I can’t think about it now. I shut my eyes again. Opposite, Clare Lomax, Local Business Manager, stares impassively at me, her hands clasped neatly on the desk. Her suit jacket is slightly too big. It looks like a man’s.

‘So. We’ve been trying to contact you for a while about your overdraft, Miss Kapoor.’

‘Yes.’ I shift my focus back to the present moment. I nod, as though we’re in this together.

‘We’ve become extremely concerned about your ability to sustain a viable business. As you know. That is why we have decided to withdraw your overdraft facility and request immediate repayment of the amount in question.’

‘Yes,’ I say again.

Clare Lomax glances at her sheet. She reads, in a sing-song voice, ‘You are five thousand pounds overdrawn at this time, and you have defaulted twice on repayments for the loan you took out with us last year, also for five thousand pounds. I see you also have considerable debt on your credit card, also held with this bank. And despite several letters requesting repayment we have not been contacted by you with regard to these matters, which is why you’ve left us no other option, I’m afraid, Miss Kapoor.’

‘Yes,’ I say again, stil nodding, so hard now that my neck is starting to hurt. It is such a huge amount, it doesn’t seem real. How has it come to this? What have I been doing? And the answer comes back to me, clear, booming, Octavia’s persistent voice in my ear. Living in a dreamworld.

‘If we look at the company’s bank statements –’ a flick through the sheaf on her desk, before one almond-shaped pearlescent nail smoothly drags the offending sheet of paper into the light – ‘wel , we can see what the problem is. Too many outgoings, not enough incomings. In fact the last payment into the company account was October 2008, for one hundred and thirty-five pounds.’

Bless Cathy. Those were Christmas presents for her mother and her sisters. But I flush with shame that these were the last payments into the account: I am being propped up by friends, by my husband. There have been no website sales since then.

‘Miss Kapoor.’ Clare Lomax shuts the folder with a flourish and puts her fingers under her chin. She stares at me. ‘It’s not good, is it?’

‘No,’ I say. ‘And in the meantime –’ the same nail scratches down a long list – ‘we’ve got payments coming out of the account regularly, driving you further into debt.’ I gaze down. ‘Website hosting . . . three hundred pounds . . . Two hundred pounds to Walsh and Sons, Hatton Garden?’

‘They make tools. Er – pliers and things.’ It’s the truth, yet I sound whol y unconvincing.

‘Right. This payment here, for six hundred and forty-three pounds, in September, to Aurum Accessories.’

‘That was for materials.’

‘What kind of materials?’

My voice sounds high, like a little girl’s. ‘Um . . . gold wire, earring studs and clutches, that kind of thing?’ I try to remember. ‘I’ve got the receipts in my folder here, I’l check.’ I’ve got every single piece of paper I could possibly need, neatly filed away, carried with me to Cornwal and back in preparation for today. I’ve documented the failure of my business meticulously.

‘It’s fine.’ Clare Lomax scribbles something on her pad. ‘Have you thought of using cheaper materials?’

‘What, like string?’ I smile, but there’s a silence and I realise she’s serious.

‘I’m just saying there are some very nice necklaces and bracelets made out of waxy thread and beads. You know, you see them in Accessorize, Oasis. And so forth,’ she adds, pul ing out the ‘th’ of ‘forth’ on her tongue, as if to give weight to it. ‘I’m just saying,’ she repeats. ‘You need to look at some other options, Miss Kapoor.’

‘I don’t make jewel ery like that,’ I explain. ‘I work with metals, enamel, laser cuts mainly, it’s different—’

‘Miss Kapoor.’ Clare Lomax raises her voice slightly and shifts her arms forward and then back into their clasp. I see the flash of a tattoo on her wrist, quickly hidden again by her polyester jacket. I wonder how old she is. ‘We are here today to discuss your business and to work out a way to keep you from going bankrupt, which at the moment is looking likely.’ Her voice is clipped, brisk, precise. ‘You have defaulted on your loan repayments twice. You have refused to respond to us about your overdraft. If you want to avoid a consolidation repayment plan, where we charge you twenty per cent interest and demand repayment of the overdraft beginning now, we need to work out how you can change your working practice so that you don’t accumulate debt.’ She gives a thin smile. ‘Otherwise, you wil have no business. Is that clear?’

I nod. ‘Yes. It’s very clear.’

‘Do you want to change the way things have been?’ She’s staring at me. I sit up straight and meet her gaze. This woman, girl real y, whom I’ve never met before, is cal ing me out, pointing out my flaws in a way no one else has, in a way I could never do. If she can see them, they must be pretty obvious.

I clear my throat. ‘Yes,’ I say softly. ‘What?’ She leans forward. ‘Yes,’ I say again, more loudly. ‘Yes. I real y do want to. I want to change the way it’s been. I don’t want it to go on like this.’

As I hear my voice, soft and tentative, saying these words out loud, it gives me a jolt, and I realise again how true it is. I nod, as if confirming it.

To her, and to myself.

Clare Lomax folds down a smal corner of one of the bank statements in front of her. ‘Right.’ She permits herself a smal smile and I want to smile too. ‘Let’s carry on, then. So – five hundred and fifty pounds paid out in November. To Aird PR Limited. There’s a couple of payments to them last year. Who are they?’

‘It’s a PR firm. I hired them to publicise my jewel ery.’ She looks at me blankly, as wel she might. ‘They’ve worked with a few designers I know.

People who have gone from having a stal or sel ing stuff through just a couple of shops to being featured in magazines, in blogs, so people write about you, look you out at the trade shows, and so on. It helps you to get a name for yourself.’

‘And have they done that for you?’

‘No,’ I admit. ‘Not real y. They got me a mention in the Evening Standard, but they got my website wrong. So I didn’t real y get any uptake from it.’

