Thursday night Elaine brought roses, then Nora brought sunflowers, and Dan was looking very tanned, and Walter was wearing a football jersey that said both “Dilmah” and “Trendy”. “We wait for the bus, we wait for the bus,” Nora had texted me to advance-explain her lateness, and I texted back, “I wait for the chicken”. By the time she and Walter came by, though, the chicken was ready for the eating, as was the garlic bread, and the clean, green summer salad, green with asparagus, green with watercress, green with green, broad beans. Summer is green this year, by which I mean my new green dress, and the green lawn of Saint James’s Park, and the green bugs that come in open windows late at night.

We were clearing the table Thursday night and I said, “Bugs! There are bugs!” and there they were, five of them, five with fine legs, like miniature grasshoppers, but without the violins. We peered at the green bugs on the cupboard door, and Dan said: “If it makes you feel any better, they aren’t dangerous.” “Oh yay,” I said, “I just need them to not be the kind of bugs that attack you when you sleep.” And we let the bugs be, green.

Friday we drank cider on the street outside the French house, me and Emily and Marc and Nai, and Emily was hottt in her fuck-me shoes, and Marc had had his hair cut. They had had no dim sum in Hong Kong, they said, and the mainland Chinese men had afro-mullets. And I didn’t know it then, for I have not X-ray eyes, but Marc and Emily had a giant bag of Aji Ichiban candies for me: cherry blossom gummies, and chocolate ingots, and red bean milk sweets, and sesame candies. There was a gold pig, too, and I know he is hiding something inside him, I just don’t know what yet.

Outside the French House, then, there was me and Emily and Marc and Nai, and Nai was rosy already from his quarter-pint of cider; there was us and there was Soho on a Friday evening, with the sky still an early June blue: there was the girl in the seventies towelling running shorts, there was the guy in the fedora, there was the guy with the outline of a necktie painted on a ratty T-shirt. We stacked our glasses—we were done with our ciders by then—by a sneakered foot and went past the Americans in the Deutschland football jerseys, I was in purple shoes and a Danger Dangerfield bag, we went past the Deutschland jerseys and we asked the score, then we turned right, off Wardour, for the C&R Restaurant. May I just say? About the C&R Restaurant? That the C stands for Café, and the R stands for Restaurant. Yes! We luv it.

And a propos of nothing, maybe a propos of C&R Restaurant serving up Singaporean and Malaysian cuisine, or maybe a propos of Singaporeans saying “ATM machine” and “IC card”, this reminds me that at dinner the other night, Elaine said: “And in Singapore we say it ‘See-rye-ous?’.” “Who say see-rye-ous?” Nai said, and Elaine said, “See-rye-ous what!” “Maybe it’s just a girls’ school thing,” I said, and Nai said, “Yah! You in the street anyhow say ‘see-rye-ous’ people laugh at you ah!”

Downstairs at the C&R Restaurant, dinner deliberations were taking place. “Chai tow kway?” “Ya!” “Hokkien mee?” “Ya!!” “What else?” “Kangkong belacan?” “Can!” People say Americans have a can-do attitude, but there is nothing like the “Can!” from a Singaporean’s mouth. “Can!” means “Order whatever you want from the menu, I will support your choice, and it will be good”; it means “Yes, me too, I like the kangkong belacan, and understand that it will not preclude the tahu goreng.”

When the waitress came by, Nai recited our list, and then said: “And a chendol.” “You’re having a chendol??” I said, marvelling at his last-minute hat trick. “Ya!” he said. He smiled, and he had his shoes off and his feet on the chair. I leaned over to the waitress, then, and said, quiet-like: “Um. Can we have another chendol, please?”

So many fun and games!, and the weekend just begun. Olive came in on the 8:54 train—

and Marc had said, at dinner, “I have an idea, how about we all go to the station to get Olive—”

“That’s nice!” I said.

“—except we don’t show our faces,” he said, “but we send him text messages telling him we’re watching him, and sending him around the city.”

“Oh,” I said, because I had not been expecting this, and because now I was thinking about it.

“We will control him by text,” Marc said, and I said: “I...can’t...say...no.”

—Olive came in on the 8:54 train, and there was just me waiting, and I showed my face because I couldn’t help it, I was very pleased to see him, and I expect I had a very pleased face. We crossed the Waterloo Bridge, and his bag read “Les Kidnappeurs”, and the evening was still light enough that you saw the city was beaming, too.