I have a second shower and breathe heat from every pore. I take water and a book, and leave the apartment, breathing in cigarette smoke as I walk slowly down the urine coloured honeycomb tiles. 

I buy her water as a housewarming present and think how much cooler she’ll be without me in her bed. 

Service Continu. 

This time I emerge onto the Paris street and am met by a wave of piss. The scent is familiar and rancid: the stench of nightclub corners and service station loos. I have plasters on my feet from walking too far and my Oura ring flashes a warning that I have “major signs of strain”. I have never felt better. I wake with a base level of happiness I had forgotten it was possible to feel; it lies in my stomach – the satisfaction after breakfast or the elongated stomach of a sleeping black cat. Everything is beautiful, and picture-worthy, and nearly very hot. I take a photo of the cheese van with cow hide splotches outside the Invalides, and watch as a boy curls his fingers through his girlfriend’s outstretched hand. Their Pomeranian squats on the pavement; she unlaces her fingertips and stoops to pick it up. They are young, visibly fresh from bed (her hair is static and drawn outwards, like child’s scribble). It feels almost like evening; honey-hot, post-dawn. I realise I am walking towards home; of course I am. 

The heat grows at a pace of knots. I can smell onions and see Sacré-Coeur on her hill. There is a wheel is the Jardins des Tuileries which makes Paris look like a fairground. The flames of 2024’s Olympic torch flick languid tongues up a hot air balloon. They seem to me to be lolling, and guarding something: they remind me of Cerberus.

The fountain starts as I lift a spoonful of kefir to my lips. I am swarmed by wasps, my yellow dress a mirror to their blind multitude of eyes, so I pop blueberries into my mouth quickly like paracetamol behind the lockers at school. The matcha is bad but the feeling is good. My artist is back — my lovers are the same. I am part of Paris, part of the fountain, part of the metal green chairs. I have strawberry juice on my sticky fingers and suncream on my curling toes. I sip obnoxiously on my matcha and pick the ice out of the cup in shards. (I bite down on a large ice cube and look around. A man is watching me, middle-aged, thickset glasses which adapt to the light, lounging. His feet are on the fountain’s edge (mine are too). The ice is too cold, too much. I chomp it, and try not to wince under his gaze. He is very sure of himself. He watches me). England fumbles in the heat, putting on too much deodorant and never quite knowing where to put her hat. Paris is direct, calculated, linear. She applies suncream to her face but wears her heeled clogs with the single fat leather strap and the block-flower printed midi dress with grace external from the environment and intricately internal to her physical self. She sits in the morning sun inside her tanned crinkling skin because she is a French woman and aesthetics come before protection. The heat goes on around her, like a feather floating on a pond. She is part of it but she is not it. She is the queen bee, the princess on a glass throne; her subjects are busy and moving and restless in their desire to please her, to give her pleasure, to make her theirs. The feather never sinks the way bird dung or pebbles eventually do. The feather never becomes the pond. (The ice has melted a little more, giving way to a pool of watery green liquid at the base of my paper cup. I suck it up, swill, suck. The man removes his feet from the fountain’s edge and slips them quickly inside his soft brown shoes. He stands up. There are three clean lines of sweat across the back of his blue checkered shirt, in blocks which exactly mimic the backrest of the green metal chair. He pulls a Galaries Lafayette tote bag over his shoulder, puts his plastic green bottle of Perrier inside it, and passes behind me as he walks away. I watch him go. I watch him). 

I knock over the matcha cup. It is empty, save for three connected blocks of ice I had judged too large to put directly into my mouth. They spill out onto the green metal chair, dripping carelessly towards the short rim of my bright yellow dress. I grab them and throw them into the fountain. The movement is instinctive, protective. They make a noise as they connect with matter one stage further than themselves, and dissolve, quickly. My heart feels full, and my phone says it is too hot to type. 09.36am.

I have the door opened for me into the Galeries Lafayette where I stop for the loo only (6ème étage). La dame pipi lets me in for free. The 1€50 it should have cost burns in my pocket. 

Montmartre is bloated in the sunlight, the late morning attracting a swell of tourists which makes it unpleasant to stop. I do not idle; I buy a postcard for my cousin with the remnants of my small change, and eat goûter on the pavement in the flow of unseeing passers-by. (I see myself as a shipwreck, a great pile of floating rock, a yellow light-house, a scraped-back bun, and I recall that no woman is an island). I gather my bag to my chest and bat strangers away. No, Good Sir, I may be beautiful but I don’t want your bracelet. 

Paris has shaded streets and sun bleached balconies. She remains hot, like a large woman’s body in the tiny long seconds after sex. Heat pulses out of her, throbbing. 

When does what you’re wearing become an outfit? Two little girls run off the Pont des Arts, weaving between their father’s legs like they are swinging on monkey bars. They are matching down to the beret: their green and white t-shirts match their green and white shorts match one another. Their berets are their distinction, their personalities, their world. One is red, the other pink.

I discover parts of Paris I didn’t know existed, like the little square just off the Pont Neuf. It feels quiet and soft and supple, like a ripe peach. (I buy a yellow plum in Monoprix and leave it in the bottom of my bag, inhaling it in a hurry over my cousin’s sink as soon as I walk back through her door). I exist in the fluff, the skin, the hair. (I exist in the outside, in the yellow juice which runs down the side of my palms as I pull my lips beneath the fruit in an attempt to catch every last drop).

Saint-Eustache chimes midday. I pass by the end of the bridge and note that where they used to sell hot chocolate they now sell squeezed lemonade. I was absent from this place for more than a year. It went on without me. Paris existed, and I did not. (They still have not fixed the road). I sit down to lunch in the down-stream fumes of his sushi, and do nothing, feel nothing, am nothing but lunch and air. I feed myself with the flavour of Paris and lick every inch of the bowl. It tastes of grapefruit and golden raisins, and the thick gelatinous cream of olive oil. 

They serve pasta on chipped plates and we cut it up like children. Everything about the scene reminds me of home. We eat chai mousse on top of cashew butter-stuffed financiers and scrape silver spoons against silver plates with an air of greedy insatiability and end-of-meal fullness. It is delicious, luscious, light-dark like soft brown sugar. The Coke Zero tastes better, like cut-glass and crystals (lemon and ice linger at the bottom of the high-ball glass, melting together into a sweet-tasting lemonade). The bubbles pop on my tongue, and taste like summer.

I gulp down coffee on a stomach still full of truffle pasta, and I cut my nails over a bin in the street. We get the bus and she pays for me, because apparently my ticket is only valid for the metro. I buy her her breakfast and us both peanut butter lattes with almond milk. We are cousins, related by ties of blood and a taste for nut butter inherited from our shared paternal grandfather. (This is news to me, and when my cousin tells me this I feel tingles of joy and grief like wind chimes up my spine. We like peanut butter, and he did too. He died last year, but we taste him in the thick nuttiness which lolls over our tongues, suffocating the tastebuds underneath and burying them in a layer of but glue which sticks to the roofs of our mouths. We remember him in the antique shop windows, the cream in our coffee, the impossibly incorrect phrases we laugh over in French Bistros. I think of him when I see an angel flying over a stall at a morning antiques market, glinting gold in dappled half-light caught mostly by the trees. I think of him as he watches my cousin and I sitting outside a restaurant together in Paris, eating pasta. I think of him, smiling. He is holding up his right hand in a blessing, so I give a cheery wave up to the sky).

I lift the window blind on the train as we roll out of Paris. The baby in the aisle has the chubbiest cheeks and her father has the hairiest sideboards. The woman opposite me (Camille, scrawled across her Starbucks) flinches at the movement which brushes her shoulder, then smiles and shakes her head. I have to watch Paris as I say goodbye. I have to see her tears, see her cry. I close my phone and sit back. My Chat GPT search reads: how do I study for an international PGCE while living in Paris?

The base of the latte is all peanut brittle and grit. I lick it up, though it isn’t very nice. Everything melts like butter and causes friction like granite stones of salt. The crop has been harvested long and I have pomegranate stains on my new white shorts. The smell of rain and mellow blackberries makes red wine out of the air. I change trains in Surdon, dismounting into a warm towel of heat onto a platform of non-existence. It is like Adlestrop, only a name. Nothing happens in Surdon; I do not even believe it is a place. There is an apple orchard and there are raindrops suspended on the leaves, hovering like divers on the cusp of their boards, too scared to leap, to jump in. I walk up the road a little, stretching my legs. Charles Aznavour is floating out of the windows of the white station master’s cottage, which has the kind of cracked paint attractive to lizards and broken shutters attractive to bats. I am, quite plainly, in rural France. Paris is a memory at the end of a railway line, a city being rained on by blue clouds and written about in papers which arrive in a daily post van. Technology feels new around here. Perhaps I am in the war? The road has yellow grass spouting from its middle. There are no loos, only the wailing of the radio and a faint hum of crickets. My transfer is the next train on the Arrivals board: 52 minutes away. It is eleven o’clock in the morning and could be any hour of the day. Writing down the digits – 11:00 – feels too contemporary, too corporate, too exact. Minutes don’t exist here and seconds appear excessive in their finitude. We are spiders suspended at the end of threads of our own making, at the mercy of the unblown breeze and stagnant summer air. I turn off the road and crouch on the damp cornfield grass of an empty stubble field. (It has rained, hotly, like a tropical storm). There is a dead frog on the path, swollen as though, in an attempt not to expire, he puffed himself up to excess. His bandy legs are spread wide, splayed in an open diamond. My bag suddenly seems heavier than before, the platform from which I need to catch my next train further away. When I walk back past the station master’s tumbledown white house, the music has stopped. I pick blackberries for my lunch from the gates by the station platform and laugh at a text from my cousin: you know the nail scissors I bought at the Pharmacy last night? Turns out they’re for your moustache…

Familiarity does not always breed contempt but it does breed complacency. The flies hum busily and the two magpies delight in their joy. There is a film of olive oil around this heart which must be penetrated before a thought is conceived, accepted, rejected. It is like the melting outline of a knob of butter, translucent fat seeping softly into yellow. Figs drop on to the floor: small and yellow and supple like kumquats. Their skin is gently fuzzed and nipple-like. I scoop one up and take it home. 

Two water rats belly flop into the ditch, followed by a purple dragonfly. We judge the end of our holiday by the number of yoghurts left in the fridge, eaten straight from the pot standing at the open kitchen window watching hot air balloons rustle slowly through the morning sky. On the lawn, magpies play. The coffee comes in small mugs which retain heat right to the bottom. The sun does not gain warmth until 10am. After that, it cooks us like fat pigs on a grill.

The Great Pillow Reshuffle occurs at exactly ten to midnight (though don’t quote me on this, because I was half asleep. Reporting is difficult when under the drug of semi-unconsciousness). I feel like Margot Robbie’s Cathy, Summer Version (not Taylor’s): my nightie is slicked internally by body oil, lascivious and inviting as the juice off tomatoes. The champagne is living, like rolling tiny diamonds around the tip of your tongue. The cats make noises like mice and the mosquitos sound like yowling kittens. France softens around me, all translucent butter and apricot skin. August is a bottle of wine. But I took that from someone, didn’t I?

Her stomach is swollen with Sunday lunch. It is the weather for mellow music, hairy pot bellies, and barbeques. I picture Birkenstocks and black-haired toes, grass the colour of sand and the Black Eyed Peas on the radio. I eat pomegranate seeds out of a little tub, and sit topless on my balcony in a new pair of frilled lace white shorts which cost me more than I’ve spent on trousers in a year. When she saw them, my sister said she could have made them for free. I think idly about consumerism, and watch last night’s wine glasses drip dry in the midday sun, condensation crawling up them like a shattered chandelier. Unable to pause, I arrived in London for one night in the entirety of August and immediately invited friends round to dinner, stirring too-strong garlic and foul-smelling blotched purple onion into buckwheat tabbouleh and plopping M&S cooked chicken and feta onto a plate. It feels unceremonious, entirely natural. It was is the best dinner I have had for a while – four friends, an uneaten courgette, a sunburnt chest and conversation — all the usual conversation of men, women (read girls, boys) in their early twenties: sex (lack thereof); money (lack thereof); jobs (lack thereof); pleasure (abundant). The world glowed red, orange, the sky bleeding tomato salad and marjoram. We reference mental health like it was an exam period and physical ailments like we are all on the brink of death. We talk about marriage like it’s an aspiration, and the Married like they are mad. We talk about familial abuse, mental stains dripping dark mulberry juice which pools in the creases of the life lines in our palms. We are brothers and sisters, but we never argue like it. It is the first time I have heard the words from his lips. We belong to each other. He turns to look at the sunset, snapping a picture (“I’m an Instagram Warrior”): sometimes you’ve got to learn to keep the friendships you want in your life forever, and leave the line in the sand clean and uncrossed. It’s like Cricket. Just stay inside the box. 

I text my cousin in Paris said I can’t wait to join her. I send her a follow-up text – I don’t think I’ve ever meant can’t wait more literally. 

