Rain today. We took the curve at the house with the tree, we drove straight past the Plage de Rohanic with the sailboats lined up by the road. We are taking the highway for Toutes Directions. Paris this afternoon, and then the three o’clock train heading south. I have a spider bite on my finger, and sand in my shoes.

There is a thing they say here when there is a chance of blue, and it is “Regardez, la culotte de gendarme.” Look, they say, pointing at the patch of blue in the sky, a policeman’s underpants. The other day Claire, who keeps an eye out for a promise of gorgeousness, tried to convince us the clouds would clear. “Y’a la culotte de gendarme, là,” she said, and, following the line of her finger, we squinted into the sky. “Là,” Olive said, “c’est plutôt le string de gendarme.”

This weekend, however, the weather has been bliss for city visitors. There were jams and ciders and piggy bits to be had at the Saturday market in Penvénan, and then, back home, lunch at the blue table in the garden. We had a full house this weekend, sisters, cousins, all; Marie in a striped shirt, Laurence with her blond hair held in place with a pencil, Christophe who carried the baby on his shoulders, Samia laughing and pretty, Maïa reaching for the dandelions.



We took rue des Dunes down to the beach, we lounged on great flat rocks, we were sea lions in roses and stripes, the sun seeped into our skin and made us lazy. Claire had brought chocolate. Olive found a prawn, and then a one-armed crab. I lay till a cramp settled in my arm, and then I went to the water’s edge. The rocks there are raggier, craggier. The tide was coming in.

Sunday the picnic on the beach, by the bay of pebbles. We climbed the slippery slope to the top of the cordon of smooth stones. From the wrong side of the wall, the cordon looks like a cordon. From the top of the cordon, the stones slope down again on the other side to a white beach, to water blue and calm and clear. “Oh,” I said, and I said: “Wow.”

The picnic unfurled, from an old Picard surgelés bag: rillettes d’oie, pâté au poivre vert, oeufs dur et mayonnaise, machin de légumes, on and on, the baguettes, the pots of crème au chocolat, the yoghurts, the selection of Lindt. We cast no shadows; the sun was on our heads.



I was peering into a rock pool later, while Georges pointed out the shrimp, the skittering crabs, the shy fish. Georges knows things, he wears his glasses halfway down his nose, he fixes model boats on a rainy afternoon. He pried berniques off the rocks with a Swiss army knife to show me the gloopy, sucking beings inside. He overturned a large rock to find a delicate, many-armed anemone, green with purple points on the end. With a small stone, he gently cracked open the shell of a hermit crab (le bernard ermite, they call them, imagine!, Hermit Bernard) and then presented Bernard with a new home. “Regarde,” he said, and I squatted to watch the crab move in. One pincer, two, and the creature popped his head in, tight. He was probably already preparing afternoon tea for a hearty housewarming.

Nights, the stars are suspended in a champagne jelly sky. Yesterday, coming home from rowdy, crowdy dinner at Le Hangar, the swish neon sign at L’Albatros fizzed and spluttered into midnight. “Sept voitures à L’Albatros !” Olive said, marvelling. It was, after all, Friday night on the sea.

In fact at lunch there were sardines grilled on the grill outside, while the rain fell and fell and fell today. Mowmy rang this afternoon, I took the phone into the study so I could lie on the covered bench, and she said, “What have you been doing?” “Eating,” I said, and I could smell they were making coffee in the kitchen. I don’t remember now if I also told her there is dessert at every meal. Sometimes dessert is a square of Lindt, but sometimes dessert is a big blue bowl of sweet red fruits served with fresh cream from the Tuesday market at Tréguier. The other day, after dinner, there was the Breton delicacy called a kouign amann, which was layers of sweet crunchy business. “This is butter cooked in butter,” Georges said, “and then dusted with sugar.” I believe I said: “On y va.”

The butter, OH.

