The Londoners arrived at Luton station like a flock of geese, squawking and huddling together in a noisy gaggle, pecking nervously at the disorientating suburban vision around them.

‘Dear, dear,’ Ivan said, eyebrow raised. ‘So this is what Kansas looks like.’

One of the stylists gripped his arm and wobbled slightly on her stiletto heels. ‘It’s called the suburbs, darling.’

‘Isn’t there some sort of government rescue initiative?’

‘Of course not. They like it like this.’

‘Impossible.’

The woman shrugged. And then with a great deal of vowing that they would never again leave the safety of the big city, they piled into a small fleet of taxis and made their way to the gallery.

Agnes was there to greet them, wearing a short, sky-blue woollen pinafore shot full of tiny holes. Each hole was beautifully backed with red felt and stitched and finished in black surgical silk. On her head she wore a felt hat hung with tiny glass and metal charms. As she moved, she tinkled gently like a wind chime. A narrow unravelling scarf with a little glove at each end trailed down her back and on to the floor.

Ivan’s crowd sniffed grudgingly at her outfit and began to peer around.

Agnes had chosen her best photographs of Justin and blown them up to two-metre by one-metre panels. There were four sets of three panels, twelve portraits of Justin in total. Six pictures ran down each side of the gallery, the gigantic figures looming over the empty white space. On the far wall were three panels forming a triptych, like an altarpiece. The three panels in the triptych were photographs taken during the airport crash: melting windows and tangled limbs, burning metal, tormented faces, severed body parts, and Justin, always Justin. Justin smiling weirdly at the scene of the disaster. Justin confused, Justin angry, Justin lost. The vertical format meant that each photograph encompassed floor, windows and ceiling of the airport terminal. They gave her compositions a sense of spatial grandeur that brought to mind early Renaissance paintings.

Around the room, soft, featureless mannequins wore the clothes Agnes had made. They were fashioned like rag dolls out of white muslin and wore felt gloves in innocent bright colours, each with a ragged edge where it looked as if fingers had been severed. There were linen shirts with the arms torn off, pale bags lined in red silk that Agnes had pulled in long fraying streams through small slits in the surface. Sweaters and T-shirts were perforated, the holes stitched carefully along the edges with surgical silk and backed with red fabric.

It was beautiful. And deeply unsettling.

Justin arrived by way of the mall, where he had stopped to shop for his brother. He’d been on the verge of giving up the search, but today had girded his loins, braved the mall, and found exactly what he wanted. When he asked the shop to wrap it, he was directed to the queue at the Christmas wrapping station, where he waited half an hour with a dozen other disgruntled shoppers.

When finally he reached the front of the queue, the official wrapper took one look at his gift and demanded double payment. ‘It’s not regulation size,’ she said with distaste, ‘and it’s the wrong shape. And it won’t go in a bag, either.’

Next year, thought Justin, handing over his £4, I’ll get the kid a pile of bricks if it’ll make your job easier.

It was only after he left the mall that Justin realized he was stuck with the package for the evening. At more than a metre long, covered in reindeer paper and tied with a huge green and silver bow, it would not contribute to the air of casual insouciance he had hoped to convey.

He met Peter and Dorothea outside the gallery. Peter had placed himself carefully in front of the title lettered on the front window, and a smiling Agnes Bee pushed through the crowd to greet them. She kissed Peter, but Justin took a step backwards, and Dorothea managed to make herself look unkissable. The atmosphere in the little group was tense; none of them quite dared look beyond Agnes to the walls, which left them nowhere to look but at each other.

Agnes glanced at Justin’s parcel.

‘Don’t worry,’ he sighed wearily, ‘it’s for my brother.’ Not some kind of pathetic attempt to win you back. ‘I don’t suppose there’s anywhere to put it down.’ Justin’s eyes skated off in search of a cloakroom, accidentally encountering twelve large panels mounted with gigantic representations of himself on the way.

He brought his eyes back very slowly to meet hers, emptying them of expression on the way. And then even more slowly, he took in what she was wearing, saw the unravelling scarf round her neck with the tiny hands knitted into each end; the little red holes bound up with surgical silk; the delicate shards of metal and glass tinkling on the dome of her hat. He took in the entire vision of Agnes dressed in postmodern disaster-victim chic, surrounded by portraits of her moody, miserable spurned lover, her discarded, distressed virgin youth, who happened also to be present here, in the flesh, conveniently clutching (for maximum dramatic, or perhaps comic, effect) an oversized, garishly wrapped soft toy.