I take my new hair to lunch after I’ve swished it up the Strand. Taking oneself to lunch is an intimate process. One reveals one’s preferences without fear of conflict or shame, exposing salad leaves in teeth and splashing water on the table without a hint of shame. I sit at lunch; I am already aware of the foibles of the girl within me, of her faults, of the fact that she is trying to finish her lunch (eat with her mouth closed, press a white linen napkin to her tingling plump lips, swill water over her tongue to cool the raging chilli) while the rest of her mind is busy, entirely occupied with the minute focus of a small child studying a worm with the splot of tomato stain which landed on her knee about five minutes ago. I admire her ability to continue polite conversation while her mind is thus preoccupied; I watch as she asks a probing question – such as do you believe you can be in love with two people at once? – flashes a look into the eyes of her dining partner (short look, quick heartbeat, slow under-the-eyelash-turn away to avert the gaze in a way which lingers, opening doors of conversation rather than leaving them closed) and meditatively dips the corner of her white linen napkin into her half-full glass of water. The white linen napkin is folded around her forefinger; she swirls once, then moves it slowly to her knee, where I watch as she dabs at the tomato stain, turning it from scarlet to maroon to puce to pink like some reverse-healing infected scar. She looks up again; places the white linen napkin (its corner softly stained, a light orange like the centre of unripe apricot) on the tablecloth beside her. Do you think Christians are polyamorous if they love their partner and God? 

The train is so hot that I travel to London as a thought-less collection of pulse and cells. Podcasts play in my ears and I am involved the drama of 1950s Neapolitan Italy, in someone else’s friendship failures and someone else’s slurred vision of themself. I get off the train at Marylebone and studiously avoid catching the eye of my former music teacher with whom I have no desire to chat; I collect ‘Butter’ from the library, and take a picture of myself in a bright yellow dress and bright yellow espadrilles clasping the bright yellow front cover to my red prickly-hot chest: in my head, the caption reads When Even the Book is Butter. I run home, put the music on the speaker, open the French doors. I boil the kettle for the tabbouleh, and place the sliced tomatoes on the table under a tepid stream of liquorice coloured balsamic vinegar which sticks to my fingers in a sweet smelling glue. ABBA comes on: Our Last Summer. I sway my hips in the kitchen, and recall it. 

I am the kind of excited, which means I can’t sleep. How could one sleep a single second in the city of Ratatouille and Venus, Emily and Chartier? I am like a water trough with the valve constantly compressed, or – more aptly in France – like there is a plastic tubular spout of carbonated water fizzing IV-like directly into my veins. My yellow espadrilles chant on the London street: Pa-ris, Pa-ris. Billy Joel was wrong: Vienna’s somewhere, but it’s Paris that waits for you.

In Marylebone, I watch two ladies. She’s split coffee down her top, and she’s wearing a bright yellow linen blouse. She marches across the road, pretending to ignore the coffee seeping through her cheesecloth shirt. She flings her foot onto the gummed-up lid of the bin and re-ties her shoe lace. This is womanhood in the city, August-style. 

Cold Courgettes Call me Home. 

I sit down on the train. My supper is in my lime green bag and my stomach is lined with excitement. I feel as though I am about to get seriously drunk. I think about the times I have boarded this train, travelled this journey before. Outbound, alone: Valentine’s Day 2019, with pit-of-the-stomach nerves. I am 16. I am visiting my French exchange, whom I have known since I was 11 and love like a toddler loves her babysitter. She is an aspiration, wholly glamorous and entirely other. She could not seem more foreign to me, nor more similar. I gurgle at her, and we communicate in this way, me looking up to her for her beauty, her red lipstick, her dark eyes. We meet her sister and head straight to a bar. I drink my first cocktail, Tequila Sunrise, in Paris, and think it is sick-sweet-delicious and I want more, more, more. 16 feels liberating cusping on sensual, accentuated by miscommunication and total knowledge of how to have fun. We go into my first nightclub, and leave immediately because it pulses with the bodies of fat men in sweat-socked navy blue polo shirts. They ooze from the club like a grotesque, unwanted zit. We collapse into a taxi, and revert to Truth or Dare. I reveal my only secret, which I have held hang-man style, a dead-weight in my heart for two years; secrets are easier to tell in French. Inbound, as a pair: January 2023, eating rillette stuffed baguettes with soggy rocket leaves spilling into the brown paper boulangerie bags. I had prepared them because I wanted to mother him, because it was my way of showing my love, because he had whispered under his breath how much he needed me and because he had taken me to Paris. I had made them because I was 19, and because I saw him as the rest of my life. Paris was to me a city of discovered desire and undiscovered, undiscoverable love. Love eluded me. It eluded Paris. She painted sex on her face like make-up and covered the veins of love with foundation on her beauty-spotted skin. (French women don’t wear foundation; they, nod only they, must have the secret to love). We had a conversation in the Metro, in the swirling hot air which rushes and recedes, rushes and recedes – the only steam of heat in Paris in late January, when even furs feel too cold and your nose turns pink in the frost – in which he told me about his future. It felt illicit. And it did not feel like mine. I felt it; that twinge, that niggling doubt, that drip of black coffee down the porcelain cup which wears it down, down, down until it cracks along that same line a year later. He felt like a stranger to me, and I giggled and took his picture as he emerged naked from the shower. I was hot and freezing and jaded and new. I was not in his future. I was constantly at odds with his past. I was a comparison and a lost cause, a fill-in-the-blank and an easy out. I made him rillette sandwiches. Exactly one year later, he broke my heart. 

I felt that twinge for the very first time on the Metro on the way back from the Eiffel Tower. I felt it. This wasn’t it. Something was wrong. We didn’t want the same things from life. I didn’t feel loved, but I felt necessary. Something he could use sometimes. The accessory his life had been lacking. An external part of him; a spare tyre. He consumed me. He was all of me. I wanted, too desperately, to be all of him. I went to his student room one afternoon when I couldn’t find him, when, as usual, he hadn’t replied to his texts for hours. We were meant to be meeting up, but timings never seemed to affect him. I opened the door, smelt the now familiar husk of un-laundered shirt, late adolescent male, sharp cologne and sweating bike shoes. I walked to his desk, ignoring the posters on his wall of women I didn’t like looking at when lying in his bed. I read a letter from his mother. She cared too much (can mothers care too much?). She had written, at the very bottom, just before she signed off (all my love): always do the right thing. I reread the line. It seemed so out of place. I thought it must be coded. It seemed to me completely laughable that the line could ever apply to her son. He never did the right thing. It just didn’t occur to him to do the right thing. The right thing wasn’t in his vocabulary. Did she know this, or was she so blissfully ignorant of her son’s character flaws that her maternal encouragement was in fact an ironic display of her mis-placed obsession? I smirked, dropped the letter, threw a two-fingers-up glance at the women in the posters and left. He wasn’t there anyway. He was probably out somewhere, doing the Right Thing by someone else. I don’t miss that smell of bike shoes and cologne and stale sour sweat. I don’t miss the women on the walls or the crumpled paper in the un-emptied bin. I don’t miss the university room, the carpet in the corridor which had never been deep-cleaned, the toastie maker in the kitchen or the mouldy pesto in the fridge. I shut the door. For once, it was me who left.

She is not wearing any shoes in St Pancras station and I believe it is a crime against humanity. They are loading us slowly, like cattle to market, slashing us with bending bamboo poles across our rumps. I buy an M&S bean wrap and chat to the man at checkout. He is not English, so we speak in monosyllables. Where are you going? Paris. Family? My cousin. How long? Too short. 

I place her at three. She has tight dusky blonde curls which hang in greasy ringlets down to the shoulders of her pink t-shirt. She wears crocs with badges studding the plastic which covers her toes. She uses both arms to throw her new Build-a-Bear bunny (who wears a red sweatshirt with L-O-N-D-O-N across its front) high into the tray at security, holding him behind her head and sticking out her tongue before launching him with so much of her tiny little might that she lifts herself too, jumping in the air as he lands, smack-bang (thump), in the centre of the tray. Her father is distracted by the ordeal of moving two little girls and a push chair through international security, so I give her a winning smile in recognition of her Great Work. She waves her bunny off, runs through the security gate, and presses both hands against the rim of the roving suitcase trolley. In her eyes are all the excitements of her holiday, all the thrill of travel: she is waiting, expectant, for the gloom of the suitcase tunnel to birth her bunny. She does not move. Her hands are turning white with the pressure. She grows tired of waiting and, never moving her eyes from the gaping womb of the security gate, allows her fingers to run idly over the moving wheels. Her father pulls her away – stop that: your fingers! Before she can argue, her bunny is born again. 

I swirl a nighttime berry tea into takeaway Pret coffee mug and marvel at myself. I would never before have had the confidence to ask for a mug of boiling water, without buying a single thing. The man was young, Indian, kind. He smiled at me, wrapped the mug in a protective cardboard jacket, and handed me my boiling water. Have a nice holiday, he said. I text my friend #iamastrongindepenantyoungwomanafterall about something completely unrelated. I feel strong. I feel oddly powerful. I feel confident. I am becoming the inconnue again. I am a writer. I travel alone. 

I hear the whistle blow and I smile. I slurp the dregs of my tea, and have the usual fumble with the man next to me as we simultaneously stick our charging plugs into sockets we both know will never work. We roll our eyes at the ‘Free Train WiFi’. He drinks Vimto blackcurrent and is perhaps the only person I have ever met to do so. 

The train smells like salt and vinegar crisps. I do a wordsearch, watch as another Eurostar draws into St Pancras, feel twinges of sorrow for the people on board whose backs are to Paris when my nose is faced that way. They going the wrong way. Someone should tell them so. I tug open the wrapper on my supper, and dig in my bag for chocolate. 

Muma, are we in the water now? (London stretches outside the window, hot in the evening sun). Are we flying? More crisps! Muma, are you thirty-four? Muma, Muma — how did Michael Jackson die?

I watch from the train as we speed through France, hunting down Paris like a bloodhound. People have picnic chairs lining the charred sweetcorn roadsides, pointing towards the sun: from the train I cannot see it, so I see it through their eyes. Solar eclipse, our world on an axis. 

La Rentrée 

There is a space shaped like the Eiffel Tower, and it is a hole in my heart. I have bled through it with skyward, pointing tears, since I left last March. She runs down the street, white skirt, glasses which suit her but which I haven’t seen before. We hug. Embrace. You are in Paris.

It’s like I never left. The intervening months of my life never happened. They are like a baby’s sneeze, or the little burps after too much milk. They didn’t exist. How could anything exist except this? I opened her front door and smelt the corridor: cigarette smoke. I called back to her that I felt at home. She made some joke about her new bad habits, and I left, walking slowly up the corridor to drink, truly drink, like a camel (Camel cigarettes), like an elephant, like a damned thirsty pilgrim, this smell into my bones. It seeps gently into the skin, yellowing and staining. Nicotine rims all my photographs of Paris, my addiction, the satiation of my claustrophobic desire. My bad habit. (The stairwell is cool, the window open; outside, Paris). I smell the cigarettes, and it smells like home. I emerge into the street. It’s seven minutes to eight in the morning, and I look at the morning sunlight dancing on the limestone buildings. Heat engulfs me, like a vacuum. I am grinning, and the bin man looks at me like I am a fool. I return to my old road, look up to the balcony window which has remained my screensaver through all the injustices of the past year. I remember the beggars. I remember the disabled man who travels everywhere by bike. I remember the place they served me whiskey, and the truffled cannelloni I ate alone. I wait in line for my matcha, and idly wonder why the barista is so good looking. I have overspent, so I wait for the thick coconut cream to hit my tongue, to soak it in, to find something, somehow, to satiate my desperate thirst. The bin man looks like Charles Leclerc.  

You can be an artist here because, frankly, there’s nothing else to be. Great things are expected of you in France, you can see it right down to their food. Something comes from nothing. Care is taken for the tiny. There is a pride of being, a sense of security in self which makes their endless failures in battle a continual puzzle. The Frenchman is sure of what he stands for; he cannot be argued with. He is an arist. He sets up his easel in the Palais Royale in the golden morning of pure sunshine which follows an eclipse. His easel is a board, over his knees, a sheet, stripped straight from his bed, a large stretch of canvas. He is wearing suede loafers in light fawn, cream chinos and a blue cotton shirt. Occasionally, he stands, stretches his palm down the avenue of trees, and looks. I watch him looking. I watch the light cracks between his fingers and the pencil marks up his forearms. I watch his eyes squinting at the distance and I watch the sunshine crowning the bald top of his head. I am a writer. I pull off my shoes and place my blue toenails on the cool stone rim of the fountain. The sun is hot, and it is not yet 10am. I can feel my chest prickling in appreciation, my stomach satisfied and curling with green cream, my eyes chasing returning swallows over the chimney tops. 

I am a writer. But currently I am all croissant. Nothing exists, there is no part of me which is not engulfing the pulsing, living, globule of pistachio butter which swells in my mouth, presses out between my lips, filling the space entirely between the neck of my tongue and the plaque of my teeth. It is all of me. Consuming. 

In the slanting sunlight of Haussmann buildings and designer black shades he could be young or old. 18 or 46. His age is irrelevant. I cannot see him against the sun, and I wonder whether we can ever truly see artists work. He is an artist; he sketches. He glances at me as I walk by. A small smile. A distraction. My phone is sticky with pistachios. 

