When I get home, I can see a light on in the basement window. This means that Crow’s in her workroom again. She hasn’t been there much since our discussion about labels. When I do see her, she goes on about Joseph and his amazing internet classes in the summer, or GCSEs and other school-related things. Her dad has definitely had an effect on her. She’s stopped making her dresses to sell in the Portobello Road and she’s told Andy Elat she won’t be designing another collection for Miss Teen in the foreseeable future. The only thing she’s working on, as far as I know, is a new design for Isabelle’s wedding dress.

I let myself in and Crow smiles when she sees me. I curl up in the velvet armchair while she fiddles with the dress on the mannequin.

‘Does my outfit remind you of anything?’ I ask her.

‘Stand up,’ she commands. I do. ‘Hmmm.’ She thinks for a while. ‘A tower block in Kampala. A beige one.’

‘Someone at school said a ruler.’

She raises one eyebrow and nods in agreement. ‘He was right. You should wear your usual stuff.’

‘Who said he was a he?’

She looks at me and laughs. ‘I’ve known you a long time, Nonie. It’s the coffee shop guy, isn’t it? The one you told me about. Anyway, he’s right. What do you think about this, by the way?’

She’s fiddling crossly with a seam on the latest wedding dress. ‘I don’t know what it is,’ she adds. ‘Usually I have such a clear idea from the start and all I have to do is make it look the way I imagine. But this dress . . . it keeps going wrong.’

I shift my attention from Liam to the dress. This version will be a white chiffon shift with a slight 1920s feel. It will hang from satin ribbon shoulder straps and fall to Isabelle’s ankles. Crow is working on the cotton toile that will make the pattern. The final dress will be weighted by thousands of tiny white mother-of-pearl beads and silver sequins, which will be applied by a workshop in India. Isabelle’s really excited and emails Crow about it almost every day, apparently.

‘It’s beautiful,’ I tell her. ‘But you’ve got ages to get it right. And, I’ve been thinking. Remember the MIMOs?’ She looks confused. ‘The men in matching overcoats who were setting up that fashion house? They’re still looking for someone. If you don’t want to do your own label, you could do theirs. I really think you should get back to them about your creative directions.’

‘But I don’t have any. I have school. I have exams. So do you. We need to revise.’

‘I know . . . but they might not wait.’

Crow shrugs. I thought I’d got used to her shrug and it didn’t annoy me any more, but right now I am super-annoyed. I have to make her snap out of her laid-back attitude.

‘They sounded really excited about you. And they’ve got so much money, they could make any design you could think of. You just need to tell them what you want to do.’

Crow shrugs AGAIN and doesn’t speak.

‘Christopher Kane’s doing a line for Versace,’ I point out.

Nothing. Even though Christopher Kane is one of Crow’s favourite designers.

‘Stella McCartney went to Chloé. Alexander McQueen went to Givenchy. It’s how most of the big names got famous and this is your chance. You’ve got to talk to them, at least. Show them some ideas.’

I look across at her pleadingly. Her lovely, large mouth is set in a thin line and for once, it’s not because it’s full of pins. She doesn’t look impressed, but she should be. Not only by the big chance, but by how noble I’m being in suggesting it to her. Even though we both know there wouldn’t be a job for me.

‘I promised Dad I’d study really hard this year.’ She looks up. ‘At home,’ – and I realise by ‘home’ she means Uganda, not her flat down the road from here, and suddenly that hurts – ‘lots of girls have to leave school to help their families. They can’t do exams or training. In London, people take school too much for granted.’

She’s not looking at me when she says this. She’s deliberately avoiding me, in fact. But I think when she says ‘people’ she means ‘you, Nonie’. And I could do without having a best friend who sounds like a Ugandan version of my mother.

We end up sitting in silence for the next half hour, while she unpicks a side seam on the dress and pins it into a new position. She does it very carefully, but at first the change seems so tiny that I can’t see why she bothered. Then suddenly the dress hangs differently and seems to come to life on the mannequin. She’s so good at this! I can’t bear it that she’s not grabbing this amazing opportunity with both hands.

I stomp upstairs in frustration, muttering something about assignments. She doesn’t say goodbye.