We were talking on the phone, me and Emily, and it was maybe twenty minutes gone, and she said, “You know what we should do?” and I said, “Talk in person?” so then we were meeting at Tottenham Court Road and walking to the fair on Marylebone High Street. We had to pinky swear to not let each other go into Topshop or Urban Outfitters, and I knew trouble was nigh when Emily said, “I just want to show you the cushion I got yesterday.” “Just want to show, hey?” I said. “I have been brought down by much less than that.” But truly, because we had pinky sworn, and because we had only a Certain Amount of Money in our wallets, and because we knew we needed to have money left for Cake, we just hovered about outside the great glass display windows while Emily pointed: “And see that dress? And behind it? Those. Not the one with the purple flowers, but the other.”

We stopped only for mango and passionfruit juices, and lemon and lime juices, and then it was all systems go for the fair, because everyone likes a fair, and everyone likes a fair on a sunny Sunday afternoon. There were belly dancers and men smoking hookahs, and this seems about the right time to say that every time I see a hookah I think of the caterpillar in the Alice in Wonderland cartoon movie, the one who blows smoke signals out of his pipe, who says, haughty as a hookah-smoking caterpillar: “Who. are. you.”

There were belly dancers and hookah smokers, there were pearly kings and queens, there was a farmer with a milk stand and cups of milk with cream rising to the top. There were a lot of balloons, and the sky was blue as a backdrop to balloons. There were peonies in bloom everywhere, and then there was a flower stand selling only roses, and when I leaned in to smell it went straight to my head, the exhilarating rose smell, like I was reclining in rose-scented bathwater with roses floating on top. Emily bought a box of exotic mushrooms and I bought an exotic mushroom sandwich, partly because of the mushrooms and mostly because I saw the mushroom guy pan frying them in butter. There were enough mushrooms for up to me and the woman behind me, but no more mushrooms that that, and they had to turn people away, and I remembered when my little fambly was visiting in April and we went to Borough Market and there were just enough chorizo and rocket sandwiches for everyone in line up to the person just ahead of us. My cousin Mae Shan says that at Bee Cheng Hiang in Singapore, sometimes the queue for bah kwa is so long that the Bee Cheng Hiang man will come out and count how many people they have bah kwa for. The last lucky person in line gets to wear a plaque around his neck that says everyone might as well go home now. This sounds like the kind of thing that is accompanied by someone striking a great brass gong.

There were couples swing dancing, and there was a very portly, very sweaty man with the hips of a Lothario. He caressed his partner’s arm and she beamed and tossed her hair. There was no cheese juggler, as they said there was going to be, but there was a stilt walker in stripey pants who was spinning around a lamppost, who said, “Wheee!” at each revolution. The ends of his stilts were shod in a pair of toddlers’ wellies, which seemed grotesque somehow, and made me shudder. I looked away, but I could still hear him saying “Wheee!” in a dancing, high-pitched voice.

There were girls with drums, and then there were boys playing songs at the acoustic stage, and really they were boys, they can’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen, the ones sitting on the ground with the kettle drums, and the one in the pork pie hat who played bass, and the other one who played the clarinet, stopping only for a chocolate strawberry when the Rococo girl came by in orange batik like a hippie chocolate girl. One of the kettle drum boys was wearing a T-shirt that said Make Music Every Day and he said, “The next song is sort of about going down a river at four miles per hour,” and it was. The breeze kissed our shoulders, and the small girl sitting cross-legged in the front, she had had her face painted to look like a pink cat, and her hair was very long and curly.

“I’m wilting,” I said, “I need tea and cake,” so we walked down and left and down and left to the fine porcelain in the window at Yauatcha. It’s been two months Emily’s been talking about the Shanghai Lily—

and the other day she’d said, “What is Shanghai Lil?”, because you know how sometimes things get stuck in your head, and I said, “I dunno.” “The fastest gun in the East?” I’d said, but this morning she showed me the error of my ways—

It’s been two months Emily’s been talking about the Shanghai Lily, which is raspberries and lychees, and may I just say that this sounds like it might rival the Ispahan at Ladurée, which is raspberries and lychees and ROSE, the Ispahan tastes like dreams, I tell you, dreams like you are holding hands with a boy and it is summer and you are going to a picnic, so of course today we sat and looked at our menus, and there was no need to look at all. We closed our menus, and the waitress came, and she said, “There is no Shanghai Lily.” “There is no Shanghai Lily,” she said again, because I think we might have said, “The what-what?” and we were so surprised we said we needed some time alone.