It is salty and somehow sweet at the same time. You put it on a bit of crusty baguette and you find you’ve forgotten the jam but it doesn’t matter. Claire, the other day, serving up a bowl of cauliflower and sliced potatoes, was telling us about cooking cauliflower in the microwave oven. Put the cauliflower in a plastic bag, she said, and poke holes in the bag. La la la, (I forget what exactly she said, because I have a mind like a sieve, a mind like a plastic bag with holes poked in it, anyway the point is), she said, and the cauliflower’s done. “And then you toss it in a pan with butter,” Georges said. “Well,” she said, “et puis je le rechauffe avec du beurre.”

So:

“Eating,” I said to Momwy, and she seemed to expect more. “Sometimes we walk,” I said, magnanimously, and she said, “You go jogging?” Clearly something wrong with the line. “It is raining anyway, Mowmy,” I said, reasonably, “we are not going to go walking anytime today.” “You are telling me it is going to rain all afternoon?” she said, and I said, “Yup.” “Eh,” she said, “it is just like London.”



Truly, it is just like London here, except not at all, and I don’t wake at half-past seven, alarm or no. It is quiet at night here, and dark so that the first night I opened my eyes to the nothing, and thought I had gone blind. There are no clocks anywhere. That first morning I slept till Claire put the music on, very loud, downstairs. We stumbled down to coffees, to juices, to fresh crêpes from the local boulangerie. It was just after one in the afternoon.



Just like not in London, we take the boat out onto the open blue on a nice day. Days like that, when the blue stretches out and out to kiss the horizon, you wonder how the raindrops fell all day from the leaves in the garden, nonstop, the day before. We sat, me and Claire, half-in, half-out of the sun on the flat rocks, there, through the pine trees, while the boys cut through the water with haughty sails.



Meanwhile, I’d brought all these books, of course, these heavy tomes I figured I’d otherwise fall asleep reading on the Tube, but instead I am working my way through the collection of Tintins at the house. Tonnerre ! I am learning to say, when something dastardly happens, or, if the something is more dastardly than normal, Tonnerre de tonnerre ! I have learned Sapristi ! From Le Lotus Bleu I have learned Mille milliards de samouraïs !

One afternoon it rained, in drizzles and in sheets, it rained all day as if we were fishermen’s wives with naught to do but sit at home and wait. We drove out to Paimpol, where the rain fell on the little port, on the local hotel looking out onto boats white and green and yellow. La vareuse, a hardy overshirt for seafaring folk.



We walk along the coastline, alternatively blue or grey or seaweed green. We balance on the craggy tips of black rocks, we slip on mossy stones. We discover clear, quiet rock pools of transparent shrimp. La vase, the sludgy, sandy mud that squelches beneath our feet. Le gué, a narrow, uneven path, a secret lane between two coasts, that reveals itself when the tide goes out.



Yesterday we walked back halfway from Plougrescant.

– funny, these small-town names: Gonver, where a muppet is mayor; Finistère, where everyone stealths along in trench coats and dark glasses; Buguélès, as if your every entrance is announced by scouts in shorts, in a small brass band –

I was saying.



Yesterday we walked back halfway from Plougrescant. We had just had coffees and crêpes of salted butter caramel on the terrace at Le Gouermel – oh, these crêpes, sweet and salty and crunchy and soft all at the same time, then Claire turned her back and licked her plate – we finished off our lunch, then we watched the tide slowly creeping in. Heading back towards Port Blanc, Georges dropped us off just after the little house and its bushes bursting with hydrangeas, and we ran down the hill till laughter threatened to make me lose my step. La hortensia, the great thick blooms on every street, in every house, it seems, in deep pink or lilac, in magenta, in blue.

We found a field growing artichokes, the sturdy stalks ending in an explosion of purple-green flower. The cows meandered up to us. They were white and curious. Me too, I am curious, but look where it gets me, for, trying to scale a grassy bank to reach the massive bales of hay, I planted my foot firmly in a prickly gathering of nettles. “Attention aux orties !” Olive said, but it was too late. “Ils piquent,” he said, just as my foot started to sting. “Mother!” I said. “Fucker!” I said, and I would have said more, and in French, had I remembered, at that moment, how. “Bordel de merde de... pute... de...,” I say, because I forget the order of things, even though I remember it ends, triumphantly: “A queue !”

But, so.

The artichokes, the cows, the nettles. We walked westwards till we came to the soft sand the colour of sand-coloured fish.