Clare Lomax says, suddenly kind, ‘You have to ask yourself if your product is right for the general public. If there’s more you can do. We see this al the time with smal businesses.’

Now I’m feeling more confident, I take a deep breath, to try and stick up for myself. ‘Miss Lomax – we’re in a recession. Two years ago I was getting interns to help me, I had orders for shops here and in Japan, the Far East, for fifty necklaces, a hundred bracelets a time. But that’s al gone now.’ I try to sound as though it doesn’t bother me. ‘People are stil buying jewel ery, but not like they used to. And if they are they won’t take a punt on some random girl they’ve never heard of. It’s real y hard.’ I sound as though I’m trying to talk her out of lending me more money.

‘I can see that,’ she says drily. She leans forward, so that a lock of her thin brown hair fal s over her face. ‘But if you’l al ow me to say it, it seems to me you’ve been burying your head in the sand, Miss Kapoor. You’ve failed to keep up the repayments, you’ve not explained what’s happening and why you’re in difficulties, and most importantly you’ve failed to communicate with us despite many attempts on our part. And that makes you a bad risk in my book. You’ve got to face up to it. As it is, you’l probably lose the business if you go on at this rate.’

You’ve got to face up to it. I stare at her, my heart hammering in my chest. ‘Right. Right.’

She says, not unkindly, ‘I just don’t understand why you’ve let it come to this.’ She sounds for a second like a concerned friend. I blink. I can’t stand it if I start to cry. Don’t cry.

I clear my throat noisily and sit up. ‘I don’t understand either,’ I say softly. ‘I’ve had a lot of other shi— stuff going on. And it’s been a hard time.

Loads of my friends are going out of business. But I’m hopeful. I’ve got a new col ection I’ve just finished designing.’

‘Real y?’

‘Yes,’ I say. This is a lie, but it’s a hopeful lie. ‘I’ve just got to get the cash together to get it made up. And take it to the shows. And I have to start doing the market stal s again. That brings in the money.’

‘I don’t understand why you haven’t been doing that al along,’ Clare Lomax says. ‘According to my notes when you opened the account you were sel ing at a stal at least twice a week, and always Sundays.’

‘I don’t do that any more.’

‘Why not?’

Why not? Vanity, greed, wanting to spend time with Oli, his jealousy at not having me on Sundays, believing the hype of Joanna, the PR

person I hired, who told me I didn’t need to stand in the cold on a stal next to lots of other jewel ers al vying for attention and space. After the up-and-coming pop star was photographed wearing my necklace the orders started flooding in, and the website was launched a few months later. I listened to them, to Oli and Joanna, when they said I didn’t need to do that any more. And it was expensive – eighty quid a day for the stal , and the Truman Brewery near where I live has too many stal s anyway, and not enough customers, I told myself. I – Oli and I – decided I could live without it, that it’d be a better use of my time to take myself out of that scene, try and move up a level.

I was so wrong. I was wrong about that, about overpaying for the website, about the people I listened to, the way I changed my focus. Ben, in the studio next door, warned me but I didn’t listen.

‘You love the stal , Nat,’ he’d say. ‘You like meeting the people, it keeps you fresh. It’s not good for you, sitting at home or in the studio al day.’

I started trying to become a brand. A brand like the ones Oli promotes. He thinks everyone is their own brand and I’m sure he’s right, but al I can say is, I was better off when everything was simple, when I could sketch in my book, pay the nice old man off Hatton Garden to make up my gold and silver pendants, and sit there in my studio happily making up the necklaces, cutting the chains, choosing the right pair of pliers from my set to bend gold and silver wire, researching suppliers, thinking up new ideas and just trying them out, listening to my iPod, and chatting to Ben and Tania, his girlfriend, who works with him. The trouble is, most of the time I’d prefer to be in their studio with them, instead of on my own. Everything’s OK

when they’re around. There’s a distraction, someone to talk to, instead of sitting alone amidst the accessories and pliers, staring into space, wondering what on earth comes next. It’s so easy to pop next door and ask for a cup of tea, or bring them biscuits.

Ben never seems to mind. He’s one of those open, friendly people who can work in Piccadil y Circus and stil concentrate. He likes chatting and so do I. We like the same humour, the same old films, the same biscuits, we were meant to be office buddies, as we continual y say. I think Tania is not quite so keen on me hanging around like a bad smel al the time while she’s trying to mark up contact sheets or negotiate with a magazine. I think she knows I’m lonely. She wants to tel me to back off and go and do some work. And so I’ve started limiting myself to one knock on the door a day.

When I realise I’ve started thinking about it like that, I suddenly see that I have to control my loneliness – that crying al over Ben when Oli left, while Tania made some tea and went and got Jaffa Cakes (and she is French, so Jaffa Cakes are unfathomable to her, so I appreciated the gesture even more) is something you do once, because it’s a crisis point, not every week, every day.

The new strong confident me looks at Clare Lomax to see if she’d understand this, the mind that has too much time to think. She wouldn’t. I wouldn’t either if someone else explained it to me. It’s as though my life has veered way off track, and although I stil can’t quite see where it began, at least I can recognise this. I put my hands on the desk and take a deep breath.

‘Look, Miss Lomax,’ I say. ‘I have real y screwed up, but I can show you how and why, and how I’m going to change things. I know I’m good at what I do, and I want to work hard. I’ve just taken bad advice, and I know how to fix it.’ I look at her imploringly. ‘Please, please believe me. I’ve ignored you and I’m real y sorry, but I’ve been an idiot, keeping my head in the sand. I’l get the money to repay the default loan payments, I can pay them with my credit card today. But please, please don’t withdraw my overdraft facility. I just need a bit more time, but I’m going to pay it off.’