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‘What's that got to do with Svetlana?’ I ask.

‘If you look at the small print, you'll see that she's the prize. At least, the winner gets the chance to design a dress for her.’

‘Wow.’

I read the small print. The design has to be for a cocktail dress that embodies ‘the spirit of Saint Laurent’. The winner then gets to create something original for Svetlana to wear on a catwalk during London Fashion Week.

‘Cool,’ I say. ‘I must enter.’

‘You and every design student in the country,’ Harry points out. ‘Everyone at St Martins will be doing it. You
can try, though, kiddo. You never know.’

I decide to go ahead anyway – despite my slight handicap of not being able to draw. The story of Yves Saint Laurent's discovery is one of my top three favourite fashion moments. He entered a competition to design a cocktail dress when he was eighteen and won. Christian Dior heard about him and hired him on the spot. Three years later he was running the label. Fashion fairy tales really can happen.

True, he then had to join the army and had a nervous breakdown, but hey – no-one said fashion was easy.

^‘
M 
um?’

‘Mmmm?’

Mum looks up distracted from her cappuccino and her BlackBerry. It's very hard to prise her away from either when she's at home, but I've been working on this. It's time to try out my idea for helping Crow.

‘You know that Cézanne exhibition?’

‘Mmmm?’ Her eyes are drifting back down to the BlackBerry, which is vibrating madly on the table, but I still have about three seconds before she hits a button.

‘The one at the Courtauld Institute? I'd really like to go.’

Wham.

Mum looks up, BlackBerry abandoned, eyes fixing me with a Joe-Yule-like laser gaze.

‘Really?’

‘Yes. Absolutely. Cézanne's one of the most important Post-Impressionists, isn't he? And this is such a one-off
exhibition. I really admire what he does with colour.’

I wonder if I've pushed it too far. The whole colour thing probably sounds a bit rehearsed, which it is. But luckily Mum doesn't notice. The fact is, her daughter is talking about Art. With interest. And Mum has the chance to educate me and share her passion.

‘I'm free tomorrow, actually,’ she says. I knew this – I've learnt how to check her BlackBerry when she's not looking. ‘Would you like to go after school?’

‘Fantastic! Great idea!’

Mum tries to look modest, as if she doesn't want too much praise for having thought up this incredible scheme. Which is perfect. It will work better if she thinks it's her idea.

The thing about Mum is she's in great demand. Although her ‘office’ is a cupboard on the top floor at home, most of the time she's somewhere else, mentally at least, being busy. She represents some really important young artists, whom she's nurtured since they were students, and they're always calling up with problems or questions; or buyers are trying to find the right piece to add to their collections; or she's arranging an exhibition or some art-related event, and it's really,
really
hard to get her undivided attention. The only times she turns the BlackBerry off are in churches and art galleries. Same thing, really, as far as she's concerned. And it's hard to have a proper conversation in a church, so if I really need to talk to her, I have to take her to a gallery.

It took me years to work this out, but since I cottoned on to it, it's made my life much easier. And I don't actually mind looking at Cézanne and stuff. He's a pretty good painter, as far as I can make out. Of course, I'll have to let Mum lecture me about him for twenty minutes or so, but once that's over I can move on to Phase Two of Project Crow.

Mum starts with a picture of the Mont Sainte-Victoire. At first glance it's just a picture of a fairly ugly mountain, but by the time Mum's finished explaining about Cézanne's ground-breaking use of colour to suggest perspective, it's become a fascinating picture of a fairly ugly mountain.

Mum pauses for breath.

‘By the way,’ I say, ‘I've got this friend.’

‘Ye-es?’

I see Mum pat her pocket for her BlackBerry, in case more important messages are arriving, but then she remembers she's switched it off.

I carry on. ‘She's very talented. She needs our help.’

Mum looks at me sceptically. ‘What does she do?’

‘She made this.’ I'm wearing a painted silk flower skirt Crow finished a few days ago. Mum's already given it a semi-approving look.

She puts her head to one side, non-committally.

‘And she can draw.’ I take a piece of paper out of my bag and unfold it. It's covered in Crow's sketches of
dancing girls. Suddenly, Mum looks quite excited. She knows big talent when she sees it.

‘And she's been asked to make clothes to sell in Portobello Road market and she needs some space to make them because she lives in a tiny flat with her aunt and she's from Africa and there's hardly any money and all the stuff is piled up everywhere and she's hardly got room to sew and I think she could be a great designer,’ I finish in a rush. ‘If we helped her.’

There's a silence while we look at each other. Then Mum does something entirely unexpected. She bends down and takes my cheeks (with their rubbish cheekbones) in her hands and kisses the top of my head. I am SO small.

This is nice, but I'm not sure what it means. I gabble on.

‘I mean, you help your artists all the time, so I'm sort of copying you, really, and we've got that room downstairs that Granny uses sometimes to stay in but it's usually empty and I know your artists need it sometimes if they're staying in London but it probably wouldn't be for very long and it would really help Crow and she's so nice and Harry's met her,’ I finish, rather lamely. I'm not sure why this should make any difference, but it might.

Mum takes the drawings from me and admires them for a long time.

‘They're good. How old is she?’

‘Twelve.’

