Tym is in town –

she arrived with Singapore Gaga, a book on soba and a bag of White Rabbits. “Pretend these are all wrapped up very nicely in a hamper,” she said, handing them over in a motley pile shiny with promise

– so we take buses and trains and we walk and we have sandwiches in the sun. At the Young Vic this afternoon, her soft-shelled crab and bacon sandwich had legs. It looked like it was trying to escape, claw by succulent, curling claw, from her grip.

She has met the mouse already –

I looked into her room this morning and all her bags were zipped as if she’d been planning to climb out the window at dawn with the London street map between her teeth. “I was reading in bed last night,” she said, “and out of the corner of my eye I saw a grey streak go by. Then I looked at my bags,” she said, “and I thought I should maybe close them up.”

– and I have taken her to see the deer and the rabbits and the goats in the park. “I like goats,” she said, as we paused by the enclosure. “There is something about their face,” she said, musing, and then she said, and the air was still, “goat face.”

We have sat around the breakfast table with cheeses and jams, and around the dinner table with mangoes and still-warm chocolate biscuits for dessert, and stories such as these: “When I was a kid,” she said the other night, “my mother used to make these sandwiches for us, she’d take a slice of grocery-store bread, cut it in half this way” – miming parallel to the table’s surface – “spread Miracle Whip on it, roll it up with a cocktail sausage inside, and put a toothpick through it.” “That was lunch!” she said, and then she said, “And she was a nurse!” She says these things, Tym does, and she makes me want a spam sandwich on white bread, or, when she talks about the coffeeshop uncles of Singapore, a porcelain cup of kopi, with the plastic spoonful of condensed milk in the bottom.



We are trying to entice the girl to London, if only for a year, if only to enroll in some Master’s programme on “cultural studies”, so we only take her to the best places. I direct her to turn right down alleys with garbage piled high on one side and the hum of air-conditioning units above us, I wave her onto crowded rush-hour buses that stall and vibrate in the dark shadows of dark bridges, I point her down narrow streets where ladies with a lot of eye make-up stand under hot bulbs and neon lights while the bass thumps out the doorway. This afternoon in Southwark, a helicopter hovered and droned above our heads. First we were talking like this, and then gradually we realised we were TALKING LIKE THIS. “Look,” I say, as we walk up St George’s Road, and you cannot deny it is true, “which tourist gets to see Elephant and Castle?”

To be fair, we were walking away from the disfigured child of urban planning that is Elephant and Castle, having made our way through its system of dim underground tunnels, and later, in the gardens up the street, I made her smell the deep pink roses, the light pink roses, the one perfect yellow rose. We went to the Charles Lamb tonight, because no list of best places is complete without it, and Olive had saved us the table in the centre of the room.

“What’s a posset?” I asked the bar boy, planning my dinner strategy by keeping an eye on the options for afters. “It is a cream-based dessert,” he said. “Done,” I said, “and done.”