I have died and gone to heaven and I have flakes of croissant stuck to my leg. Everyone dresses better (I, too, have better clothes). The man I fell in love with in the bakery last year is still the same boy, with an earring and golden blonde curls. (I avoid him; my love made me over-pay for a not-too-good pastry). They wear red ballet flats and black capris, short flower-patch dresses which look as though they have come straight out of the new summer collection from Ba&sh. They pose in wedding dresses by Japanese designers and have their trench coats corrected as they stand in a fountain. The fashion is felt and unspoken, either a blessing you are bestowed with or a curse you spend time and money attempting to expel. The conversations are detailed, if not serious. The green metal garden chairs are pulled at an angle to one another, so that her rucked-up knees fold directly above his outstretched feet. His espadrilles are the same colour as the dust. They have been performing this art – this dance, this romance – for an hour. Their noise has not stopped, the shouts of their conversation cutting through the running fountain and causing the morning readers to look sharply their way. They do not notice. I smile for the — they are so enraptured. I cannot tell if they are in love, or simply so desperate to discover every corner of the other’s being, every shadow behind each doorframe, every toothpaste stain on each counter-top, that being in love on top of that would be superfluous. Can you know, must one know, every intricacy of one’s lover? Doesn’t love breed strangeness, cast flickers of hidden flames like shadows on flagstone floors behind the iris of the eye? To love as these two talk would be exhausting. Every inch of them is entangled, and their limbs stay resolutely apart. I believe this love is called friendship. I admire it.

He eats a banana graphically then drops his Perrier bottle with a clatter on the ground. I cover a smirk, and do the same. 

He has a dog. He drinks matcha. He reads. He wears blue linen shirts. I want nothing more. I walk past twice, hoping he’ll notice me. He doesn’t.

He is tall and self-conscious and wears white trainers and pale shorts. I like it when he touches his hair as I walk past outside the Invalides: I think he is doing it for me. 

Madame no longer feels incongruous. 

I am visiting a lover with whom I never broke up. We spend hours in bed reminding ourselves of each others bodies. I visit the freckle and the scar, the soft-touch behind the ear and the hot coffee breath down the spine of the neck. It tingles.  

Total strangers wish each other a good lunch in the street. They are eating cardboard brown bread sandwiches with thin films of fake cheese and too-pink ham on a bench. They have Notre Dame as their view. I consider there to be worse things. I buy cold soup and bread studded with dates and return to the Palais Royale for lunch. I sit on a bench on the opposite side to a man and his mistress (too many lunchtime kisses, to obvious a parting of ways; she was twenty years his junior, generously). The man beside me apologises for raising his voice as he tucks his iPhone into the pocket of his suit. He is an Economist from Senegal. We talk. He tells me things I had forgotten people say in real life; they only seem to say in in Paris. He spoke in aspirational quotes and he spoke in French, and perhaps that glamorised it all the more. He wears a red and brown striped t-shirt and brogues, smart suit trousers and black glasses. He spoke to me kindly, slowly, with a hint of the Senegalese accent he has been ridding himself of for 25 years. I say I love the sun and he holds up his black arms and laughs that he has an advantage. I wave my white ones, and say I don’t. You have to follow your heart and there’s nothing stopping you. Every langue has a culture behind it. It is the humanist approach. Write everything down. It reaches seven minutes to two and Abdoulain leaves. I get my phone out, start writing. His father was in the Senegalese army. He has three daughters. An actress, a civil servant. He is kind. He says again that you have to do what makes you happy. I am happy I sat on this bench for my lunch. 

When I start walking again, my feet are tired, and I realise I’ve probably gone too far. How could you ever leave this place? I love it with my body, viscerally, in my gut and in my nose. I love it hard, flexibly, in my earlobe and my little toe. I love it like it is the tripe lining my stomach, upturned on the table in front of me, single candle dripping wax on the Bistro-striped cloth. (A man eats French onion soup with his Papillon on his knee. The cheese has congealed around the rim of the bowl, and is perspiring grease into the liquid remnants of the Frenchman’s lunch). I go back to my cousin’s flat and turn the shower on full and cold. She has cherry soap which drags purple stains over my throbbing body. I spritz myself with her perfume, once, behind my ear, and sit naked in front of the fan. 

I write. I will meet her for dinner. I am in Paris.

Her breast is bared to the banks of the Thames at 3:16 on a Sunday afternoon. Weighted by milk; udder-like, baby-attached in a suction-like vacuum like the toothless gums of a squid. 

Flies crawl over me like slabs of dead meat. My thighs are exposed flesh, raw in butchers aisles, picked at by black bodies with no heads. 

I like the idea of putting colour into my writing, as though the pages are flooded by the lights – actors on a stage. Dark red for the brothel that pulses like DJ beats off the pages, throbbing between the white of the lines (white lines; bathrooms; rolled bank notes). Bright moonstone turquoise for the letters of my summer, shimmering white heat and orange fire (the fires in France – in Spain – in Suffolk – rage; I think of them, all flickering tongues and starving, starved, bottom-less pit mammoths, engorging and engulfing our land which smells like hay and crisps like Walkers in a cheese sandwich).

St James’s Park is full of little naked children and bra straps slipping down hot red arms. He licks an ice cream and sweats. She coughs, dryly, insufferably, embarrassingly on a first date. I walked this same way home a year ago, giddy with bad little kisses and gin on a summer night. I walk now under the fig tree, cinnamon chamomile tea in a thermos in my little hand bag, hair in a pony tail, long skirt blowing in a wind which strips dandelions of their Afro wigs, on my way to Shakespeare in the Square. My head is full of a desire to spend money; clothes or plates, a whole flat or a dog bed, a pair of designer boots or a tub of artisan gelato? I miss the traffic lights, dreaming. I sweat heat out of every pore, quite happy, quite full. 

It’s green for me, she whines. Her hair is tucked under her silver cycling helmet, sticking out in a flattened grey bob, too sensibly for the silliness of a warm July night. We are all in the road. Her whining is a flash of pessimism, reality, spitting oil in the frying pan, boringness and dullness unsuited to this mood of mine; to this July; to my blue skirt, my running legs, my chamomile tea outside the gates of Buckingham Palace, the fringe of St James’s Park. I cross the road. She disappears in a hot-head of fury, a pink spot of anger in a blue July kiss.

17/07/25:

I lie in bed the night before Lisbon. It is hot, the dying notes of the heat wave which has lasted an entire month. Heat Sea. An Ocean. I bathe in it, naked and sparkling, a silver slip-slide of base-level excitement forming a playground between my gut and my womb. I am a child on the first day of summer; the days stretch – long, far, seemingly endless – further, beyond the boundaries my short arms can reach. (Hold your arms out wide – tip your eyelids (shut) to the sun. They are the length of your body, horizontal). These boundaries are passable only in my imagination, and, there, I leap freely between their borders with bare toes sticking into the sand, tanned twin spindles for legs jumping over stepping stones, splashing cool streams of water onto grazes which appear unknowingly and regularly, like war wounds of a child’s summer. The slip-slide in my stomach chains, eases. I am reminded of my age – 23, tomorrow – and I’m aware I have not yet had a cup of coffee. The morning is viewed through fugged-up eyes, all condensation on the side of a beer glass, up the inside of a winter train window. I am in the lion’s mane, clenched between its jaws, rolling around its throat towards the pit of its stomach. I am in the midst of the morning, with the pissing dogs and spilling beer cans, the too-early commuters smugly clutching their Caffè Neros in the knowledge they have already achieved. ‘The next station is Clapham Junction’. We approach it fast, comfortable, rattling like my yellow suitcase up Victoria Street wearing a brown shift top purchased on my birthday last year. No one gets off; too many get on. The morning peace feels shattered, removed. I feel the stabbing need for my coffee – coconut. I see Lisbon like a mermaid ahead of me. She is ethereal, shimmering turquoise. She smells of flaked pastry and resembles Venus on the rock, iridescent in her delight like the inside of an oyster’s shell. Un-patriotically, she resembles Greece. She resembles womanhood; she holds up her mirror. One day – soon, after the plane, once I have brushed my hair, and certainly, certainly after the coffee – I will stare into it. I will see the reflection of my 23-year-old self. I will consider her, slowly, curiously, like that child on her first day of summer, like I have never seen each crinkle, each freckle before. Summers are curious (they poke at hairy caterpillars and stretch like cats on Italian doorsteps). Goddesses and mirrors are more. 

We pass little churches and raffia bags. He tucks her head into his shoulder and it fits just right. We send Excited Selfies, I take off my ring, and I write. ‘We are now approaching Gatwick Airport’. I get up; Lisbon.

Lisbon is monkfish, hen pheasants and pea hens. We walk around her Castle and think of women being less beautiful in nature. Our beauty standards are God-given (the theologian within me rebels, but can find no proof to disprove), literally in-built in our natural order, inherent like the mortar between the sandstone of the castellated walls. It has traditionally always been Human women who have felt the need to dress up, to tart up, to get ready. To paint their faces, cover their bodies, clothe their skins and line their eyes. Are we, to other species, the less beautiful member of the Human race? Are the Geordie girls with inch-thick fake tan and arse-skimming extensions just dun-coloured pea hens ruffling their dull, concrete-hued feathers in this relentless, carnal, visceral search of a mate in which we all, subconsciously, share (I picture this pursuit as a dripping steak, raw raindrops of grease-ebbed blood melting down my fingers)? It is the circle of life; it is natural selection. It is Sex for the Sake of Survival. The lizard eats the snail eats the frog. I squish the insect and it leaves a trail of yellow goo. Guilt stabs. We are ugly.

18/07/26:

Portugal is a mosquito net, embedded diamonds in the gilt of a mirror, rich red grapes and cerulean blue tiles all veiled over an old woman’s face. I had thought she would be Venus; expected youth, found age (a hangover of Porto Tonics and Fado singers, a haunting whisper down slippery cobbled streets, a whining tram canary yellow in the sunlight). I expected Venus; gold-crusted, young. She had black beauty spots and gold curls in her hair. The background was turquoise (it is darker, in reality: the sea is turquoise, sure, but the buildings are all blue, brighter than navy but darker than the gem); the foreground was golden. I find, in reality, Portugal is older; she has wrinkles where I thought freckles would lie, and her buildings, her bastions, her armor crumbles under heat and July sun. The sandals of tourists wear at her skin, beating her topaz body with flip, flip, flops and the beer-sticky soles of Stag Dos. She has a benign face, but not a historically beautiful one. She is no dowager, no Empress; no goddess, no mermaid. I find her middle-aged, with flies caught in her mosquito net (hanging in sticky orange strips down the doorframe of a hot village house in provincial France in the slumberous lull of an August dusty summer), a black veil over her face studded with balled velvet like sultanas in fly biscuits. She is keeping out of the sun. She is menopausal. She is hot — is cold — is cloud-scudded and empty, bulging with life in her stomach and emptiness in the extremities of her limbs. I find her aging, ageless. I find her beautiful, strangely. I find she is singing gutturaly but from her throat rather than from her heart, and the wine of last night dries flaking in her lungs. (Pastel de Nata crumbles on to the street). Smoked Port and pulled beef. Cinnamon ice cream and almond croissants. Singular stars, candles, Mary Magdalene and cheap pink sunglasses.

I feel whole and like I am growing, a sunflower towards some funnel of light. I wear white like an angel and lean with devilish thoughts against the bleached cool of the monastery’s stone. My bag is a blood stain, ripe red, Christ’s scared bleeding heart. My friend is a notebook, a scrapbook, a novel, the pages of our childhood spilling out and sticky with suncream, thoughts of our shared schooling spewing in chlorine-dripped ink stains and water marks, curls of lost time and crumples of folded secrets turned down as bookmarks between the chapters of our existence. We are known only to each other, caught between the bookends of our lives; friendship reads easily, in the summer.  

I find truth in death and I read epitaphs like a proverbial book. 

I feel almost like a bear cub, this birthday. Like the year has made me tired – a child, in the Quiet Corner at Kindergarten – as though I’d like to curl up on the warm stone, Thumbleina, in an acorn, and close my eyes. I think I would doze and perhaps I would dream. I would dream of rhubarb green and strawberry pinks, of blushing and clementines, of dragonflies and figs. I would dream of Cosmopolitans and tanned shoulders, of chipped coral nails and family FaceTimes. Of Jesus’s spread arms and denim patchworks of turquoise sea. 

We are Intense, fruity and elegant, Fresh, fruity and light. We are our wines and our wines become us, trickling slowly into our bodies like condensation drips, deeper deeper into stomachs swelling with rice and hearts swelling with fondness. Friendship is watered by wine, fed at its roots like the burnt, straggling trunk of a vine. We laugh; full. 

24/07/26:

Everything can be ascetically pleasing and building and nourishing and wholesome, and at the same time entirely empty. Like a jar of crushed tomatoes. 