We had a yuzu kura, then, which was dark chocolate with sweet and bitter, and strawberry thing that was white with pink stripes, and we balanced on our fingertips hot cups of orchid tea. “My fingers are burning and there is no Shanghai Lily,” I said. “This is exactly how I had not envisioned this.” And it sounds like I was complaining but really I was quite pleased to be there, because of Emily and because of tea for two, but also because this means we will have to go back another time.

I took a bath tonight, and I am reading a book I judged by its cover. It is How I Live Now, there is a daisy and a boy, I read till the bathwater was cold and still I was reading. I smell of mimosas.

I was telling Henny and Suz over dinner at the Hare Krishna restaurant—

I had emailed Hens: “You will fall over and laugh but it is true, we are going to a Hare Krishna restaurant,” and she’d emailed back: “I am on the floor.”

—we were at dinner and I said, “I am for the Italians, because of Bar Italia and because I like their slogan.” “Forza Azzurri,” I said, “and there is a big banner hanging across Frith Street saying so.” “The Italians are always falling down!” Suz said, and Henny said, “Ya! We want the Brazilians.” “Oh,” I said, and considered. “Okay lah, can!” I said, “for Seu Jorge.”

Still, when Saturday night rolls around and Italy’s playing the USA and Bar Italia’s just down the street, I mean, COME ON. I was at home, on the carpet, surrounded by the weekend paper, and the boy called, and I said, “Sais pas s’il faut que je sois à Bar Italia,” and then I heard, in the background, his sister say that the Italians had just kicked the ball into their own goal. “Je pense,” I said, “qu’il faut que je sois à Bar Italia.” “Do it,” he said.



I heard the cheering and the whistle-blowing, like a dream carried on the wind, from two blocks away, but then I came up to Frith and the heaving mass of humanity made it clear this was no hallucination. The street was packed to the corners, everyone necks craned to the television in the window. And the ole oles and I-ta-lia!s and the spirit fingers. And the boys from Bar Italia selling sandwiches from a silver platter held high.

The second half just beginning, I found Luca, quick, in blue and a cigarette. Even at the front of the crowd, we were twisting our necks to watch the game from behind the dried chillies hanging from the ceiling at Nino’s Paninos. There were the oooo’s and the aaaaa’s, the oohhhhh’s, and then it was all over, beer cans on the tarmac, and the boy on the phone saying, “La honte.”

I was walking home past Ed’s Diner and there were four boys sitting at the bar in rockabilly hairdo’s and primary-colour T-shirts. I was just about to take a picture when one of them turned and saw me, and I got shy.

Oh, but I hadn’t forgotten about the cupcakes, cupcake!

I just ran out of time, and then the week was upon me, and the idiot project with the one-day “critical” deadline that I skipped lunch hours and stayed late to finish, day after day, to meet this one-day critical deadline that moved, day after day, until a week after I was first given the project, and there it was, still, large, a beached whale of a project on my desk, and it occurred to me, not for the first time, that the phrase “critical deadline” might not mean anything to a boss who spells the word “intergrated”.

“I can’t talk about work anymore,” I’d said to the kids when they were over for dinner Thursday night, “because it just makes me live the aggravation all over again.” We were sitting at the table, and Sweden and Paraguay were on in the other room—just in case—and we had plates of baked trout, and shitake mushroom soba, and a hope-for-the-best broad bean salad with grilled asparagus and tomatoes, and Finchley seemed very far away.

