Page 87 of The Island of Lost Girls

She marches from the room. Mercedes hears her bellow for her father.

It’s made of some cloth she’s never seen before. It stretches. In every direction. Like stockings, only smooth and soft and slippery and heavy, all at once. She’s overwhelmed with lust. Greedy like a child, mad to feel that cloth against her skin. In seconds she’s down to her old grey hand-me-down bra and her knickers, and the dress is dropping over her head like a cocoon, and she is in heaven.

She strokes it. She can’t stop. Just stands in the middle of the floor and touches herself. Runs her palms up her arms and pinches the folds between her fingers, and shivers with pleasure at the very feel of it.

‘Right. That’s sorted.’

She jumps. She’d almost forgotten Tatiana, for a moment.

Her mood has cleared. She’s all smiles again. ‘Some idiot mistake,’ she says, sweeping in through the door. ‘You’re all coming. Luna’s going to drop the invitation in this afternoon … oh.’

She stops dead, falls silent. Looks Mercedes up and down. ‘Oh, yes,’ she says. ‘That’s perfect.’

‘Not too much?’ Mercedes asks, timidly.

‘Oh, no. It’s perfect.’ She looks some more. ‘It looks much better on you than it does on me,’ she adds, generously. Presses on another piece of wall and opens up a cupboard door with a full-length mirror on the back.

Mercedes looks at herself, and inhales. For a moment, she thinks she’s looking at someone else. I look like a princess, she thinks. No, I look like a queen.

And Tatiana brings her back to earth. ‘What are your mother and sister going to wear?’

Reality. It crashes over her head like an ocean wave. Of course I can’t wear this. How stupid I am. I’d make my family look like fools.

Tatiana is quiet again. Thinking.

‘Of course,’ she says.

‘What?’

She wheels, and leaves the room again. ‘Come on!’

Mercedes scuttles after, follows her down the corridor.

‘There’s all of Mummy’s stuff,’ says Tatiana, ‘still just sitting there. Even your mother might be able to get into one or two of the looser things.’