I spend time nannying. The days are long long long and punctuated by constant ravishing hunger. The girls swing, eat tomatoes, pick up puppies in the crooks of their arms. I remember the rubbing burn of arm bands, and take all three with me to the shower in our swimming costumes. I am fought over at lunch and made to push harder, higher than the world, higher than the fairies (who live, of course, higher than the world). Everything is golden-glistening and light sky blue, adventures about worms bigger than wars about worlds. The crumbs of orange cake fall into my lap, and Sticky Fingers sing songs of Aussie summer through the speakers of my dog-haired Polo. I look for three blonde heads in my rear-view mirror and miss the way the girls would chatter-scream-laugh-dance-cycle-ride-eat. We are all souls, soulful, hearts full of chocolate cake and frozen bananas. Never once should that ‘bana defrost.

The days are quiet and the butterfly isn’t dead. I open the window and release her from the cobweb, watching as she unfurls her bright red wings and flaps wildly, desperately, free from her silk lead chains. Beyond the window is cool green grass and twirling summer flies; this side, the pane throws hot light onto the window seat, burning my face. Summer lies here, in the space between us; she is the hot glass and the cool grass, the window and the pane, the chipping white paint on the wooden frame and the butterfly’s wings caught in cobwebs. She is my pressed-up pink face and the dubbin on my loafers, the burrs on my socks and the salted butter on my loaf of sourdough. The flies drop, dive-bomb, die. The thistle mist floats off into the breeze, across the moors, across the pale blue sky. I watch airplanes fly and hear motorbikes roar. I drink champagne and taste the burnt crust of lamb on the barbecue. Geese clack and the dog eats bone. All at once and never at all, I am home.

I wear no clothes and I spend quite a lot of time alone. I see a man who looks like a version of my cousin (who finished Cambridge today) walking down the street and feel as though I am staring into the eyes of the future. Macrocosm becomes mircocosm becomes Mcosm: a State. I feel the thrill of secret knowledge, precious as an earwig cupped in my five-year-old hands: I know something he doesn’t; I know what he will look like in his future; I have cheated Time.

We are given a pension review at Work. We all fold the paper aside in the into our handbag and nip it over for the men of our families to look at. There is something in that.

It feels like spring, but it is early June and the sun is out. The sky is very blue. There are massive white clouds and a bitter wind which cuts like a guillotine down the littered London streets. A plane flashes over the sun. Shadow — light. All the earth is honeysuckle-sweet in June. The threat of rain is heavy, a pregnant stomach, swelling. Her belly is all the horizon: the pavement, the sky. I am looking up at it from below. Sub-vagina. Below the waistband of the knickers, and the equator, which divides us earthly beings, and the heavenly expanse above. I trace the stretch marks of the clouds with an idle fingernail – unpainted – moving slowly over them, over her belly, and up, up towards the sun, up, towards that spherical burgeoning beacon on the horizon, above the horizon, above earth, above heaven, and above it all – the nipple.

It is hot, sooty-chimney covered heat, the spout of a power station chugging fug into the sky. We have swollen bodies. Like puppy’s bellies or pregnant pigs.

I told the beggar to have a nice day but I couldn’t give him any money. I feel kick-gut guilt. How can he have a nice day when he’s toothless, hunched like a grey cat outside Sainsbury’s clutching a broken cardboard Pret cup with grease dripping in visible bulging droplets from his hair? A builder stands by his open white van’s door drinking Gordon’s pink gin from a tin at five past one. I smile. 

I avoid a spider on the stairs and think about France all the way to work. The streets are clean after the roadworks, and the spider has caught a fly. It hangs — suspended — crumpled at the end of its rope. It is helpless and caught, alive but unable to live, trapped but moving, swaying, swinging, with all the carefree attitude of a child going too high on the swings at the playground. Time does not apply to it; we live in suspense. We hang, at the mercy of a creature not much larger than ourselves, at the mercy of a Nature so much more powerful, so much more silent, so much more deadly than we ever pause to consider; we might become that fly any time. Perhaps we already are. Spinning, spinning, the web wider than ourselves, the world, the social network all sticky and out of our control, pinning us to a point in a grimy stairwell in a central London council block like we are bogged down by alien green goo and quick-sand like slime. It cannot be helped; this Nature that is wider than ourselves. It fills all the stairwell, when we only take up the tiniest space, the tiniest dot hanging on the end of an invisible rope, swaying softly in the breeze of the cracked open window, funneling up the stairs, step-by-step, down-up-up-down, inescapable and unavoidably, desperately, desolating filling our void. We are flies. We buzz too much: there is too much noise. I swat it away and go to work.

We are trundling; there is no other way to describe it. Pre-adolescent male, hands in pockets, wire-haired mother. He is ignoring her, focussing much harder on this task than on his GCSEs. Oh quick, let’s catch the green man she chimes, ding-dong annoying, peremenopausally desperate. I send her a mental note of sympathy, of you’re fighting a losing battle; (I had mentally thought exactly the same thing; oh quick, Cressy, you can catch the Green Man. What if he doesn’t want to be caught?). 

K-I-S-S-I-N-G!

Clemmie, what’s your hamster called? Claris. Like it is the most obvious thing in the world. After all, what else would a five-year-old name her hamster?

Someone’s eaten a pepperoni pizza on their Saturday night. I can smell the chilli in the oil, dripping warm, fat, oozing, softly over my pale trousers. There is an ‘L’ sign on a green Land Rover, at which I feel a stab of jealousy. I’ll buy myself a Land Rover someday (Donna Sheridan style, light blue, convertible. Driven only when wearing a cowboy hat; dungarees).

We appear to be a nation of joggers. (I have never jogged. In fact, that is a lie. I have jogged, once, in France. I was 13, on a French exchange, and staying with a house party of just-teenagers at a beach house in Brittany. We jogged on the first morning to the crêperie, picked up a stack of pre-prepared crêpes to feed 9 hungry, beer-tasting mouths, and jogged home. We did not jog again the next day, though somehow we managed to get crêpes). Everyone is moving, pushing, surging: I am walking. I can smell the sweat off their bodies as they run past, their hot breath coming in jerks. Am I missing something fundamental? Walking through life when I should be on the run? No; no matter how fast I walk, how slowly I run, it will all happen anyway. If nothing else, those crêpes will still arrive, steaming and warm, on the light blue plastic tablecloth of a French holiday home on a plate with ditsy flowers on the side.

Pink Lady apples in a white plastic bag.

They are Premium Coaches, taking pride in our work. Me too.

Do we always feel like half creatures — like beings on the edge? Like sunlight cracked over corners of walls and pink wallpaper in the evening light. Like we’re waiting for something – always waiting – like we’re about to get on the train, feel the hurtling rush of the tube, step on it, step off it, ignore each other and press so close — too close — to see right in front of our eyes. Like I am lying naked in my bed – waiting for summer. My body is orange and the sunset is pink; the fan is billowing my hair and my legs are splayed as in sex, though I am alone. I type and watch the curtains ruffle, and dream of France and feel prickles of sweat slip down my back. The fan is whirring against the noise of London traffic passing through the open window – a crack of life in my static, satiated, permanent reality, in my perception of life beyond. I turn to look at myself; think I have abs (I don’t: it is the way I am lying, propped up on one arm to type, sprawled over white bed sheets stained a little dirty from three days’ heatwave and restless, deep, deep, sleep); admire the way I sparkle (sun cream, moisturiser); trace blue veins from my crotch down my legs like the drip of the bubblegum ice lollies the boys were licking after school. I flop back like a sea creature, just caught, like a toddler exhausted by a tantrum, like a dog collapsing on its side after a walk. The light is golden now, and it catches the gilt frame of my father’s artwork which hangs as an abstract reminder of our mortality on my bedroom walls (it reminds me, again, painfully, like pressing on a burgeoning spot or sticking a finger into an open wound – horribly nostalgically for a 22 year old – of France. I think briefly of my parent’s lost youth. Of people’s days going by as they watch them, from behind desks, from sunlit terraces, from the stern of a boat). I sit up: I am bare faced in the light, shining under slick layers of face cream and perspiration. I am waiting for something. Aren’t we all? 

I curl my toes on the bed head, tracing the pin-cushion studs from left to right with one blue-gelled big toe nail (though they are only small). I have lost my sense of waiting. I flick back, flopping again, rolling on to my side. I will put my phone down, will read instead of write (but I will write mentally all night, all night, and it will keep me tortuously awake like a broken record, like Spotify on shuffle-play, like movies on a loop. My head is a nursery full of crying babies, a church full of evangelicals, a village hall full of the WI. It is noisy; it is inescapable. And, at times, it is really surprisingly good fun).

Lena Dunham makes me think about having little lipstick on the glasses so they’re easier to wash up: the only reason I have male friends.

Shall we play Mermaids? No one’s asked me that for so long. Perhaps this summer I will re-find mermaids.

I have concluded that people pleasing is a self-interested and self-invested state: selfish. I tell Lucy so: it is all about the Self, not People, not really. It pleases; the pleasure goes straight to your soul. It comforts; the comfort is a bed for your own insecurities, the lyrics of a mother’s lullaby, the silk of a pillow case against your over-moisturizd face. It is mediation rather than interference, meekness, self-victimisation, a placing of the self at the centre of someone else’s issues. It is Fibonacci. More fibb-ing. More indulgent than sticky coffee sauce around a chocolate fondant pudding. Saturating, cloying. Fat. That is why, to the addicted, it feels so damn good.

The sun has gone in, so I pull my white vest top off the back of the burgundy garden chair and up over my head. I pause at my neck – my sunglasses got caught, went over the back, stuck in my hair; my tummy is a little pink, like strawberry flesh just ripening, or like the Jelly Shoes with silver sparkles we used to wear in the sea in Cornwall. My leg is tucked up as I type, my white thong the only thing between my vest top and the seat. Legless, I shove the sunglasses back onto my head, hug my knee, decide it is getting colder, and watch a helicopter come in to land. The heatwave is dying, but like a tearful mother waving her child off to college she is clinging, reluctant to let go (there are swathes of rain above the clouds, somewhere out to Surrey).

I pick my gel nails off in Shakespeare and drop the plastic curves between the seats of the theatre, watching my friend’s scared wide eyes as she embodies a character so different from herself, in stature, sex, society, that it only emphasises to me all she is attempting to escape from. I wonder idly if she prefers this mode of existence; never fully being anyone, just a series of minds, a series of bodies bound by the beat of her one living heart. It is almost psychopathic, acting. A case of disassociative identity; will she ever find her own? The mind runs away; the nails are curling on the floor, wood-shavings.

Her perfume arrived before she did. 

I continue my conversation with Lucy. There are two stages of people pleasing, I conclude. Stage one: the pleasing. Stage two: the anxiety. The roundabout of the mind which has no Arc de Triomphe to anchor it in. It runs like a fishing line reel down, down to the bottom of the sea. I am not hooked on this latter stage. Lucy is.

We laugh about the affliction of being a Girl (the capital G symbolises the bridge to Womanhood which we are currently caught on, playing Pooh Sticks). We over-complement other girls and admit it’s because we’re actually a little (read raging, green-eyed, jade fire-breathing) a little bit jealous of them. We use other people’s products in the shower because somehow they will make us so much more beautiful than our own tried-and-true (read stale and boring) beauty regime. We are fascinated by the contents of another friend’s bathroom cabinet (what does this do? She removes — down there??). We accept our own worst traits with the attitudes of martyrs (our fates are unavoidable, unknown), and feel like bees circling the hive of a family holiday, uncertain which entrance in to take (we can be honey sweet; we sting; we die). We know the skins of our friends but not their flesh, and we force ourselves with pressure which builds from within, like the fizz beneath an exploding bottle of champagne (we pop the corks on the lawn, seeing who will fire them furthest).

We ate slowly but talked quickly, our mouths the mobile scooters to the Ferraris of our minds. I drank quickly, she — a little slower. Oceans and seas and years and time zones divide us, but we are Girls; we play Pooh Sticks on the Indian Ocean and silently thank the stars above that we met.

A crow picks apart a pigeon, bare breasted in the road. It is it’s Friday Night Feast. It is gruesome.

I try to read but I am far too distracted by the other people on the train. The three large Americans (husband, wife, spoddy don’t-wanna-be-here son) who have squeezed in beside me on my table for four: the mother eats M&S apple and peanut butter greedily like it’s the first snack she’s ever had; the father reads the golf news on his phone, which is itself the size of a small iPad; the son – long, greasy dark hair brushing his elongated shoulder blades – has keys in his ear lobes and watches something — probably porn — on his phone, sideways, tilted away from his father’s watery grey eyes. A little boy is pointing at a dog (“Hairy Maclary!” – I smile, that particular highlight of English literature having been lost to me for many years), ignoring his mother who is telling him firmly that they cannot start lunch until the train leaves the station (it is 11.00am exactly). I drink a green smoothie and type, dressed all in blue and reading (or not) a horse racing thriller loaned me by my sister’s husband’s mother. The train smells like croissants (it is Saturday morning), and wrinkles like plastic bags. We leave, promptly; 11.02. 

I think about the narcissism of singlehood. Singlehood or singledom? Is being single (in itself an artist’s creation) a neighbourhood of spinsters or a kingdom of fellow-subjects? My singledom for a man? Is he worth the price?

Time slows down to the pace of a bumblebee. Fuzzed legs in the style of a flower; marjoram on my tomatoes. I am pink as my knickers and hot as a cat. July is turquoise with orange flowers. Love’s Labours never were Lost on me.

