s my PE teacher will happily testify, I am not a very fast runner. But I still manage to get at least ten metres away before Nick catches me. He has to push me back into the stadium like I’m startled cattle.

Actually, I’m shaking so hard that if I did contain milk, I’m pretty sure it would now be butter.

“There was supposed to be nobody here,” Nick explains when I’ve finally stopped waving my arms and legs in every direction, like an upside-down beetle. “They’re here for a sumo match that starts in an hour. If you’d been here on time, it would have been empty.”

I peer through the swing doors into the arena; there are chairs all the way up to the ceiling, and almost every single one is full. “I can’t do it,” I say almost inaudibly. “Nick, please don’t make me do it.”

I look desperately at the floor. If I can just find a crowbar I might be able to pull a few floorboards loose and crawl under them. I can live there forever, like a mouse or a rat. Or a really big and totally pathetic woodlouse.

“Of course you can do it,” he says. “They’re strangers you’ll never see again. Who cares what they think of you?”

I look at the crowd again and the distant stage, and my stomach folds in half. Nobody can transform that much in six months. This isn’t a few strangers. This is thousands of strangers. Thousands and thousands of strangers. Thousands and thousands and thousands and …

“Me,” I decide. “I care.”

“They’re here to watch sumo, Harriet. Not us. They won’t be paying any attention. We get up there, do our thing for half an hour, and then come down again. It’ll be …” He twinkles at me. “Coolioko.”

I glare at Nick and then sigh in resignation. This is what I signed up for: live catwalks and live television and live octopi and live sumo. Everything in modelling is live. There’s nowhere to hide.

Plus unless I want to be disembowelled on the spot I don’t think I should push Yuka’s patience any further.

I nod grimly.

“Excellent,” Nick says. “I’ll be there, so don’t worry, OK?”

That is simultaneously the best and worst sentence I’ve heard in the last two months. “Uh-huh.”

Nick turns to a chair behind him and picks up what looks like a huge white scarf and a very large safety pin. “Here’s your costume. See you out there.”

And he winks at me then disappears through the doors, into the crowd.