Mum sucks in her breath as if she's just tried a scalding cappuccino. Then she swears in French. One of the words I Tipp-Exed on my Converses, in fact. French swear-words are a leftover from her modelling days. Her eyes keep scanning the drawings.

‘So?’ I ask at last.

‘Certainly,’ she says, smiling. ‘She can have Granny's room.’

I wait for the ‘but’. This has all been far too easy. But there isn't one. Maybe I'm better at managing my mother than I thought. Maybe Crow just really is that talented.

Two days later, we invite Crow and Florence round for tea. Mum takes to Crow straight away and can't help going on about how fabulous her drawings are. Then we take her downstairs to our basement room, which Mum converted years ago for visitors.

We've had great fun creating space for a big worktable and finding pieces that Crow might like to be surrounded by when she's working: the squashy purple velvet armchair from my room, a quirky antique lamp from the sitting room, even a tailor's dummy that Mum found in an antique shop in Paris when she was modelling and has lived in our spare room ever since. The bed has been turned into a sort of sofa, with lots of colourful cushions. And there are three hatstands and a rail for hanging finished clothes.

When Florence sees the room, both her long-fingered
hands fly to her face and then they flutter, like butterflies, as she stands transfixed in the doorway and tries to think of something to say. Crow marches straight up to the tailor's dummy and strokes her hands over it. Then she goes to the French doors that lead to steps up to the back garden and peers up at the sky. Finally, she sits on the sofa-bed thing and puts her hands out beside her, while she admires the worktable. She nods calmly. It will do.

She doesn't say thank you for the room. Or for anything else we try and do for her. She's not big on emotional outbursts. But within hours she's returned from her tiny flat and filled the space with her treasures. Her little black sewing machine is set up on the work-table. Her finished clothes are already filling up the rail and the hatstands. Her favourite designs and inspirations are in a tall pile of paper, ready to be stuck on the large pinboards on the walls. A half-finished dress is draped on the dummy. Paper patterns cover the bed and the floor. When I pop in to check how she's getting on, she can't help smiling.

Phase Two complete.

O 
n the last day of term, Edie arranges for a video about Invisible Children in the camps in Uganda to be shown to the whole school. We watch them singing. And dancing. And making bracelets to sell. And talking about people they know who've died of AIDS. Or been killed or kidnapped. We watch some of them going to school. Most can't, because there are no schools to go to.

Our headmistress looks extremely grim and several sixth-formers can be heard sniffling into their sleeves. It's not the most fun-filled atmosphere to end the school year with, but the idea is to make us appreciate our good luck and fill the world with our noble deeds.

Afterwards, an old pupil stands up and tells us how we're connected to everyone on the planet. She tells us not to be obsessed with cheap celebrity and to make sure we do something useful with our lives.

Then Edie wins so many prizes that I have to hold
most of them for her while she goes up for more. Situation normal.

The trouble is, next morning I have to go to the airport at the crack of dawn to meet Jenny, who's fresh back from the Tokyo premiere of
Kid Code
and full of stories about cheap celebrity that she's picked up from her Hollywood friends. And however hard I try to stay noble and unobsessed, they are, frankly, FASCINATING. I'd share them, but I'm sworn to secrecy. That CIA thing you have to do when you know people who know stars.

Suffice it to say, most of the stories are about people you know from all the magazines we're not supposed to buy and some of them would make your HAIR CURL. They in no way make the world a better place, but they certainly make it entertaining.

Jenny's dying to meet Crow. She had to head off just as things were getting interesting and since then I've been keeping her up to speed with Crow's new designs, and her incredible drawings, and her new workroom in our house. Edie's been giving her updates on the reading progress and the Invisible Children video. Sadly, I think Edie is trying to compete with me on Project Crow, but I'm so winning. Not that it
is
a competition, obviously.

We meet in the workroom. Crow's in her new designer uniform of blue dungarees and slippers. When she's working, she doesn't bother with the fairy wings and tutus. Jenny is ecstatic about everything. You can tell she's
been surrounded by acting types for a while. Everything is GORGEOUS or INCREDIBLE or ADORABLE. Crow just gets on with cutting a new pattern and leaves her to it.

Jenny's brought back a few cute outfits for Crow to look at. She gets them out of her bag with a flourish. Crow looks vaguely grateful, but it's hard to tell. So Jenny goes back to admiring the room. When she gets to the drawings of dancing girls, she pauses to look at them for a long, long time. You can tell she's thinking something.

‘Can I watch you work?’ she asks eventually.

Crow looks surprised and shrugs. Jenny takes it as a yes and curls herself up in the purple armchair where, within minutes, her jet-lagged body goes limp and we hear her gently snoring.

For a while, I watch Crow by myself. I'd offer to help, but I've tried before and everything she does is a lot more difficult than it looks. Especially cutting. She does it in long, confident strokes, but I've seen what she has to do with the fabric afterwards and if you make one tiny mistake you've ruined the whole thing. I made one tiny mistake once and she was very kind about it, but I haven't offered since.

I sometimes wonder whether it's fair to let a girl of her age work so constantly. I asked Mum one day, when she came down to the workroom with me to see how she was getting on.

‘We're not exactly forcing her,’ she said. ‘I'd say, if
anything, it was a question of not stopping her.’

It's true. I look at her expression as she cuts. It's totally focused, but also sort of happy. She catches me watching her and gives me a quick smile.