We eat like kings, like fisherman kings, like fisherkings. Le rouget, drizzled with olive oil and baked for seventeen minutes. Le maquereau, marinated overnight in muscadet, and popped in the oven with tomatoes and melting onions. Le lieu jaune, baked with pats of salty local butter. One night we had great fire-orange crabs, bigger than my head. Right now, I know, there are sardines in a brown casserole in the fridge. They have been marinating in lemon juice and salt since yesterday. The fisherwoman at the Port Blanc market has sad eyes and rubber boots. She is lean up and down, with a big laugh. Her hair, cropped close, is white-blond from the sun and the sea.



So the holidays are upon us. The house is stirring now. Hopes are high for a pot of Malo yoghurt and a grand dollop of confiture de fraises de Plougastel.

We arrived in Roscoff early Monday morning. We came off the boat and had my passport checked by a tubby man in a denim Tex Avery button-down. Just after seven in the morning on a Monday, Roscoff was still but for the seagulls calling in the wind. The harbourfront hotels were quiet; everyone at the Écume des Jours, it seemed, was asleep. The signs were still up from the weekend fête de l’oignon rosé, but there were no lone farmers wiping away stray tears, nary a papery onion skin being blown along in the breeze.

Olive found a boulangerie, and we sat, apple juice, water, two croissants and a weathered wooden bench, facing the water while his fever died down again. We found an open café later, one of two, by the small streets of the old town, just in time for morning coffees and a morning drizzle. “Il pleut,” I said, but the locals just smiled at each other and said, “C’est la Bretagne.”

Olive’s mum and stepfather came to get us shortly, by the roundabout and the friterie. There was fish soup and rouille for lunch in Locquirec, that first afternoon, and then I fell asleep in the car, as I do. When I woke up we were turning left, and left, and left again for home.

The day before we leave, Olive was burning up with a fever, the washing machine was leaking generous amounts of water onto the kitchen floor (give me back my £91.88, Mr Plumberman!), and I seemed to have pulled something in my bum. I was on the phone with Suz and I said, “It’s FINE,” and she said, “Say it again lah!” so I did: “It’s FINE.”

The bags are packed, I think, now, almost. The housesitter comes in minutes for the handover of keys. We will have roast chicken and zucchini sandwiches for the train, and a selection of Fortnum & Mason chocolates (reduced twelve pounds to three) for afterwards. We will have the Observer special edition food magazine. This time tomorrow I will be on the Brittany coast, which will probably be, I imagine, pretty fine.

The rain was like needles in North Finchley this morning - my last for some time.

Nothing like a last day, even if it’s not a total farewell, as I’ll continue to do freelance bits for this company here and there through the autumn. I’ve written the four-page pre-leaving memo, I’ve put all the folders and sub-folders and sub-sub-folders in order, I’m altogether feeling very accomplished - and yet... meh. It’s sad when a last day sort of fizzles out, sort of beigely blobs its way to the end. The last time I quit a job, we were out all night, all of us from the office. Schmio’d booked a table at this Swedish place in Chinatown; it was raining, hard; we sat and ate and laughed and reminisced about days past and days to come. The bill came, finally, and we rollicked some more while Dan had Schmio put it on the company Amex. I wasn’t sure what was happening next - there was some vague idea about grad school - but the night went on and on till we were tomorrow, and we had our arms around each other, me and Tom and Schmio and Jill, and the question never came up anyway.

I’m leaving this job today and I’m glad about it, because it was wrong for so many reasons - but it was a job and it paid the bills and it was something for the ol’ CV. This time, though, there’s a gnawing and an unspoken panic about what happens next - mostly because this time the vague idea of what comes next is accompanied by the sound of my visa expiring. The visa chase is one of my least favourite activities - no, wait, it’s my least favourite activity. It’s less of a favourite, even, than paying £91 to the plumber out of the stash I’d put away for vacation spending.

My friend Jon asked what I was going to do after the job was up, and I said that I was going to France for a month. The boy and I are going to Brittany, I told him, and then to the Côte d’Azur. And then Paris for a couple of weeks, because why not. “Clearly we are the most decadent unemployed people ever,” I emailed. “Yes,” Jon emailed back, “do as I do when the going gets tough - run away.”

