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O 
n the way to the Tube, a couple of men in dirty denim jackets and jeans shout across to us from the other side of the street.

‘Weirdo.’

‘Get a life, silver legs.’

Edie puts a protective arm around me and Jenny holds my hand, but I'm used to it. I don't really mind any more. When some drop-dead fashion god rubbishes the way I look, I might be mildly upset, but guys in head-to-toe denim aren't really in a position to criticise.

Edie tries to change the subject. Sort of.

‘You should see the girl I'm working with this afternoon,’ she announces. ‘She's
seriously
weird. She goes through different phases but at the moment she's into ballet tutus and fairy wings. I mean, fine if you're five, but she's twelve. I never know what to expect next with her. If she shows up at all, that is. She's missed the last two sessions and she's in mega-trouble if she misses this one.’

‘What are you doing with her?’ Jenny asks.

‘Reading. She's dyslexic. Seriously dyslexic. Her brain just isn't wired up for spelling. Last time we were working on “chair”. I have to give her reading strategies.’

Jenny and I have no idea what reading strategies are, but decide not to ask. Edie's quite capable of spending the whole journey telling us.

On the train, she gets some books out of her bag and shows us what she's brought to tempt the girl with this week. They're all stories about small children and animals, with big letters and no word over two syllables. Then she pulls out the Jane Austen she's in the middle of and settles down with it. Knowing her, she'll have finished it by this evening.

Jenny and I get to South Kensington station and bid her goodbye. The V&A is a short walk away in the early summer sunshine. I love it. The buildings are large and chunky and colourful and rambling. You could get lost in them for days. As always, we go through the costume section to get to the café, so I can get my fix of inspirational outfits.

Today, I'm busy admiring a John Galliano wedding dress when Jenny grabs my hand and yanks it.

‘Ow!’

‘Look!’ she whispers so loudly she might as well shout it.

‘What?’

She starts to giggle. ‘I think Edie's going to be out of luck today.’

I follow the line of her stare. Sitting in front of my favourite cabinet – the one with the eighteenth-century embroidered court dress – is a little black girl with a satchel and a notebook, who's busy sketching. I see what Jenny means. The girl is wearing blue cotton dungarees, but they're swamped by an oversize pink practice tutu and there's a tattered pair of pink fairy wings slung over her shoulders. She's topped it all off with a sky-blue crotchet beret scattered with beads and fake pearls. London is a trendy fashion capital, but even so, this outfit is distinctive.

She's staring intently at what she's doing and doesn't notice us.

‘Should we say something?’ Jenny asks.

I shake my head. ‘Not our problem.’

‘But Edie mentioned mega-trouble.’

‘We can't go up to some stranger and say she needs to be in reading practice. She'd think we were nuts.’

‘She's not exactly super-normal.’

I take this as a personal insult. People who choose to dress differently from the crowd should not be labelled and judged, in my opinion. I sniff in an offended sort of way and walk off. Jenny rushes after me.

‘Sorry, Nonie. I didn't mean . . . You know what I meant.’

In the café, we drink our smoothies in silence. I'm trying to look hurt, still, but actually I'm feeling guilty. Jenny's probably right. The girl will be due for some dire punishment and we probably should have helped her. I'm just not as brave about these things as Jenny.

Jenny's looking anxious again. In the end, I give in and ask her what the problem is.

‘Nothing. Just . . . thinking about next week, that's all.’

I feel guiltier still. This is supposed to be a cheering-up day, before all the interviews and publicity and being on her best behaviour.

Some fourteen-year-olds would be itching to live the Hannah Montana life and be on a red carpet beside Hollywood's Hottest Couple and sexy, seventeen, green-eyed Joe Yule (Joe Drool to the press and the rest of his adoring public). Not Jenny. She seems to be particularly dreading her big moment and we're not making it any easier.

At least her father will be there to keep her company. This is the father who left her mother for his second mistress/third wife when Jenny was two and didn't acknowledge her existence for FIVE YEARS, but he's been a bit friendlier recently so we're giving him a second chance.

Despite her father, who's an ex-theatre director, Jenny has wanted to be an actress since she was four. Her imitation of Simon Cowell watching an act he doesn't like on one of his talent shows is so funny it physically hurts to
watch it. She also does the act in question: usually a middle-aged break-dancer or a little poppet who can't quite get the high notes. Most times we have to beg her to stop so we can catch our breath.

A couple of years ago she starred as Annie in the school musical. Our school is BIG on musicals and anything theatrical. Some of the kids go straight on to drama school. Jenny was twelve and was acting with children six years older than her. Even so, she was funnier, louder and more entertaining than any of them. It helped that the part called for a cute redhead with a big voice, but you have to have talent to get that many standing ovations.

One of the parents in the audience turned out to be a casting agent for the movies. Next thing Jenny knew, she was chatting to Hollywood's Hottest Couple beside the pool of their glamorous beachside mansion. They were on the lookout for a girl with an English accent to be Joe Yule's younger sister in their new action picture called
Kid Code
. It's an adventure about a boy from London who can decipher hieroglyphics:
The Mummy
meets
Raiders of the Lost Ark
, with a teenage hero and unfeasi-bly attractive parents (guess who).

So off Jenny went to Hollywood, and all around the world on location, chasing baddies, getting chased by baddies and sharing witty repartee with Joe Drool. As you do.