I am looking at her back and I see the aisle like a runway ahead of her, fuzzy like the heat off an airplane, like landing in India or Dubai. There is moisture in the air and thick, fatness like thunder inside the Church, like marshmallows, like the smog of burning coal. I touch her arm – let her go. We push our shoulders back: walk.

It feels somehow like the end of enfance. The end of our shared childhood. A final sever between sisters. 

I sit on the train and I think I ought to write and I know I want to dream. A girl compliments my dress on the tube and asks me where it’s from. I smile at other people’s lives; the sticky notes on the bedroom window which I see from the train, GCSE revision and sweaty exam halls and timetables hour by hour. I picture the teenager behind them (she is, in my vivid, tired imagination, spotty. She has big bug-eyed glasses and her hair is scraped back in a bun which she has piled on top of her head in the way you must absolutely never do in company but which every girl does, alone, as soon as she comes in in the evening or enters her bathroom to brush her teeth. She is 15. She is looking at Chemistry (pink Post-It notes), and thinking about Kristallnacht). The sun shines, and it all seems incongruous.

It is the most beautiful evening. One they dream of and one I write about, from the window of a train. Mid-summer. The year at its peak. The sky is as blue as my dress and the clouds are transparent like my heart. The sentence is overly-hyperbolic and romanticised, but I am going home for my sister’s wedding and I feel I have every right to be nostalgic. It is the ending of my youth. The fin of our shared childhood, of our joint memories, of the experience of being One and yet not-quite-One which all siblings must share – part of the Whole, but little beings in themselves, two children made distinct by parental treatment, by defiant minds, by food preferences and clothes choices, by curly or straight hair. We used to play Robin Hood and she was Maid Marian. We used to bring our dollies to France and kiss them to sleep each night. We used to build barricades of wine boxes between us on the car journey home, fortresses of my father’s fortune, and argue over its top with angry glares which spoke louder – hurt deeper – than the pinches and the punches the barricade had been built to avoid. She used to laugh at Jeeves and Wooster so I said I hated it (I didn’t), and she only liked carrots so I said I preferred peas (I do). Our grandmother cooked her pizza and me pasta every Monday evening for five years, when I would be lying on the sofa (I suffered from Monday-Fever) and she would be watching The Simpsons (closely followed by Top Gear). She used to drink orange barley water so I said I liked lemon. She always had long hair so I cut my hair short (I now wear it long, but remain unable to un-see the shortness of it compared to that of my sister, so still try fruitlessly to grow it every so often in ineffectual bursts of specialist-shampoo buying shopping sprees). We used to make up songs and plays and collect bones in our Wendy House. We used to troop down to the river and swim naked with our friends, and be chased by angry black cows protecting calves from picnicingseven year olds. We used to be so close and fight so much. She used to hit me, hard. I used to shut myself in my wardrobe – watch the sticky glow in the dark stars twinkle from the wall, behind the clothes (her hand-me-downs) – and cry. She is getting married tomorrow. She is not mine. We are not the same, her and I. We never were. We used to play Robin Hood together. She was always Maid Marian, and I was always Robin. 

And suddenly there I am again; at the end of the tunnel — the train. Driving back through sunlit flitting countryside, watching them bailing the hay – make hay when the sun shines – with my father in the car, both mentally preparing, neither saying much (we talk about the cricket; the pigeons on our roof). I have made it all about myself again. How successful. It may be the only Wedding I ever yet. 

The vicar tells us ‘I’ll wear less under my cassock on the day’. I block the image from my mind, and focus on where to put the bouquet. 

People keep saying Good Luck like I am running a marathon. Like I am instrumental in the success of my sister’s marriage. Perhaps I am. Perhaps the pink-ness of my dress, the curli-ness of my hair, the pearli-ness of my earrings will really make a difference in their happily ever after. In the happily ever after of the day, at least. I suppose that’s something. 

I ignore the single magpie and delight in the red sky. I wish upon the jockey moon and put the dog to bed. I go to bed too. 

I think I am only just beginning to realise quite how much we have been through as a family. Two grandfathers dead and a mother with cancer. A 25-year parental relationship already not immune from turbulence pushed into fierce magnification by inevitable, fast-paced illness. My sister took it all on herself, and got engaged into the bargain; organised reams and teams of women, old friends, new friends, unknown friends, to visit our mother in her loneliest days, when her depression grew in clouds darker than thunder, darker than the clouds falling from her head as her puff-like brown hair fell down the drain. (It is growing back, quickly, slowly, all in patches like allotments on the dirty edge of a town). She did too much, sailed through, cried and felt and dealt. I was selfishly ensconced in the fierce determination living (who knew it was such a chore?). I wrapped myself into an unknown version of me, of half-moving to city, falling out with friends and making much more honest ones, proving I was no longer heart broken and feeling lonelier than I had ever felt, so focused in on myself, my image, my control, my biggest fears, that my body expended all its energy on just keeping myself alive. I knew it was all I had. It was killing me. My father grew bags under his eyes and ignored his own limp, sat in hospital appointments and looked away during blood tests, felt ripples of my mother’s delusional hatred, adoration, manic highs and screaming-into-the-open-fridge lows. Took away her car keys when she swore she was going to leave. Calmed her down, the way he does to me. Silently. He reaches more regularly for the bottle of wine, now. 

I have put teaspoons in the freezer to soothe her eyes in the morning. We are crying, each in our own individual rooms, some crying more physically than others – crying out. Totally mismatched, speaking different langues like in the Tower of Babel. We love each other. It is our bind and our curse, our cooling waters and the boiling-over heat of a cafetiére which singes the hob. (I see dark brown liquid, burning bubbles and coffee stains. I see charred halloumi, and chicken breasts on sticks). We love each other. She loves him. She is marrying him tomorrow. (If nothing else, they provide me with inspiration). 

I put the Bridesmaids in my Polo and turned the windscreen wipers on; we wound down the windows to shout at the Ushers, and gathered up her skirts as she ran down the road. Two minutes past doesn’t count as late. But I can hear the bells – bells – bells – like those round cat collar’s and cow’s necks. Bells – bells – bells. I take my father’s arm as she is about to do, and run up the road with a posy of sweet peas.

My sister got married yesterday. I feel the weight of it in my body and the fizz of it in my head. My bones ache but my skin feels light, like dancing, like champagne, like cream on top of coffee.

My sister got married yesterday; and now I am hot on a train to London. My sister is now somebody’s wife. (Wife? I capitalise it in my head). It went off without a hitch. Two people got hitched. But that was the plan all along. 

Sisters don’t take wedding vows. But she will be, forever, mine.

They smell like Pornstar Martinis and teeter down Victoria in slim-fit white high heels. He brings wine. He clasps flowers. (He wears a green fleece gilet and cords which taper at the ankle. He is slightly uncomfortable in this uniform, and wears it like it doesn’t quite fit; a child on its first day of September school, an army cadet at its first parade. He is not wrong; the uniform doesn’t fit. If he truly belonged to the tribe he attempts to resemble he would never, never be wearing cords which taper at the ankle. It is an unwritten faux pas. Oh well; he will learn. Perhaps his awkwardness is in part owing to the large flowers he has attached to his chest like the multi-coloured breast of a summer robin). I smile vaguely in his direction. I dream of someone bringing wine to me. We would sit, open it in the sun. Soak in alcohol and sunshine alone on a balcony in Pimlico. I would be topless. I like to be topless in the sunshine. Drinking wine. I think it would be rosé. 

The world feels bright on this Sunday morning. I am going to church, and then I’m going dress shopping. I have a baby-blue handbag slung over my shoulder, and tawny see-through sunglasses which hardly keep the bright glare of the day off. There is heat coming. I know it. I watch a small family pack themselves up for holiday from the pavement in Pimlico, and I watch groups of teenagers huddle outside cafés (I think this is odd; teenagers should huddle behind bike sheds, corner shops, in the back-ends of church yards. They should not huddle outside cafés. It feels far too cosmopolitan – good cocktail). A man shoves a large Subway sandwich into his mouth, down his throat. I think of the open jaws of the crocodile in Peter Pan. Captain Hook, Hook, Hook, and a Sunday Sub. A whippet wanders the streets alone. So slim, so fine, so elegant. So definitive: my status; my desire. I do not dread work tomorrow. That feels like a blessing. I check my watch, and, as usual, I am running late for church.

We sit at marble coffee tables in Duke of York Square and drink hot matcha tea from paper cups. This leaves a green rim where our lips have pressed, outlining the hole in the plastic lid like painted circles around potholes. We are going shopping. It is a softer Sunday. 

London makes me sneeze. I kiss my Uncle (not a euphemism), and avoid treading on Pom Pom dogs in the street (throw a smile at the frustrated pink-spectacled middle-aged owner, male. Art collector; interior designer? Heterosexual. Just). 

The lilac is blooming and the earth smells like warm grass and bluebells. I’m just cooking my supper and I’ve got no knickers on. Life feels about right for a Saturday. 

This time London smells of sulphur and my sister is talking about cassocks on coatracks. (I mentally capitalise this: Cassocks on Coatracks). I ate chocolate cake for breakfast in a pub in Hampshire, and I delight in the lit windows of London’s white fronted streets. Her buildings are ladies in debutante white dresses, but they are older (no wiser) than a deb; they are the mothers at the tea-table, the grandmothers at school pick-up, the ladies making coffee for the homeless on a Sunday morning. They have the air of having seen it all – seen nothing – turn a blind eye, and wink. I wink back. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all be Mary Berry?

05/05/26:

Give me a clue, who’s in the loo? Chant it on a Monday morning. (I work in a school; I hear all kinds of chants. A little boy sits in my office, very serious, face drawn. His tousled hair falls over his tiny forehead, completely untroubled by spots. He looks at his teacher: “Tell me”, he says, like a character in a play, a Christopher Robin, a story-book innocent, “tell me: if you were born in Scotland, why do you speak English so well?“).

There are Builders eating brown bread sandwiches out of lunchboxes with the cast of Frozen on. Anna is looking pristine, hands clasped over her purple cape, hair braided casually right down her back. Elsa has her mouth open (I do not think she wants some sandwich). I think she is singing, belting, drawing in all her breath. LET IT GO. The pasta’s in the pan. LET IT GO-OH! 

I walk to work, holding my flask of coffee. The little girl (I am not lying when I write she has pig tails – I would not lie, for Ernest Hemingway tells me to write only what I know) I walk behind has two little plaits over either shoulder, each with little bows at their ends. She is too perfect for words, caramel-milk chocolate hair, straw boater, tiny fingers. She is locked on a desert island. Her brother (he is on a blue plastic scooter, and is, oddly, less noticeable for me to write about. He is a passenger in this game, a co-conspirator not the main event, a Best Supporting Actor to his sister’s great, living, fantasy) trundles along at her side. He scoots on the pavement – over the side – on the pavement again. His father pulls him back by the collar, a warning hand, tired eyes. Brother, I think we gotta leave this island and find us a new place. I’ll pack all our toys.  It’s too hot here. (The person next to us at the traffic lights sneezes conspicuously. That is not part of our fantasy (I, too, am on the desert island. I remain unseen). May has not brought her sun hat or sun cream. Instead, she has brought jackets and those thin, single-layered scarves. Our island may be tropical, but London is not). 

Tiny old ladies hunch over French fries. There are children on the floor – will you marry me? I’ll let you play in my paddling pool? It’s an offer I could never refuse. 

10/05/26:

They call it Moonlight Shadow and the buttercups are rife. 

The boat was called Moonlight Shadow, and my thermos flask goes upside down in my precious designer Mark Jacobs and it doesn’t spill. (We go to the Buckingham Palace Garden Party, Tuesday afternoon, and the wiggly boy at school announces he has worms). May is a graceful beast, a dual persona. She has large doe eyes and long, long, fawn coloured limbs which click gently as she unfurls them in the sun. She is quite unprepared for the weather she throws at us. It is a side of her tempestuous soul which her long, dark, mascara’d lashes attempt to disguise. Her brown hide is speckled by hail, then, too quickly, her white tail bobs bunny-like into sun. My hands freeze and my eyes stream, but I love it somehow. We are lying under a blossom tree, this doe and I, and snowfall comes in plumes from its branches, just like the grey winter coat malting off my pony. There is a bath on the street in Pimlico, and I step in front of a Sainsbury’s van at 7:51 in the morning. Still, I sleep with my doe. She sleeps with me. We are content.

The world smells like fried bacon on a Saturday morning in May. 

He hopes to give it to his Son Some Day. Try that out loud after a few drinks. I host my first London Dinner Party and we drink No Name Natural Wine – Blanco – and play Empires. We are children growing old, adults staying young. We drink and eat defiantly, proving a point: we hope to give it to our Sons some day. This feeling of youth which flows like life-blood, thicker than water, looser with the wine, red like patriotism and untouchable like grandeur. We will give it to our sons Some Day. Some Day far from now, far from the sun-socked balcony and candle-lit white table clothed table, far from the turkey koftas and orange cake, far from the ten faces of ten friends (one of us is marrying soon; one of us has never been in love; one of us springs with hopes of four-leafed-clovers and believes in love like fairytales). Some Day, far from now, we will give it to our Sons: the heavy-set gold ring on his finger; the feeling of Being Young. (The next morning I write the beginnings of a blog and it auto-deletes. Symbolic of life? It can’t have been worth the words. I drag the un-clothed table back onto the balcony, and fold washed napkins into squares with a next-day sadness which makes me search them for leftover feta stains, as though the remnants of food will re-anchor my straying vessel of a self firmly in the glowing waters of last night. The candle wax has melted on to the table cloths (my grandmother’s worst nightmare). I smile, and scratch at it with my nails. We will give it to our Sons Some Day. And Daughters too; always, always, to the Daughters too).