I don’t know how much running is going to happen over the next month, but I believe there will be a lot of sitting, and reading, and trying not to be allergic to lobster for dinner. I have some laundry to do before we leave, and I have to prepare the house for houseguests. I need to make sure I have everyone’s address in my little red book for postcards. I need to pack. Pink skirt? Yes. Rose skirt? Yup. Sage plimsolls. Alain de Botton, Alessandro Baricco, Tahar Ben Jelloun. We leave Sunday.

When I come back in September, French Elle will have me believe, I need to “fais confiance au pilote automatique”. “Les pièces du puzzle se rassemblent,” their resident astrologer says. “Stabilisez vos pensées et vos sentiments,” he says, “l’époque s’y prête.” He says, Didier does, “vos souhaits pourraient bien être exaucés”.

It seems the sky has been white for days now, not even grey, but a blurry white, heavy, a sky of goose down, of soft obliteration.

Yesterday was the laziest of Sundays.

I woke and slept and woke and slept, and always there was the boy’s body next to mine. This is warm. This is new.

The bus took us southwards and eastwards towards London Bridge, where I was on plant-watering duty at Hens and John’s. Water in the herb box made the air smell of moist earth, of coriander, of green.



We moseyed, in the Tate Modern – its wide, concrete floors are made for this – we meandered. I peered between thick doors marked “No Entry”. I know where Cy Twombly’s Quattro Stagioni is, I like coming ’round the corner to it, his Autunno with its colours like wet leaves.

The rain came down, furious. The Harmonic Bridge piped in the rainsound, tribal drums echoing around the Turbine Hall. And then, just as suddenly, it passed, it had passed, and we ran for the bus under straggling raindrops.

There was room for us under the awning outside Bar Italia, me and Olive and Madalena and the strange, thin man in a grey suit muttering about Chinese people. “Chinese people in London,” he said, and he was alone with his glass of wine. “And they speak English,” he said, lowly, to no one. I surprised myself: I wanted to scream, I wanted to cry.

Claudio came and found us, later, too late for the parma ham and wild rocket pizza. He was polishing off a beer, like a boy who works Sundays, and was explaining about his section manager at his new job. “Not the boss,” he specified. “The supervisor, but less.” He brought his hand, palm down, a step lower. “The less visor,” he said. “The visor.” We were two boys and two girls laughing into Sunday evening.

It was eightish, I guess, and the cold was seeping in from the streets and settling in for the night. Claudio and Madalena ran for the bus up Charing Cross Road. The boy and I, we crossed the street where someone had tied a yellow raffia YOU AND ME into the metal railing.

I don’t know how it happened, but summer’s kissed us and left us in a blink of an eye. Sunday night there was pea and ham soup in a flame-orange pot the colour of the memory of the summer sun.

So secretive we were, so sly! “Not a word to Nai!” Dan said, in emails full of tricks and plans, and by Saturday morning I was on the phone with Emily, saying, “We are the MI5 of cake!” Nai turns thirty today, see, and we like Nai, and we like cake, so what better way to celebrate than to bring them both together in a streamer-strewn room, Saturday night at Number Twenty-two.

“If I have it in me,” I’d said, “maybe I will also make cupcakes!” and the also signalled the already-accounted-for hazelnut meringue tower of our chocolate cream dreams. “If,” I’d said to Marc and to Dan, and “If,” I’d said to Emily, but the voice in the back of my head knew better. The voice in the back of my head said, in a voice dusted with sugar crystals, “There is no if in cupcake”.



By the time Emily sent a mid-morning text to find out if I was awake, twelve cupcakes were lined up on the cooling rack, while the oven worked on another dozen. “It couldn’t be simpler to make cupcakes,” read the Nigella Lawson recipe online, and then it prescribed putting all the ingredients in a blender. Faced with the empty space in my cupboard where no blender sits, I said, “Oh, Nigella Lawson,” and reached for a wooden spoon. It is true, though – the cupcakes couldn’t have been simpler to make, and I wonder now why it has taken me so long to come ’round. I think I’d been thinking I couldn’t be bothered putting together so many small things, when clearly I should have been fêting the one porcelain mixing bowl from whence so many small things come. There were twelve, then there were twenty-four, then, okay, there were twenty-three. There was a lemon zesty cream cheese icing, afterwards, and there were sugar letters in blue. There were pink sprinkles all over, like it’s a party now.



