eyes. Vee cannot wait to see her friend again.

Leonie showed her, from the beginning, what was possible. The week after they met in Dagenham, Vee sent her the contact sheet of the photographs she took there, after they left the pub. She’d circled the ones she thought were best. Leonie had returned the contact sheet with different images circled, and they were the ones in which she was at least a third profile, her nose not minimised or made smaller by angle or light.

Vee would love to snap the young women at the next table, one in a skirt that brushes the floor, the other in a mini-dress and knee-high boots, as they pour tea into brown mugs and talk in hushed tones about what they are planning for tomorrow night. She almost asks if they’d mind being photographed, but Leonie might arrive at any moment.