The trout—do you know how to bake trout? Because me, not so much, but I’d figured I’d give it a go anyway, and if it didn’t work out then (a) there’d be shitake mushrooms and soba for all! and (b) that’d just get us to the cherry clafouti quicker. “So maybe 200-degrees-celsius?” I said, to John, maybe, or to no one in particular, and set the oven. And Emily laid the trout out on the foil, and we popped it in. “And maybe five minutes?” I said, to Nai, maybe, or to no one in particular, and Nai obligingly timed us. Some minutes later, Nai and I were sitting on the floor in front of the glowing oven door while I wrung my hands and wailed, “It’s not cooking!” Everyone came and crowded round, then, and Marc opened the door and peered inside, and said, “It’s hot, and it’s cooking.” “How long has it been in there?” he said, and I said, “Six minutes?” It is possible, but I am not sure if I’m projecting, that he snorted.

And I forget now how long it took altogether, which means the next time I do this I will have to go through the whole rigmarole, but let’s say something like seventeen minutes, with a minute—or until you get tired counting to sixty—under the broiler to make the skin crisp up, call me Nigella. Henny was in charge of the plating line—“Fish!” she’d call, or “Parsley!”—and then we were six around the table, hungry-like.

I discovered, a couple of weeks ago, that it is possible to have people over to dinner during the week—all it takes is leaving the office when I’m actually supposed to leave the office. I was so tired this week, so beat down by the little idiocies of the people who pay my salary, but then Thursday night there were the windows open at home, and Henny’s lilac and cream foxgloves in a vase by the sill; the summer night on the wing while the bubbly fizzed and giggled in our flutes. And we laughed, we beat on the table and laughed, and Nai was saying how Indonesian people describe falling: “Pa-da-pa-da-pa-da-pa” and we furrowed our brows and looked at him funny and laughed.

“I’m full,” Marc said later, and I said, “Did you eat a donut?”, for when I’d greeted Nai at the door, he’d had a grin and a box of Krispy Kremes. “No?” he said, and he couldn’t look me in the eye. “You had two slices of cake and a donut,” Emily said, and Marc smiled a sugar smile.

But, oh, dessert fiends—the cupcakes, which I hadn’t forgotten, and which, still, I haven’t forgotten. There is a dedicated space in my mind for cupcakes, don’t you worry, and said space reminded me, last Saturday, as I texted the crew: “Picnic today, Saint James’s Park”, that once upon a time I’d read about cupcakes, and I thought, “’Sabout time a girl made a cupcake.” “There will be cupcakes,” I texted, because sometimes all it takes is saying a thing to make it happen, but for extra security I also crossed my fingers I’d find a cupcake tin in time.

There were cupcakes, then, for—you see?—you just need to say it, even with the boy and I waking up late, and our lazy breakfast; after considering the too-pricey picnic gear at Cath Kidston before tooling down to Shaftesbury to the discount wholesale-retail kitchen place; after being in the slowest slow queue at Tesco’s for chocolate powder; after a stroll through Soho and a sushi train lunch; after dropping in to say hello to Sherene and the Italian watching the football over the largest beer glasses in the world; while the boy took a siesta downstairs, I put on the Mosquitos and the cupcakes came to life. Thank you, Saffron!, truly, if there is something you know, it is cupcakes.

Here is Saturday afternoon: We were in the park, me and Olive, on a big white tablecloth under a tree. There were ducks. Seung Yun rang. “We are near the lake,” I said. “By the Inn, under a tree,” I said, describing at least fifty other people, and I despaired a little. “I will come and get you,” I said. Jazon rang. “Come straight in on the right,” I said. “We are just past the group of naked men.” “Naked men,” he said, “I am writing it down.” Marc rang. “We are two-o’clock from the ICA,” I said. Marc rang again. “Yes,” I said, “two-o’clock.” When he and Emily finally showed up across the lawn, he said: “Those were terrible directions.” He said: “You are at least two-ten.” Dan rang. “I’m going to hand you over to Marc,” I said.

Jazon showed up though, easy as pie, and clearly it was the naked men that done it. When he opened his messenger bag to take out his camera and I saw what I saw, I said: “You brought me an US Weekly!” “Yes,” he said, and he put it in my hands, we like friends visiting from New York a lot, and we especially like Jazon a lot. US Weekly, here are my pals again, Lindsay and Britney and Jake, none of this Jordan business, this Peter Andre business, these footballers’ wives.