What I want to know, though, is what the voice in Emily’s head was saying, because closing in on party time, Olive and I tumbled into Number Twenty-two from the evening chill to discover what you can do with four hundred grams of Nutella. Emily, she’d made a chocolate-hazelnut cake with a chocolate-finger swimming pool of green jelly water. Ludivine Sagnier wasn’t sunning by the side, but a miniature couple relaxed under cocktail umbrellas, belying the terror they’d experienced some short hours before. “I came downstairs after my shower,” Emily said, “and found the pool had melted.” “The people had drowned,” she said. “I screamed.” But she is handy, is the girl, and by the time party time closed in, the miniature couple had been revived and Blu-Tacked to the side. By the time party time closed in, they were reading summer bestsellers under paper parasols in red and blue.



So giggly we were, so fidgety! as party time closed in, and we stood in the dark with the candles lit. “5,” Dan texted, like the spy he is, and we blew out the candles, for if we hadn’t, Nai would have been greeted, in five minutes, by hunks of molten wax. Then we heard a rustle, and we scrambled into place. We relit the candles and held our breath. Nothing, then nothing, then nothing. “My face is itchy,” Emily said, and her hands were full of cake. She wrinkled her nose as if it had fingers. We blew out the candles again.

“Well,” I said, “this is fun and all,” and then we heard the front door open. “Sshh!” we said, “sshhh!”, and “sshhh!” again, like in the best comedy shows, and somewhere inside me I snorted. The light came on under the door. And the footsteps, and the footsteps, and still we waited. And then the click of the living room door opening, and Nai peered round the door frame. There was jubilation then, like balloons on the wind, and those of us who remained in control of ourselves yelled “Surprise!!!” Me, I think I fell back on “AAAAAA!!!” but you cannot tell me that is not surprising.



And then, my friends, and this is no surprise, then there was cake. There was cake and cake and ice cream and cake, and somewhere in there there was the birthday song. Nai charmed all the Spanish girls. Marc ate all the Pringles and then started on the shiny streamers. Elaine’s peach agar-agar revived us from our sugar stupor, but then Emily started sliding behind the chair again, and I was curled up on Dan’s red futon. It must have been near two in the morning by then, and it was time for kisses good-bye, and the cold outside.

The number ninety-one wasn’t long, and, back home, it still smelt of baking.

So fast the two weeks flew by, and then last night the Italian boarder kissed me goodbye, once, then twice, on the cheek. That first week he arrived, I reckoned he must have thought me some kind of barefoot contessa, what with someone always popping ’round for a bite, what with the impromptu dinners. I’d open up the Stephanie Alexander and he’d say, knowingly, “Ah.” “Ah,” he’d say, “the bible.” One night, that night there was the roast chicken, he said, “The bible,” and Marc bent gracefully, at the waist, to kiss the book. That first week, there was limoncello in pink espresso cups at the end of every meal. He knew some random words in English, Claudio did, and he would say, “A dash more?” tipping the limoncello bottle forth in a suggestive manner. “Just a dash?” he’d say, and we laughed, both of us, because what a word to know.

One morning, the morning of the berry picking, he said: “Cranberry.” “Mm?” I said, and was surprised, because what a word to know. “Small,” he said. “Yes,” I said. “Round,” he said. “Yes!” I said. “Blue,” he said. “No.”

“Can I learn English from you?” he asked Marc one night, and there were cheese and Luxury Crackers on the table. “Hey!” I said, indignantly, “What is this?!” and Marc said, “Yes, do not learn English from this girl.” “I have taught him plenty of useful things,” I said, “for example, ‘Go crazy’.” “Go crazy!” Claudio said, and gestured, with an open arm, towards the prosciutto.