Her boyfriend told her to Stop Crying in the Chippie. I dramatise the words. ‘The debut novel by Cressida Valentine. Stop Crying in the Chippie: A Metaphor for Life’.

The 19th of May is a Monday. I remember it by various sayings, drifting to me like the telegraph wires of communication which buzz and vibrate outwards from the epicentre of my School Office.

I lost my tooth this morning.

The cupcake lands icing-downwards on the imitation wood carpet. 

Nanny forgot her knickers so she’s wearing her wet swimming costume, and Mummy must – must – drop round her white filly ones because she refuses to wear the pink ones I wave at her from the cupboard in the office (kept specially for just-such disasters). I think of her damp, clinging navy costume seeping chlorine slowly through to her woolen school blazer. I cringe. I call Mummy. Mummy brings her knickers.

She gives her a Lily of the Valley card on her 56th birthday with ‘Deepest Sympathy’ penned in curly cursive inside.

I’ll see you when I’m married!

I believe “are they alliums?” has become the new flirtation technique. 

I am the bravest of them all. I’ll go for a swim, plug my phone in, fall in love. 

I slip my boat shoes on for the first time this summer and it feels like coming home.

Fishing’s not about luck, it’s about how you wiggle your worm. (He wears a graphic tee. He has a belly and a sun cap and eagles on his arms. The writing is stretched taut over his stomach, so that the ‘W’ warps illegibly into the letters below. It’s about how you Iggle your Orm. So Iggle it).

There is half a moon and four stub-tail gulls. The bees bash into my arms and I have no socks on my feet (cold grass, yellow buttercups — yes I like butter). Nothing stings except the prickles of nettles down my legs, and I lie naked in the sunshine with shimmering skin and a flash of coral knickers (stomach down, dog-on-my-book. Stomach up, bare breasts little mounds which sparkle in the haze; heave; breathe; sigh; shudder, like a baby’s snore. I taste summer on my tongue, shimmering softly down my body. It tastes of the liquid sun-cream mothers lather on children at the beach, and sparkles a little like fizzy elderflower. The pool is full of dandelion heads. They are Time, clocks, drifters of nothingness). There is a single bead of dew on the base of my fingernail. I watch it: do not move.

The river smells like sour cherries and muscovado sugar. The light is yellow and the dark is grey. The moon has grown from a half into an almost-whole, and I salute the dying sun. 

We share a mutual wee. I laugh at him as he eyes me, leg cocked on a thistle. I am squatting on a dock leaf (much more comfortable). We’ve never done this before, I say. The sun is setting in Turkish Delight colours and the horses swish summer flies off their spring coats. We are caught in the in between – knickers down (not that I was wearing any anyway). At once exposed and molly-coddled by nature in her tawny hour, the dog and I wee in the field. We are part of her bosom, live moles on her creamy skin. Her golden hair is glimmering and ready for brushing. It requires a hundred strokes (by candlelight) before the bedside mirror. She is flushing with the graceful effort. Pretty, soft, late May, late evening. White nightgown, blonde hair. Too early, yet, for stars.

I am sitting in the woodshed on the final Saturday in May and there are pink poppies waving gently in the garden.

I am striding out in a pair of clean dungarees, which never happens, because dungarees are, by default, dirty. The dog’s ears are pinned back by sticky weed, and I wonder what my sister and I have in common except parents.

The feeling of falling in love is temporary. 

The honeysuckle is acrid and stenches like sex after the rain (I can hear the thunder in the background, grumbling slowly, roaring like a belch from the stomach of a sleeping beast. The beast is London; it snores; it wakes, some great living city in the pouring rain, great grey skies all gunmetal in June).

We go to the Cricket and I watch – keep your eye on the ball – as a man stands poised like a meerkat, bag of Haribos between his lips and two pints of dark black Guinness in his hands. He scouts like an unseeing owl for his clan. He is blind to his own beauty, but I am not. He has a sharp, straight, small nose, and circular, very green, eyes. His hair is dark (it gets paler at its tips, naturally). He would look good in shell-rimmed glasses. His knuckles are dripping with spilt beer, and straining a little with the effort not to spill any more. I admire him like an animal at the zoo, and look back at the game. I am all curiosity for our human nature, us Kings of the Animal Kingdom; we are in the strange constructed reality of Sport – a pseudo-reality we crave. It divides us – like we need further reason for division? – and unites us – temporarily, but with unmatched richness – in ways political systems could only dream to recreate. Is all the world a stage, or all the city a cricket ground? A football pitch? A tennis court? I hear them shouting at the World Cup from the pub 50 metres down the street and conclude unsatisfactorily that we create a simulated reality for something to do; we are children in need of toy soldiers and doll’s houses; we require occupation, so we give ourselves a purpose. Perhaps that is the reason for Art. If it is, is does not detract from its greatness.

A cast of characters; a Life; a world. (Capital L, little w. It feels right, so I wonder why?). The rain runs marathons down the window panes, diving my world by a transparent wall of speckled glass from the horror of Life beyond (London; endings, heaving traffic, quiet solitude on a Saturday night; the Rivals within; the rivals without). The drops run relay races and play tag-It, sudden sprinters pushing through like Derby winners, little children all in a line (crocodile, not two-by-two), packed tightly between the white lines painted on wet grass at Sports Day, running, running, like rain drops, like weather, like birds migrating and cricket balls through slips, running like their lives depend on that – that finish line. It is unknown and yet so certain. They know exactly where they are headed, but have no idea quite what for. They are my raindrops down the window pane, my weekdays, my Saturday night. They are mosaics of water patterned softly between me (under a Zara Home wool-blend beige blanket), the balcony (under a lichen-lined film of chipped white paint and a blanket of pooling rain), and the World – capitalised this time – beyond (Itself tucked tightly like a baby in a cot under a blanket of car-metal grey). I am picturing Life and thinking of nothing much. I am 23 next month. I wonder at my Twenties. They have been a funny thing, like a toddler in the bath (we sit in the cooling water of the draining tub and rub bubbles into a little flopping cone on our heads, giggling).

My friends are two Paddington Bears, preening one another (sticky fingers from marmalade and sex). I love them for it, maternally. The sourdough is out of the oven and dark, making the flat smell like bread crumbs just caught in the toaster. Breathe deeply – it is Sunday. Rest.  

The skyline is a bruise which grows darker and more purple by the minute not the hour. It looks painful. (I wince for it). 

I smell of rhubarb and toasted oats, and I weep my pretty little heart out in the car. 

I walk to work and play Chic/Not-Chic in my head. Martinis – chic; espresso martinis – not chic. Diet Coke – chic; Coke Zero – not chic. Thinness – chic; having an eating disorder –

I walk through Kensington Palace Gardens on a Wednesday at lunchtime. It is early March. The sun is warming us through the morning fog and the daffodils are bright yellow and being plucked at by a toddler like a pecking pigeon in the pavement gutter. If I were in Paris I’d know I was in heaven. As it is, the pavement is maroon and there are nuns pulling Nando’s chicken off their greasy thigh bones with oil covering their bared teeth in a layer of slickness, one leg tucked under their habits, one foot planted firmly on the park bench between them – Penny loafer, black, patent leather (can it be real? Can nuns wear leather?). I am not imagining; I write only the truth. There is a man bending down to pick up dog poo (down-up); he holds the yellow-rope leads of three Golden Retrievers, each with a different colour dyed tail; one pink, one green, one blue. I wish I were exaggerating; I am not. I write only the truth. I smile and think I am in Wonka-land, then smile wider and wish with all my heart that that were a place. I return to work, turning my face finally towards the sun before heaving the door to sit again behind a triple screen computer for another four hours. I enjoy it (I know now this does not last: a sense of darkness, that metallic taste of thunder, that bruised cloud bursting suddenly with fat, fat drops of rain. The storm is coming; the clouds will break. I believe there are rainbows after events like these). I research trips to Las Vegas and marble baths. 

11/03/26:

Someone’s burnt their toast. 

14/03/26:

All I smell is cigar smoke and all I taste is Greek yoghurt. The sun is out and the birds are very noisy, like they want to make their presence extra-felt after so long in their nests. They are babies waking up from a nap. Hungry.

20/03/26:

“We’re not giving you the bloody five pounds, the five pounds is for the cupcake!”. I smile ruefully and try to hide it as I walk to the tube, because I know that were I the frustrated bob-haired mother carrying her screaming son’s blue plastic scooter to school while he throws a fit on a Chelsea pavement (mind the pigeon poo) I would whole-heartedly resent the girl in the leopard trench coat smirking at herself as I attempt (loosing battle) to discipline my golden-haired boy. After all, the bloody five pounds is for the cupcake. It is 8:24am.

She wears a pink striped nightie and hand weights – pumping like a body builder down the Chelsea street. Belgravia is full of surprises this morning. I place her in her mid-sixties. Pink striped nightie, little blue weights. Up, down, up, down, all the way to get coffee. She has trainers on her feet, and creases running marathons up her goose-fat arms. Good on you girl, I think. How bloody patronising I am.

Single stars in the sky. Leopard print. All Over.

26/03/26:

He has good looking hands. (I am reading this back, and I have no idea in the slightest exactly who, on the 26th March 2026, had good looking hands. On 20th April 2026, I wish him well).

There is a false nail on the pavement. Pink. Crusted. It is a typical portrayal of my life, this phoney world of Clients and achieving a lifestyle which is not your own; it cannot be my own; I do not want it to be my own. I believe they are unhappy. I believe wealth buys experiences but it cannot buy happiness. I believe fun comes for free. 

A single sheet of seaweed lies on the pavement outside the office, green on grey. A little out of place, so I smile at it. 

31/03/26:

I have decided my world should be rhubarb. Pink and green. Streaks of stewed stripes all pink in the sky, tart on the tongue, painted sugarplum across my lips. I buy a pink and green ring just to prove it. Easter is pink and green, cinnamon spice and rhubarb. 

01/04/26:

April. I look up at my little flat and smile. I have cooked two salmon fillets, before 8am. I have washed my hair; packed my lunch. I can hear birds in the blossom and smell the sour tang of raw fish on my fingertips. Life feels monotonous in its whirlwind. The same family I see every morning pass me on the Pimlico pavement. A chubby-cheeked baby in his push chair, gurgling dadada as his mother walks the Pom-Pom dog with its lion-bush tail and insists, exphasises, mamama by his side. Dadada pushes the baby along, studiously not getting involved in what is clearly a long running debate. I give him a smile, like the dapple of sun through trees; shaded, hidden, strong in its liquid weakness. He nods. Bye-bye Baby Baby Goodbye.

A mother and son board the train. They have matching mullets.

Unknown:

The street looks like Thursday Night Pub and smells like the salt on the top of fish and chips. Fish and chips are like the Earth’s crust, layers of soil, batter, scent, vinegar, sea, salt, and a molten core of body. I am swimming currently in the outer-shores, between the layers of salt and vinegar. We sit in a church and sing. Thursday Night Pub and the intense holiness of Evensong collide, organ music in pipes and a pulsing beat behind the gin-sticky bar. One man’s incense is another’s salty chips. The passage between the church and the pub is a meeting place of God; He dwells there, in the shadow of an archway, on top of the cigarette butts and awkward stammers of first dates, with the mice who live under the railtracks of the tube. I see Him here, and smile.

Sunday morning, naked cooking. Sunday is love heart balloons and a Christian fish, and friendships falling apart in the March sunshine, spring and new beginnings, or homecomings to blue lights wear. I think about rhubarb cake and turn my face towards the sun, and run to church in the morning, except for once I am not late. I am wearing a leopard print jacket and pony hair shoes. My fingers still sting in the cold, but my cheeks blush red in the sunshine. I am makeup-less. It is Sunday, my day, alone, in Pimlico.

It is Thursday night, this time. In the space of three weeks, I have lost a best friend and a job. She has not died. Only decided she no longer likes me. And considering a mutual level of admiration is an important component of best-friend-man-ship, I consider that, on the whole, I have lost her, to the wind. Not the idea of her. Not the ghost. But the physical body – mislaid. (Or buried?).

02/04/26:

I sit on the train, with a fillet of salmon in front of me. I consider its pinkness, compare it to my own (flushed cheeks, heavy bag, misread Google Maps). Pink and green. I am in the pink.

I saw my ex-boyfriend at the station. Split second; recognise him anywhere. What is it with that?

The sun sets somewhere outside of Gratham. There are rape fields outside the window, and hot cross buns on the train. 

07/04/26:

The heat is blushing behind the sun. She isn’t brave enough, not yet. She is springing, softly, like a field mouse’s petal velvet nose. She needs a darker shade of blusher.

