Carla Simoes leans on the railings outside the chemist on her break from the Marks and Spencer foodhall. Simoes more tired than usual, many of her Saturday staff failing to show because it’s Easter and they’ve left town without telling her. She sucks on an e-cigarette and checks her messages, wondering if she should send another text because all she got from the last one were Ramon, Belle and Jürgen saying they couldn’t come. Otherwise it will be just her and Tamara and all that food. No, too needy. She checks her watch. Her stomach grumbles and she sucks in more nicotine as, over on the western side of the road, Maureen Keep wearing a purple beanie pulled down against the chill and a cinched camel coat she bought new in 1982 walks past a phone repair shop and a vape shop on her way to Brondesbury Villas. The clown remembers Keep when she was a dancer, not that she ever looked his way. Blonde beehive, pouting lips and fake lashes. A modelling contract with Mary Quant, a shoot with David Bailey, paparazzi snapping as she left a club with Georgie Best. Assignments dwindling as late nights and opioids robbed freshness from her face, dancing jobs that didn’t quite pay for the amphetamines, the fug of hotel parties where the drugs were free. Slim, supple Maureen Keep spending her summers on yachts, partying with Khashoggis, gyrating in a two-piece as billionaires applauded, congratulating one another on putting on such a show for their guests. Scandal with a Saudi prince, a hurried return to London and a glamour shoot to pay her court fees, topless Maureen Keep gracing a thousand bedroom walls. Twenty-year-old Luke Eldad passes Keep on his way into the mobile phone shop next to Greggs and sees an old woman with dyed blonde hair. Momentarily ageless, Keep smiles at him. Eldad nodding back politely, feeling he should know her, ignorant of the calendars that adorned transport cafés and bus drivers’ canteens across the country for a decade, Keep coquettish with a finger on her chin, hair in a curled bob, breasts pushed up with invisible tape. Seized by a sudden coughing fit, she leans on the pole of the pedestrian lights, hoping that the good looking young man isn’t watching.