Amidst the jolly dinners and coffees on the sidewalk, I thought I should tell him it wasn’t always like this, but then so fast that first week went by, and then my outdoors schedule kicked in, and then we barely saw each other. There were brief hello’s in the night before we retired to our rooms. It was probably for the best. One evening, late, he told me: “Last night I went to Liverpool. I met my friends, we ate the Indian. This morning” – and here he patted his stomach – “I was not a flower.”

Early on, his days were free, and he’d walk the city before coming back to the flat, spent. He sent me texts offering to run my errands. “If you want I do something to you,” he wrote, “have only to ask me.” Then he got a job – “Hurray!” we cheered, and raised our arms in the air with celebration – and will be serving and recommending wines soon in Kensington. “Medium red,” he said, the other night. “Nice body. Forest fruits. Finish of – ” and here he contemplated, “pepper.” I swirled the Tesco wine in my glass. “Bullshit!” he said, triumphant, and swigged a mouthful.

His last night here, he cooked me a carbonara. I stood and watched while he touched every cupboard handle, every drawer pull, with raw-bacon hands. Me and my neuroses both, we gritted our teeth.

Tonight he is gone, released into the grey city, but there is limoncello still in the fridge.

There were so many pictures, I couldn’t stop taking pictures because it was Saturday and the sun was out, and I had a red dress and a camera, and we were laughing, we were laughing and running and sitting and laughing some more. Sometimes the answer to a question was “Hee hee hee”, and Nai said, “Eh I ask you a question, you don’t just come and hee-hee-hee lah!”

I sent them the pictures, later, and I said, in my email: “I. Don't. Know. How. To. Blogit.” Because how do you blog we were doing nothing? We were doing nothing and it felt good, we had ice creams and did nothing and it was good?

Nai emailed back:

So there were chili crabs and there were laksa and curry chicken that were the cheat-your-money-kind, and when the queue got long, chili mussels but I think you needed to be angmo to get some. Ee-yur. There were so many Chinese things at the, eh, Singapore chili crab festival. They even DRESSED the young white boys in martial art costumes and even though one fell off the stage, because marc said he had only “tumbled” off the stage and landed on his feet, that was ok. Earlier someone had told us to lower our voices because he couldn't hear the tin-whistles. I mean COME ON. Come one day, people may actually PAY to hear my voice ok? Well, I know the boy will anyway. Later in the afternoon when it got warmer and the beers got warmer, there were two kawaii boys playing with their also kawaii-but-in-a-different-sort-of-way father whose tattoos marc couldn’t get out of his head. A teddy bear cone got eaten and then there were lamb chops much later.

Something lah something. he wrote, because he is helpful.

Hello, I wrote back, are you John Crace in disguise? And still I didn’t blog, because how to blog summer nights and summer days and the afternoon stretching out and out and out, and the sun never setting? In the summer, the words disappear the moment they are written, they float off as if you made a wish on the wind, and all you are left with is the smell of the sun on your arms.

Then Dan emailed:

We also. Could write. Bestselling crime suspense thriller. Staccato sentences. Japanese criminals in the east end. Chilli crabs from outta space.

...I need coffee, he wrote. They are helpful, these boys at Number Twenty-two.

By then I must have been on the slow train to Finchley, under grey skies heavy with Monday – five in the dark Monday morning the sky had broken open, I’d jumped awake and run upstairs to close the windows, I’d gone back back to bed, to the rain, the rain, the rain – and the smell of the sun and the summer days had been replaced by the smell of wet, of moss.

Saturday Suzzan thought it’d be a laugh to watch the changing of the guards at Buckingham Palace. Suzzan’s husband plays the trombone in the band, you see, which meant we were going to be groupies. I like a band, and it is a secret to no one that I je-regrette never having been in a marching band, so off we trotted, me and Suz and Charms and a 1.5-litre bottle of water. Foolish girls!, the gods must have mocked from their balcony seats, for there must have been six thousand other people there, all hot and sweaty and full of elbows and sticky smells. We walked around the Queen Victoria memorial while Suz tried to locate Grace on her mobile phone. “Grace,” we called, lacklusterly into the crowds, while I rued the day we didn’t put a GPS monitor on the girl.