09/04/26:

Temple station is empty on the platform out of the City at 9:21am. I stand, bereft of company. I text a friend whose grandmother has died. She was a beautiful and wonderful woman. It is not enough. I curse my job and wonder if I’m wasting my life, then remember smiling at the sun and realise how it doesn’t matter – it doesn’t matter – because I’m here and I’m living and even on an empty tube platform where the black tarmac stretches into infinity alongside a cliff-drop to the tracks — too close — London is living all around me. I saw Bill Nighy in Pimlico and a girl who looked like Timothy Chalamet on the tube. (Yes, a girl. And, yes, frankly she was very beautiful).  

12/06/25:

I dropped my phone in Waitrose. I blame the post-Hen Do hungover shakes which made me extend an exhausted arm towards the row of cheeses, and thank the kind shop assistant who runs across the road waving my iPhone in the air like she’s at a concert with the torch on. Perhaps it’s Ed Sheeran — Perfect — Wembley. (I am on a pilgrimage to Tescos. I look round shadily, like an embarrassed monk caught in the act. (I need not specify of what.) It’s their fault, my hungover brain thinks angrily. I do not know who they are. But they really shouldn’t have put Tescos and Waitrose right opposite each other. Of course I’m going to be the Guilty Pilgrim in search of cheaper cheese. Of course I am. I am only 22. Pilgrim’s Choice. The shop assistant catches up with me, and presses my phone into my outstretched hand. Thank you, Waitrose, thank you). I cook. The sun shines. Heat is coming. One day.

She’s replying to WhatsApp in Westminster Abbey Evensong. I find something immoral in it. 

17/04/26:

I am sitting on the train trying to be atmospheric, except I have sat by the wall between windows and my bag wafts intermittently of yoghurt and peppermint tea. Children Railways is not such a romantic end to a Friday. I have finished my last day at work; so much for that lucky penny on the street. I feel whole and wholly empty, my half-eaten yoghurt pot open between my thighs, my 7:30am make-up peeling, my dress waiting in an Oxford college, waiting for me to fill it and to dance, dance, dance and forget my failures. The failures are chains around my neck, heavy black and gold necklaces which leave red wheels against my pale skin where they’ve got caught under my coat collar. I need to wear a pendant for a while. (My ears have pearls in them. This tea is too hot). 

I wonder vaguely if it’s symbolic that I am writing again, just as soon as the job is over. It is not that I do not write when I am unhappy, but that life becomes a vortex of monotonous whirlwind and I get caught. It is all very well being Katy Perry’s Paper Bag until one gets hurled onto a car windscreen going 80mph down the motorway. I picture Alice Through the Looking Glass; I picture myself with curly hair. I have done a Big Thing today: I have saved myself. (A girl sits on the train; she eats Doritos with one hand, and holds her phone up to her mouth with the other. I cannot see her face – the blue velvet seat (how many bottoms? How many sticky hands?) obscures it. She is wearing terracotta linen trousers – Free People, I think – and has a rucksack on the seat next to her which gives the impression that she’s been travelling for months. From her telephone conversation, I realise that she hasn’t. She repeats, increasingly frustrated, gently patient as a teacher with a toddler, “doctors appointment… sooner… time OFF work… experiencing burn out. Experiencing burn–out. It’s all in my original appointment request. I need time off work – they say I’m EXPERIENCING BURN out”. She swallows the “out”; out, out fine fiend. It is over, done. Thank you ever so much. Well done, Daisy. I believe you too have saved yourself today. Our carriage is a haven of female success. I turn back to my yoghurt. She sticks her hand in her rucksack: pulls out the packet of Doritos). 

I realise I will never see the man who sits on the McDonald’s steps selling the Big Issue again. He leaves every day by 12pm, like clockwork, like he has somewhere better to be. He is the McDonald’s cuckoo; out every morning, in every afternoon. Cuck-oo, cuck-OO. He has always worn a blue cotton jacket, which bulges over his stomach and he has not changed this – not once – every morning since January 19th. It is now April 17th. I couldn’t even stick it three months…

18/04/26:

I have decided to become a teacher. Because one tiny life is some person’s whole world. I can make that difference. 

Later:

She smiles, all white-glow and soft. I think of baby sheep, wooly cashmere, The White Company socks. Motherhood is coming — two weeks away. I sit in my dungarees, pink scrunchie pulling my hair back, tawny sunglasses rammed on my head staring blankly at the ceiling of the jam-packed cafe. I am the Carrie to her Charlotte. I am completely in awe. 

19/04/26.

Note to self: don’t grab the wrong fake tan bottle in the bathroom and end up slathering “Quick Ibiza Sun” all over yourself the day before you start a new job. It makes your hands look like you’ve been smoking for a hundred years. Not a good look when you’re about to start working with kids. 

We drink champagne and eat rhubarb cake and nobody cries. That feels good. I look up at the lavender sky – purple-pink, French grey, borage field hue – and think: Hi ho, hi ho, and it’s back to School we go. I have a mental picture of Snow White and a snail of school-children trooping down a Belgravia pavement with their rucksacks slung over their shoulders like the spades on the dwarfs. Life is resuming a new normality; I believe it is Orange.

I start a new job on the full moon and pick up a £10 note on Kensington High St as I step out of work on the Friday evening. I feel somehow lucky; I hope they are lucky signs. I am charmed. 

(June bridesmaids dresses in January). 

30/01/26:

I watched the rain tumbling down the train window as we sped out of London on a Friday night — the last in January — and thought about writing: it is raining. I didn’t. Too much is happening, too much reflection, too much pain, and oh – oh – too much hope, for such a useless phrase to be written down, again. I bit noisily into an apple and picked seeds from my peanut butter out of my teeth with my tongue. I am going to the seaside. That soothes the senses in my brain which have stared at a three-screen computer all day, all week. The sea. 

He reads Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’ on the train from Ipswich to Lowestoft and looks like a spoddy student from Cambridge. (He is bored, and goes on Instagram less than 10 minutes into the journey; not so spoddy, perhaps). Hard going for a Friday night. 

(It has reached that time on a Friday night when Wonder Wall is playing on the taxi radio when the driver eventually picks me up, having left me waiting station-side in a downpour even Noah would have been jealous of. Maybeeee you’re gonnabethe one that saves me. I do hope so; his driving does not feel safe). 

01/02/26:

I have spent much of my life on the bus. I feel suddenly some affinity with my younger self, day after day, morning — evening, in and out of Oxford along the endless mole-brown of the Banbury Road. Now I sit in the rain on a Sunday evening next to a man I don’t know who wears a baseball hat. He put his seat belt on, so I did too, though I’d never have done that before (what is it about busses and taxis which mean legality is forgotten, changed, or ignored? A second () for what is it about being unintentionally influenced by the actions of a large male at one’s side; implicit sexism; societal patriarchy; explicit inferiority complex? – all dull, all mundane issues). I saw myself on the train pushed up against the window, coiling blonde hair and an enormous multi-coloured coat with rain drops crying ceaselessly down the pane and an open book on my knee. Ted Hughes changed nappies (the interviewer appears shocked). The bus is warm, like being in a cocoon which crawls steadily towards the Metropolis, full of strangers. In baseball caps. 

Busses are far more intimate spaces than trains. Proximity and direction. Close, one-way. Pods, in which we sit like peas. 

07/02/26:

I feel low and I feel empty and I hate it. I feel like the endless stretch of grey cloud, the February sky, the puddle in the gutter which spreads thickly over two yellow lines, inexplicably dividing the road from the pavement. I am the tarmac and the dishwater-down-the-drain. Dull. 

09/02/26:

Even the longest days come to an end. 

10/02/26:

I ate Ibuprofen for breakfast and walked in the rain. Kelly had Pina Coladas for breakfast in Barcelona because there was no one to tell her otherwise. She is 55. I am 22, the future looked bright (according to Lily Allen). I think it does, sometimes. There are kisses in the clouds and orange sunlight gleams out of the curved windows of skyscrapers. 

11/02/25:

London conspires against you. I leave early to get to work (still new enough to try to impress) and the doors stop working on the tube so that a whole train full of people sit at Sloane Square station waiting to begin their days while the driver runs down the platform with an engineer in an orange jacket (like that will help him), and the doors open and slam to a constant soundtrack of beep-beep-beep. (Little do they know their days have already begun). 

A woman mouthed “I like your jacket” at me on the tube and I mouthed “Thank you” back. She smiled, and sipped her coffee. I re-adjusted my ear muffs and looked out of the window with a little smile on my lips. We are British: what to do after a compliment? 

It occurs to me that Memory grows cleverer every day. 

13/02/26:

I am a year since Paris and I could write about it but I don’t want to. I could think about it — that best time of my life — but I don’t want to. I thought at the station this morning that this is my third Friday in a row taking an evening train going — anywhere. Somewhere. Somewhere new. Tonight, the building blocks of metropolitan society fall away to snow fields. I cannot see them. They lie outside the dirty windows (wet, dusty), outside the confines of my thoughts and my head and my peppermint tea (my stomach is full of the breakfast I never got to eat and I am tired). I thought, as I waited at the tube platform-edge this morning, that I could write about the people; the lives of all those people I have traveled with — somewhere — on a Friday night train (going anyway) in the past three weeks. (Once, it was to Southwold; once, it was to Bicester. Now, it is simply To The North). East, Middle, North. Where can I go that’s West? Tonight, everybody is kissing. It is too much. It is Friday the 13th and it is the night before Valentine’s Day, but I am not going out (instead, I am (of course) getting on a train with a peppermint tea). I have no date to go on (I eat them instead). I am not the kind of girl to eat men for breakfast. I hope, perhaps, that one day I might be. (And aren’t thoughts funny little things?).

A woman on the tube receives a message from a friend saying “I hope you’re looking after yourself. I hope you’re eating enough xx”. She replies: “I am x”. “That’s what I always said, too” the friend responds, ditching the kisses. I feel sorrow for the woman which wells at the base of my heart (an empty place, tonight, it seems). I have received too many of the same texts; they never help. They are unanswerable because, as in this case, no matter what you say in the reply it falls on deaf ears. Mute. (An owl). I look at the woman, hard, through my tired end-of-the-working-week eyes (weighty with mascara and bags larger than the weekender at my feet): she is put together (though perhaps not, since the texts suggest otherwise), and she is wearing bright red mock-croc ankle boots with thick indigo wash jeans and a navy and white striped over-sized blazer. Trendy, middle-aged, stylish; a woman of the world in a way I aspire to be. In a way which defies ‘mutton dressed as lamb’ and falls into ‘strong personal style’. Definitive; clear. If only her life were so simple. (Her ring spells LOVE in gold italics around her middle finger: does she need the reminder? I wonder it vaguely, the thought dancing like a hesitant guest at a wedding. I conclude that I dislike the way it feels, so I dismiss it. The guest turns away from the dance floor and walks self-consciously back towards the bar. It is over-crowded. They walk towards the loo instead). Her blazer has stray grey hairs abseiling down its felted wool, blowing precariously in the synthetic weed-scented breeze of the Circle Line. (Her silver hair is shoulder-length, chopped with shaggy 60s bangs). I want to do something to help her – to make her feel better. I try to catch her eye as I get off at King’s Cross, but she is scouring for a seat in the train I am leaving behind. I like her blazer, I think. I would have told her: I like your blazer. I send it mentally, and hope she has a wonderful night. I hope my mental-mail arrives safely at her door: Package Successfully Delivered. Message Received and Understood. The only trouble is, they so rarely are (sorry Royal Mail).

Coconut matcha and a ginger shot. Empty tummies and bagels with red-hot hot sauce: drips. Dates on the train. My life. (Next week I will eat hummus and crisps exclusively. And perhaps some Parmesan. I love Parmesan). 

It feels weirdly like Christmas, and very very far from Christmas. Everyone is chatting on the train; they are friendlier up North. A baby rides his Mummy’s shoulders on the pavement opposite High St Kensington tube (his Daddy trundles along with the empty push chair resignedly). The baby screames “Ruuuuudolf the red nose reindeer – yipPEEE!”, bouncing and giggling as his mother throws him by the legs into the air to the beat of his tuneless tune. I smile up at them. (My own shoulders ache. Weary world). 

There are diamonds in my heart, and they glisten like iced snow in the morning sun. She tap-taps her heels along the street and I feel the blood from my blister seep gently into my sock.