We lounged on one blanket and another and another, half in the sun and half out, and it was blue and green all around like summer. And Emily’d made these things, these filo pastry things, with tomatoes and cheese and things, and later, when I asked her to pass me a wheaten biscuit, she made me one with Boursin and tomato boobs. And the cupcakes, the cupcake part of my brain whispers—and it’s true, there were the cupcakes as well, dark chocolatey and orangey and gingery, and the geese had left the lake and were closing in on them, too. It was four o’clock, then five, and six, and seven, and on, and the sun was still up, and it was still summer.

“Footy and pims with the boys?” Nai’d texted me earlier, and I’d said “See how lah”, but it was clear, as we shook the grass off our blankets, that we were heading to meet him in Bayswater. We were leaving the park and Emily said, “I like your walk.” “My walk,” I said, and it was as much a think as a question. “Your walk,” she said, “you have a chewing-gum walk.” “A ch—” “Wriggly,” she said, and she swayed her hips.

At Panos’s, there was salt and pepper squid, and Four Seasons duck and char siu rice, and we made lemonade Pimm’s with strawberries in a stock pot on an unlit stove. We were many in a small room around a small television, and Panos was swearing in Greek, and I yelled at the screen: “Come on, blue-haired guy!” We wanted the Côte d’Ivoire to win, at least Jazon and I did, because I liked the orange costumes, and Jazon wanted to feel the goosebumps from football uniting a nation at war.

We were outside on the balcony afterwards, and it was night by now, cool, and we smelled like the sun. We were picking at leftover picnic cherries, and Emily was tying a knot in a cherry stem with her tongue, and I said, because sometimes I feel like bragging, “I can spit a cherry seed really far.” And I remembered that when I was at the zoo in the Jardin des Plantes the other day, with a cloud of candy floss larger than my head, that Olive had spit his cherry seed farther than mine—it was indisputable, the two seeds sitting in the dust—but I thought I would keep that on the DL.

Saturday night, we couldn’t see the arc of the cherry seed as it hurtled toward the ground, but we heard it hit the metallic blue bonnet of a parked car. We waited for the car alarm to ring out, but there were only our muffled laughs, and the moon a silent circle in the sky.

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.

Tired. Too much work at work, too much work post-work, and not a whole lot of sleep going around. I wake up and it’s too hot, I kick the covers off me, I look at the clock, and it’s two-thirty in the morning, or four, or six, and I’m tired still, the burning behind the eyes, the head heavy, and still sleep elusive, and already the day’s to-do list mechanically unravelling like a till receipt kachnk-kachnk-kachnk in my mind. Sometimes I wake up happy, and it’s because I was dreaming I was running, the road and the running and the wind, and little else.

There are still moments, though, for there are always moments. Today I took my packed lunch outside to the patch of lawn by the carpark, I sat on the cold concrete in the shade and leaned back against the brick wall, my legs from the knees down were in the sun, and the warmth spread up and good. Suz was on the phone, and there were cotton-ball fairies dancing every which way in the breeze.

Sunday I spread out a white tablecloth on the green in Saint James’s Park and the sun seeped in and I was lazy all over. A girl all curly and girly was too small for the stripey deck chair, and her stubby legs kick-kicked in the air while her father blew soap bubbles that carried secret messages over the daisies.

“We’ll go and eat fish in Brittany,” he says, and he says “We’ll spend a year in a cinema, watching all the films you haven’t yet seen,” and I say Okay because it’s a nice idea and because he’s nice and because of the cinema, and the cool, the dark, the glow of the big screen. I’ll tell you a secret, sometimes I turn around to look through the window of the projection room, I like to see the reels turning and I like to follow the ray of light towards the front, I like to see the bits of dust floating in its path. He says things to make me smile and in the back of my mind I think about the visa that expires in a matter of months, about the rules, the regulations, the stipulations. I smile and what comes out of my mouth is Okay because I don’t know what else I can say.

But there are moments, is the thing, and the thing is, I look in the mirror and my shoulders are brown already, summer’s upon us, and it’ll be skirts and dresses and picnics and kisses and reading in the sun for days on end.