We found her, finally, thanks to the sequined purple flower in electric blond hair, and it was a miracle we even spotted her, for, guard-wise, among the throngs, I could hardly see anything at all. While the drums thumped in the distance, I saw the back of an elderly gent in a green tweed jacket and a pageboy cap. He looked very nice, but he was not in the band. Later, I saw an American college footballer-type on the shoulders of another American college footballer-type, as they craned to catch a glimpse of the goings-on. I marvelled at their gymnastic abilities, but they were not in the band either. “This is great,” I said, and Suzzan distinguished it from “This is great!” The sneer, it makes the difference all the time.

The crowd four- or five-deep, I hadn’t a clue what was going on behind the palace gates – the guards could have been doing the can-can and I would have been blissfully unaware – when the Irish Guards started playing highlights from “The Phantom of the Opera”. “What is this!” I said, and it was clear to me that the formalities were over, I mean, COME ON. We were three IJ girls stuck in the hordes, me and Suz and Charms – we had lost Grace again by then – and it was probably around the bit when the band swelled with Christine asking Raoul to promise that all he says is true when a heavy-set, unshaven man turned to us and shushed us. “Oh!” we said, indignant-like, like birds a-flutter, like middle-aged aunts at tea with small cakes and large perms, and, had we had more wits about us, we may have said, “Eh you think you are Miss Jo Teo at morning assembly, is it?”

We met Christopher at the Wellington Barracks afterwards, and took the train, the whole gingang of us, me and Suz and Charms and Grace and Christopher, to the Tiger Beer Chilli Crab Festival at Brick Lane. The thing about chilli crab, you see, festival or no, is that you need a whole gingang, because, as girls who grew up in Singapore know, chilli crab is the kind of lao jua thing you do with a gingang.

You know what else girls who grew up in Singapore know? They know that there is not usually a woman in a cheongsam playing the erhu while you wait in line for chilli crabs, and they know there are not usually girls dancing with ribbons and boys fighting with fake swords as if they are in a budget Jackie Chan tribute film. They know that Tiger Beer, in Singapore, is not steeped in the inscrutable, sensual mystery of the Orient, and they definitely know that Tiger Beer, in Singapore, is not called hu jiu. Finally, they know, especially if they are IJ girls, that if you are throwing a chilli crab festival, you do not run out of crabs two hours into the thing.

Nai had said, a week earlier, that we should be in the queue the night before the big day. “Please lah,” I’d said, “Singaporeans are not going to run out of food.”

Shows how much girls who grew up in Singapore know.

We were in line for the chilli crabs when a girl came ’round and explained that they were, in fact, out of crabs, but that more crabs would be arriving shortly, and then there would be crabs for all. Like IJ girls who grew up in Singapore, we took advantage of the general grumbling and confusion to segue to the head of the queue for laksa and chicken curry.

Five pounds a plate for Hokkien prawn mee in a coconut broth or angmoh chicken in coconut milk! It was at about this point, I think, when I said, loudly, like a girl who grew up in Singapore: “Cheh! Cheat me my money!” I had been sending Nai real-time CNN updates via text message, and he wrote back: “Where is Violet Oon? Must complain.” I couldn’t see Violet Oon, though – I saw the erhu woman in her silverblue cheongsam, and I saw her sad-eyed band members, I saw the Oriental Tiger Beer girls in their satin halterneck dresses, and I saw the furrowed, sweaty brows of the crabless public, but there was no Violet Oon, advertised though she had been.

“This was clearly not organised by Singaporeans,” I said, because if the Tiger Beer Chilli Crab Festival had been organised by Singaporeans, or at least IJ girls who grew up in Singapore, there would have been (1), chilli crab and (b), ice kacang. Instead of the high-kicking kungfu boys on stage, there would have been Dick Lee and Kumar, I mean, COME ON, it’s not that hard, people. Do you know what Kumar would have said, if faced with this situation? Kumar would have said, he would have pushed his hair back on his head and he would have said: “Adooiiii!”