20/02/26:

It is a great love story. She is beautiful, and it is raining. There is so much pain, unhidden, bare in his eyes. He kisses her and there are ghosts — there are always ghosts in our love stories, alive and dead, living and breathing, waking and sleeping. They are the former lovers and the ellipses which end the book, the credits at the end of the film and the billowing net curtain illuminated by lightening half way through. Love is war and war is all because of love. (There is an obvious English teacher in the row in front of me, a large glass of white wine on her little plastic table and a large chuckle in her throat at each literary quote Margot delivers on the Curzon screen). The two girls I am with have rivers of tears streaked down their pretty faces as the lights flick on and I turn to them with a unfazed grin. I wonder if love stories are felt more deeply when you are in love? (I open this to the floor for discussion, and the panel of my thoughts (or are they a collection of middle-aged, Chardonnay-ed, cardigan-ed women at Book Group?) chatter excitedly). This leaves Me – unaffected by the affliction which plagues their eyes, and Them – sobbing. (Though ghosts of the film haunt me – haunting, is how I would describe it, were I a critic – as I walk back in the splatters of rain and sick which line the pavement between Victoria and Pimlico on a Friday night). They cried softly, their emotions at odds with the intensity of the drama we had silently witnessed (bar the occasional slurp), their matching long blonde hair falling around sad faces. I am not in love; they (ostensibly) are. Do they replace Heathcliff with their lovers and Cathy with themselves? Am I heartless or simply loveless – without-heart or without-love (perhaps that would sound better in Greek)? I believe I have known love like it; I believe in its cosmos, its depth, its breathless endless Yorkshire-grey sky. There is a witchery in Wuthering Heights. It is a witchery I subscribe to and it is a witchery I believe. That much I know to be true. (The sirens sound in Pimlico. Cinema is art; I am a lover of the arts – and I despise myself for saying so). 

21/02/26:

Wuthering Heights feels like a late-night fever dream. Her pool of blood, the crudeness of love, the reality of humanity so rawly exhibited on an unreal screen. I sit now on the 36 bus to Porcester Road. There are two puppies vying for the bus’s general attention (a grey speckled English Setter and a liver-and-white Spaniel), and my green and white striped Stanley cup is tilting dangerously as I write. I am going to a Barre class. It is my first ever, and I feel oddly nervous, despite having been to lots of other exercise classes alone before. I am a ballerina. I am ensconced in a patchwork duvet-coat, and I have been invited to the Buckingham Palace Garden Party. I eat truffle crisps and Parmesan, and buy anchovies and pomegranate. Ginger shots on a empty stomach. That, that, is my London.

There are apricots and coffee half way across the world, and the kookaburra still sings from his gum tree. There are beach bars with old country music and passion fruit margaritas so spicy the chilli gets stuck in your teeth. Money seems far away – an abstract thing, meant for men (how wrong, I know, but they are men, and they are angry) in grey suits in large cities very far from the falling branch of the gum tree, from my half-apricots on the terrace (no stone), from the grains of sand on the circular table over which a tiny red and white ladybird picks (she scales mountains) silently. I am not one with the men in suits, and to the ladybird I am bigger than God. I feel like Audrey Hepburn in ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’, as though I should be strumming a yukelele and humming about rainbows — waiting round the bend. Unfortunately, I cannot sing. But I wear a headscarf and long, patchwork jorts and my hair is still a little damp from the shower (Go Blonder travel-size shampoo), and it seems to me, on a Thursday morning with an orange apricot and an almond-sweet coffee (white mug), that perhaps I am in my pot of gold. I am playing in it, bathing like a cherub, gurgling with pleasure as I slip and dunk my golden head under, deep delis the surface. (I am played with by a Roman goddess – Venus, Botticelli’s (or is that too obvious?) – and she delights in this burbling child who squeals and blows bubbles and splashes in a golden cauldron of Australia). I am far from concerns — untouchable in the hangover of yesterday’s heat, in the pres of tomorrow’s (we are in the ‘kick-ons’ of a hot day, and begin to get drowsy with it). I resolve to care less. Care Less. An ex-boyfriend once begged me to “let it go”. Well, here I am. I let it Go. 

It smells like heat and thunder and muggy humidity, the kind of languidity that flies swim around in and die. 

14/01/26:

Sydney is a city of coffee shops and avocado toast. I lie on my haunches on a white hotel towel in Bondi Beach, fighting wind and the recurring fear – dread – knowledge – that I’m going home to reality too soon. The sun is warm on my shoulders and bakers them like hot cakes in an oven, but the wind whips through my plaited hair and my arms raise goose pimples in protest. The sand is whiter than it is at home, the air brighter with crystal-like light; Bondi is vast, an eyebrow of the city, ash-brown and fawn-tanned and liquid, turquoise-blue sea. The birds sang all night outside the hotel room – noisy, unknown birds whose call was a siren on city wind, an alarm and a lullaby in the shadowed heat of the Australia summer night. Now I hear only the waves, a heaving ocean at my back as I sit on my haunches on my hotel-white towel, yellow-black-beige grains of endless billowing sand underneath me, in front of me, around me. Lucy is stretched a leopard-print swimming costume on my right, reading her Kindle through purple sunglasses and veiling herself from the sun with a navy Ralph Lauren polo hat (the white horse dances alone). It is becoming too bright to write, the sun reflecting in glaring clarity off my notebook – my white hotel towel – Bondi’s ceaseless sand. It grows pleasantly hotter (my shoulders are cakes crisping in the oven, golden-brown tops in danger of growing red); the hairs on my arms no longer raise in protest. They are stuck down with suncream, lathered on early in double-cream consistency. (The people are tanned, have tattoos, and carry surfboards. I drink coffee-foam Matcha and taste bitter grass and ice cream). We walk through the Botanical Gardens in the cool of 9PM and talk about love in the high of dirty martinis and red-light cabaret. The word – love – tastes to my parched, unknowing lips like lemon gin and olive brine. We do it dirty down under, Lucy says. Love is a world of possibility which is a world away from me. I lie on a crisp-white hotel towel on Bondi Beach; I am no longer on my haunches, but I have stretched my legs out behind me – one at a time – and now have them curled beneath my body, furiously wiggling to fight the pins and needles. Love tastes like olive brine and butter olives. It is tart like fresh lemon juice and bitter like limes. Sydney is full of people in activewear who carry surfboards and smoothies. The lifeguards tell people to move between the flags; the sand sticks in singular pearls to my dark brown nylon handbag; a seagull’s pale feather whips into my notebook. I catch it: stop it. (Turn and watch the surfers). Keep it, stick it in the scrapbook.

My feet are cracked. Great craters of stretched raw skin pulled taught – tight – between my toes. We walk for miles, watch ‘Gatsby’, drink Aperol Spritzes and dream big. The rain pours outside, burning thunder screaming an echo down the Sydney streets. In Sydney, there is no smell; only street-food and salted air. In Sydney, I eat a grilled squid and sip strawberry smoothies in Bondi. In Sydney, I run into university friend halfway (the full way?) across the world. Everywhere is concrete, skyscrapers, beach and sand and sea. Noise-soaring, echoing noise and first dates with straws in their cocktails. (The wine is orange, her top is blood red). A city of make-believe and black silk dresses and Betty‘s Burgers napkins on the floor. I fancy fay and flora and fairies. There are no big lights, no neon signs. Just taught skin and make-up on the towels.

15/01/26:

She has tears in her eyes and messages that she had food in her teeth. We laugh because it’s a full-circle moment, and I sit on the train to the airport watching a child spin round his suitcase and write a definitive list on my phone of all the açai places I have tried in Australia. (The security guard calls me darling, making me blush and smile all at once, and I message her about it because we are suddenly new to this long-distance thing, and it seems important that every second of my time in Australia is shared. Our link; our bond; our hotel room). It would be hard to explain such a friendship to someone who has never shared its intensity. A friendship founded like a relationship. Endless pavement conversations and brunch dates and rolling over to tell each other your dreams. (I dreamed vividly, in Australia). Endless chatter and time off and films under sheets spread with focaccia. Endless talking about boys and spicy margaritas and knowing that no one else will ever be a friend to a traveller across the world, will ever share the Sydney rain or the Melbourne wind or compare relationships (friends and lovers, friends to lovers, lovers to something very far from friends) wrapped in towels on the wind-tunnel benches of a cross-harbour ferry. (My thong flies out of my bag). 

She says the immortal line “three minutes till boarding”. I have never stood in line for so long. I pop a sleeping pill into my mouth and eye the boys on the plane. (Good looking, generally. Youthful and floppy haired. Of course they are; I’m going to England). Don’t cry for me, Australia. I’m already crying for you. 

I feel very settled, grounded. I feel grateful for that, because I feel like that is what Australia has given me. We went to Manly on a ferry and saw Paddy in Rushcutter’s Park. Watched ‘My Best Friend’s Wedding’ in the hotel room eating day-old focaccia and hummus on the bed. I miss Lucy: I have loved Australia, every second.

China Eastern Airlines. We bond with each other every time we are together. We see the world together every time we take off. There is no cold tap water in Shanghai, only fog and expensive cappuccinos from closed coffee shops. I sit and write. If there is nothing else to do, I will always simply sit and write. I am never alone; I travel with my pen, my fingers, my small form of art. I travel away from friends and towards family, and it is so foggy I cannot see my way home. But China Eastern Airways assures me we see the world together every time we take off. So I suppose the runway must have lights.

I leave half bananas in the fridge and I eat one with breakfast on a wood-decked terrace, drinking almond milk coffee on a day which promises to be 40C. The kookaburras sang all night. My father sends pictures on our Family WhatsApp of a Nativity scene and snow – the Christ child in a manger, the meadows thick with ice. My mother says Nutcrackers look out of place in the sunshine; I agree with her, but sit idly and watch a family on their way to the beach. They are carrying a blue-and-white cooler, parasol, a towelling bag. The next lot wear straw hats and carry surf boards. My banana skin is artfully exposing herself on the slats of the dark-wood table which is crusted with toast crumbs and bird poo. I swirl my dark coffee, and wonder whether to make another. There is a crow in the gum tree. The breeze is a whisper that will become a shout later — a full-on wind which, perhaps, will dilute the 40C day. I feel grounded — toes in sand, itching. I feel ready — dark coffee swirling, yellow ‘nana skins empty, glasses of water and the pale trim of heat which shrouds the horizon behind the turquoise sea. My legs are a little speckled by sunburn. I look like the inner flesh of a peach.

We are penguins on the beach all huddled together: matching skins worn for warmth and swimming fast from danger. We both go to eat the orange skins from our Aperols and laugh. Suck the sweet droplets of fizzy fruit flavoured juice off the sticky pulp. Grown-ups drink Aperol and children eat fruit. We are caught in the in between – the slip stream, the Rip – a place between adulthood and childhood, England and Australia, New Year and Life. It is a place of friendship and learning, feeling each other out slowly, softly like carrying a newborn baby or holding a butterfly by its wings, piecing together sections of a person’s background — their family, their homes, their upbringing and their favourite foods — in order to see them in the vivid, stark relief of standing in front of the picture of their past. It is only ever a skewed view – impacted by my own (the artist’s impressions), by the graffiti-like brush strokes of other people’s opinions (her mother’s occasional despairs, her brother’s ill-timed jibes). But the image, once painted, is very beautiful. A Person’s Life: Incomplete. Full of sea and songs and frozen yoghurt. She is the bare bones of a naked model in a sketchbook. The dust of a charcoal pen. I add lines each day. Today I will colour the sea.

I will remember Australia by Go Blonder shampoo and the stickiness of Factor 50 on my goose-pimpled limbs. It will forever be the promise of pasta for dinner and oysters on the beach; Aperols and pub gigs and Indie music which I sing loudly like a hippie from the 60s (where’s my Volkswagen Beetle van now?). Most of all, it will be that bare-flesh sand-filled rub between my big toe and the thong of my flip-flops. Raw, pink pain. Bubbling, blistering pain which I ignore because it feels in some earthy way very life-affirming. Very real. Very Aus.

The flies are lazy in Australia. They are drugged, doped by sleep and slumber and heat. Sleep-walkers of the air. They stick in the suncream.

It is the kind of day I wake up and feel optimistic.

Excitement is balled like a too-quickly swallowed drink in my throat, and my upper back prickles with heat in a way that feels like ten thousand of my lazy flies have suddenly revived – le révélé – and dance a Riverdance in tap shoes across my stretched plush skin. Grains of sand fill my flip-flops. Everything is blue and yellow and sticky and light. I smell nothing. The senses are all sight — the enormity of the sky and the incongruous modernity of the houses, the 70s mattress topper and the ping-pong table on the patio. There are patches of kangaroo-coloured dry heat on the lawn and the beige-grey screen door knocks gently in the wind (pebbles on the window of a forbidden lover). I relish the taste of my coffee; dark, swirling.

It is the kind of day I wake with optimism. The kind of day I know I will record. It is my father’s Christmas. The Nativity feels very far away.

A Longchamp full of sand (Birkins in the dust). The latter bears no resemblance to reality, but I like the way it sounds. We do suncream in front of the mirror and learn Terry’s lyrics in the floor. Lock, stock and hopscotch. I feel pink.

There is a certain smell in the warm-cool interior of a basement shed belonging, specifically, to grandparents. It is so far from must, so near to dust, so putrid yet soft (we use Eucalyptus oil laundry detergent). I am back in France, back in Heaven. There is an old boogie board propped against the far wall, and a washing machine with a lid instead of a door. (You need to turn the taps on to make the washing machine work; I forget, the first time, and pull out dry clothes which are stained and untidy, but smell sweet. Eucalyptus oil). I see no spiders. It is the cool interior of the tomb, buried beneath the stark heat of a house full of windows. 50 minute wash; Eucalyptus and cotton.

Big bad boy no underwear. Six-pack dads and baseball cap prams. Flip-flops thump thump on the dry street. The tarmac scorches. I still feel pink.