The trouble was, nobody thought to give her any
training in acting for the screen. She'd tell me about it in long emails, written late at night after a busy day's filming. There was hardly any time for rehearsal. You were just supposed to learn your lines and go out there and do them. And she kept on being told
not
to act. Everything she'd learnt about doing things bigger on stage she had to unlearn. For the movie camera, she had to do things smaller. The director would tell her to act with her eyes and then go crazy with frustration, shouting that her eyeballs were ‘EXHAUSTING HIM WITH THEIR PERPETUAL MOTION’.

And when she wasn't acting, she said the boredom of just sitting around waiting was unbelievable. There are only so many Sudokus and Mario Kart games you can do before you start to wonder if your brain is melting.

I don't think Jenny spent a single day on that set being truly happy. And now filming is finished, every time she meets a journalist she has to say what a fantastic privilege it was to work with so many talented people and how much she's looking forward to the movie coming out.

To cheer her up, I put my smoothie aside and lie through my teeth, assuring her that the red dress will be super-amazing when she's got her hair done and her new makeup and everything. She almost believes me.

Then I get her to do a few impressions of recent talent show hopefuls. At first she refuses, but soon she can't help herself and comes up with a would-be teenage tenor who
has me collapsed in giggles. We start to get funny looks from other tables and decide it's time to leave.

When we get back to the costume section, the girl in the tutu is gone.

N 
ext day, the strangest thing happens.

I'm in the kitchen getting myself a drink when Mum and my brother Harry come in to talk about something. The kitchen is the place where stuff usually happens in our house. It's big, white and full of designer gadgets that we don't know how to clean. The table is Italian marble (‘Don't touch it, don't sit on it, don't draw on it, and for God's sake don't spill anything on it’). The floor is limestone (‘Don't touch it’ blah blah blah). The walls, like the rest of the house, are covered in framed photos and paintings. It looks like a West End art gallery with a cappuccino machine. But it's actually quite homely when you get used to it.

Harry lays some photos down on the table (very carefully) for Mum to look at. Harry's five years older than me and is studying art at Central St Martins, which is THE BEST ART SCHOOL IN THE WORLD. I'd be planning to go there too, if my figures didn't look like stick
men and my attempts at perspective weren't like some sort of weird 3-D puzzle. As it is, my ambition is to make tea and do the photocopying for the Olsen twins or Vivienne Westwood, but I haven't told ANYONE because it would be fashion heaven and I don't want to jinx it.

At the moment, photography is Harry's thing. Before that, it was screen printing. I don't think he's decided exactly what sort of artist he's going to be yet, but he's definitely going to be GOOD.

Harry is Mum's golden boy. I should be jealous, but I can see what she means. He is supercool, because he doesn't try. He's wearing old jeans, frayed by his bike rather than by some designer, a tee-shirt from a dodgy band he saw in a field about three years ago and flip-flops. His hair is dark brown and curly, like mine, and he keeps forgetting to get it cut, so it flops over his eyes. His voice is low and always sounds as if he's about to tell a joke.

I'm pretty sure Edie fancies him, although she won't admit it. If it wasn't for the massive age difference, and him being my BROTHER, they'd make a good couple one day, because, like Edie, he's super-kind and, unlike Edie, he's also quite charming so he might balance out her diplomacy malfunctions.

Harry takes after Mum, who is still beautiful, even after all these years. She has that bone structure thing that models have (‘Cheekbones, darling. What a pity you got your father's’), and smooth skin and lips that look as
though they're pumped full of beeswax, but they're not. Mind you, you should see my granny – she makes Mum look positively ordinary by comparison and she's old enough to be, well, my granny.

Anyway, Harry's got the three photos laid out on the kitchen table. He needs to use one for a project he's doing and he wants Mum's opinion on which is best.

‘The theme's street style,’ he explains. ‘I've been taking pictures of local people who've caught my eye.’

The photographs are black and white and Harry has blown them up large. He's obviously used the fancy new lens he got recently, because the foreground is sharp and the background is very blurry. He's extremely proud of that lens. I've never seen so many blurry backgrounds since he started to use it.

Anyway, we all look at the first photo, which is of a woman in a black burka, with only her eyes showing through a narrow slit in the fabric.

‘I wouldn't exactly call that style,’ says Mum. ‘I'd call that irony. Next.’

She gives Harry a sharp look and he sheepishly pulls forward the next one. Mum starts peering at it through her glasses, but I don't even notice it because I've already spotted what's on the photo behind it.

‘Watch out! Careful!’

Oh no. I realise I've spilled my drink in shock and there is water ALL OVER THE MARBLE and getting dangerously close to the burka. Harry gathers up his
photos and I'm despatched for a cloth. Mum purses her lips in the way she has.

‘What was
that
about?’ Harry asks, crossly, when I'm done. Thank goodness it wasn't a smoothie.

‘The girl in your last photo. It's just . . . I've seen her.’

‘I'm not surprised,’ he says casually. ‘I took it near the V&A and you practically live there, don't you?’

Harry puts the photos back. Mum unpurses her lips and focuses on the last one.

‘Oh, this is the best, definitely. Who is it?’

I look at it again, still shocked. The girl is resting against a railing, drawing something out of shot. There are the tutu and the fairy wings. The satchel and the notebook. They're unmistakeable. This is positively creepy.