Natalia took another drag on the spliff and looked out at the ocean, over which the enormous moon was casting an almost ethereal light.

‘Yes. Yes, it does.’

And in that moment, a lifelong friendship was born.

Chapter 15

Sam stumbled through the wet streets of Soho on her high heels, trying not to cry, but not caring about the rain ruining her hair and make-up. It didn’t matter how she looked now anyway – she’d done what she had to do. She’d been so desperate to get out of the basement studio, that she had just slung her neatly folded sweatpants and hoody on over the stockings and suspenders she’d been wearing for the shoot, without bothering to change into her comfortable cotton knickers and underwired bra. In fact, she’d been so flustered that she hadn’t even bothered to fish her trainers out of her holdall, just shoving her feet back into the patent black stilettos that looked so sexy in the photos.

Now she stopped underneath a dripping café awning to change her footwear. There was not caring how you looked, and there was wearing stilettos with sweatpants and a hoody. Besides, the five-minute walk to Piccadilly Circus Tube would take more like fifteen minutes in these shoes and she wanted to get out of the rain and back to halls – her heart sank slightly at the lonely thought – as quickly as possible.

Everything looked seedier in the rain, the multicoloured neon lights proclaiming XXXX, WE SELL POPPERS, VIAGRA, GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS all bouncing in clashing angles off the shiny pavement. She was so sick of all this.

It was bad enough that the other girls on the shoot had been sniggering about Mark and Karolina Kristova. Some of them could be such downright bitches. But the rancid icing on the fetid cake had been the slimy photographer, who thought he had the right to run his hands up and down her body as he told her exactly how he wanted her to pose. Surely there were laws against such things?

As she walked down Berwick Street in the direction of Piccadilly Circus, she found herself bouncing slightly in her trainers. A couple of market traders leered openly at her braless breasts through her hoody, which was getting wetter by the minute.

‘Nice tits, love.’

‘Oh, just sod off.’ Sam, who had been brought up to say please and thank you, was normally polite in the face of catcalls and wolf-whistles, but today she really had had enough. She suddenly wondered what Sienna was doing, and without a second thought reached into her holdall for her phone.

‘Hey! Babes!’ cried Sienna, in her trying-not-to-be-posh voice. ‘How’s it going?’

‘I’ve had a crap day,’ said Sam bluntly. ‘All the girls were being bitches about Mark and Karolina, the photographer was groping me, and … and … now it’s raining, I haven’t got an umbrella, and I’m soaked …’ She found herself crying by the end of her sentence, and hated herself for being so pathetic.