Him, in other words.

Agnes had chosen her portraits precisely, presented him sad, confused and blank. She had displayed him at his most vulnerable and beseeching. He looked incontrovertibly pathetic.

Doomed Youth, indeed. When he had contemplated his doom, it never occurred to him it would be like this, would play out here, in a brightly lit room surrounded by people.

Oh god, he thought. How much disaster was he expected to survive?

‘What do you think?’ Agnes chirped, much too brightly.

Justin stood very still. He said nothing. Boy gazed up searchingly at Agnes’s face. Dorothea didn’t breathe, and Peter had to turn away from the spectacle of pain seeping out and pooling at his friend’s feet.

‘Look, Justin –’ she began, but just then heard her name called, and retreated, with evident relief.

‘Do you want to leave?’ Dorothea whispered.

Justin still said nothing.

‘Come on,’ Peter said, with an Englishman’s stoicism under fire, ‘now we’re here, we may as well look around.’

As the little group moved into the gallery, Justin caught sight of a dress sewn all over with tiny red dots. Blood, he thought, horrified. It’s spattered with blood. He shuddered and turned away, to a linen shirt with a jagged tear where one of the arms should be.

Justin froze, his face a mask. A buzz spread through the room; once someone had made the connection between the boy in the coat and the photographs of the boy in the coat, his presence attracted the attention of the entire company. ‘He’s good-looking,’ someone whispered, ‘but obviously not quite himself.’

On the contrary, Agnes thought, he is quite himself.

Peter came up beside her. ‘You should have told him.’

She folded her arms, defensive. ‘How could I?’

Peter said nothing.

‘I do love him, you know.’ She paused and looked around the room. ‘Just not in the way he wants me to.’ Her voice had a petulant note.

So that’s how it is, Peter thought. Justin, desperate to be loved, and Agnes, desperate to be absolved of blame.

Despite their cruelty, the photographs of Justin were beautiful. Agnes had captured the hesitant nerviness that lurked just beneath his friend’s fine, translucent skin. The pictures pierced him like X-rays, peeled back the flesh to expose a soul so raw it could have revealed itself only in trust and love.

The way he looked at the camera was the way he looked at Agnes.

Peter moved away, embarrassed, as if he’d witnessed something private.

The plane crash scenes came almost as a relief with their depictions of clear, unambiguous horror. It was a more comfortable sort of voyeurism. How terrible, one could think. How wrong, how painful, how tragic. And how expressive, how courageously witnessed. He had to admit that Agnes had captured something unexpectedly moving in the juxtaposition of tragedy and victim.

He turned back to the crowded room, scanning it for familiar faces, and saw Justin pushing his way through the gallery towards him.

The triptych was surrounded by people, and even before Justin could see the entire work, his brain filled in the missing pieces of the panels from memory. Slipping quietly, insistently, to the front, overcome with something between outrage and fear, he already knew what he would find there.

These pictures. She should never have…

Have what? Taken them? Printed them? Shown them?

Yes.

He searched the room for Agnes. Shoving his way through to her, he wrapped his hand tightly around her upper arm and dragged her away from a small group of acolytes.

‘What were you thinking, Agnes? It’s horrible.’ He glared at her, eyes burning. ‘You’re horrible. What have you done? You’ve turned me into some kind of freakish spectacle. And you didn’t even ask me.’ Fury boiled in his blood. He felt capable of killing her, himself, everyone in the room.

‘I’m sorry, Justin. I should have warned you.’ She sounded defensive. ‘But I made something of it. That’s all.’

‘You made something? Of corpses? Of me?’

She followed his eyes over her shoulder to a suit jacket that had been sliced to pieces, then stitched roughly back together with brown string.

Justin collected himself. ‘I have to go now, I just wanted to stop for a minute.’

Someone called Agnes and she turned away, leaving Justin tumbling slowly towards the exit. There appeared to be plenty of time as he fell, time to experience quite distinct waves of anger and disgust.

‘Justin –’ Agnes called after him without much conviction. She didn’t add wait’.

He opened the door, and the gallery coughed him out into the street.