Suz, she has eagles for eyes, Suz saw the trays of crabs being carried in through the gates of the Vibe Bar play yard. We shrieked, then got back in the chilli crab queue. We were waiting, then, still, but at least, now that we knew the crabs were in the house, we were not waiting in vain. People came round with a tray of chilli prawns. “It’s for while you wait,” they said, and they ladled out freshly cooked treats from Violet Oon’s wok, sleeping prawns covered in fluid blankets of bright chilli sauce. Where the laksa and the chicken curry had failed ignominiously, the chilli prawns were equal parts sharp and sweet and hot as they should be. Violet Oon walked past, just then, looking exactly like in her photographs. “Um, Mrs Oon?” I said, and she heard nothing. “Auntie Violet!!” Suzzan said, and I said, “Eh you so familiar ah?” “Yah what,” Suz said, like the sage she is, “all aunties are called auntie!”

Violet Oon turned and looked at us, and she looked kind, like someone who might whip up chilli prawns on a whim on a Saturday afternoon. “Thank you for the prawns!” we said, me and Suz and Charms, like IJ girls who were well brought up in Singapore. “Yah,” I said, “you are the joy of this festival,” and she looked charmed to hear it.

The queue was inching forward, slowly, like crabs confused, and then Marc came, and then Nai and Dan, and still we were inching forward. I want to say the erhu playing was become tauter and tenser, but I think that would be lying.

And then there were crabs! Seven pounds’ worth (the currency, not the weight) of chilli crab fits into a regular-sized box from your Chinese take-out, and comes with your choice of white rice or white bread. We had been holding out for man tou, but after waiting an hour and some for chilli crab, you take whatever comes with. We sat indoors, in the dark cool of the Vibe Bar, and there was the dipping of bread into deep-orange pools of chilli gravy, the cracking of shells between teeth, the picking and digging and worrying into the open of tender crabby goodness. We couldn’t speak. Our lips were tingling. And then there was the crab graveyard lying messily between the beer bottles, and Nai handing ’round lavender-scented wet wipes.

We were sated and logy, and, slowly but surely, the jingang petered out. Soon it was just me and Nai and Marc and Dan, outdoors again at leaning picnic tables, and the hot afternoon cooling down at last. I took a puff of Marc’s clove cigarette and licked the sweet off my lips.



We tooled around and sauntered about ’round Spitalfields afterwards, me and Dan and Marc and Nai, like we had nowheres else to be but swinging from the vines in an urban jungle. We walked by the beach at the Old Truman Brewery, then Nai checked out the more-squalor-for-your-dollar Miss Sixty sample sale while the traffic guard shooed us off the street. On Hanbury Street, we admired the ukuleles out front at the Duke of Uke, then danced on the pavement outside Nudge. The record store still had its notice in the door about a lost elephant. “Size,” it says, “big.” Marc pointed out the boots hanging into the window at Absolute Vintage, and then we pushed ourselves westwards, plummeting into the deepening sun.

“I need ice cream,” Marc said, then, and we remembered the gelato stand at Pat Val, and the white tent covering like a giant bird wing. There was chocolate and mango and Lion Bar, and Nai won with chocolate-pistachio, the “Mozart”. I accidentally dropped my coin into a gelato bin and screamed, but the gelato man took it well. He had a moustache, like a gelato man will.



There were these kids, they were running and screaming and giggling, as kids will, two boys, two lions, two Godzillas, they ran and they put up tiny claws and said, “Rarr!!” and their father had tattoos up his arms. Everybody likes the giant bird-wing shade; there was a man lying on the bench under it, and shortly he raised himself up to drink from his pillow. I am not the Sphinx; he had been resting his head on an orange juice carton.

Us too, we were sprawled out on the wide benches under the bird wing, me and Marc and Dan and Nai, and it seemed like nothing could touch us, this was youth and Saturday and the kids were alright. I just had to make sure the wind wasn’t blowing up my skirt.

Friday we converged on the Tate, with the snaking queues for grilled sandwiches, with the cups of water selling at one pound a pop, we converged on the Tate, with hipsters as far as the eye could see. There were bands playing, Friday night at the Tate, and there were girls with pink hair, girls with blue hair, boys in red shirts, there were fishnet stockings and knee-length shorts. There was a man with triangled paper horns clipped to his head, and he turned out to be Famous. There was Agus, with a smile both shy and wide; there was Morgan, with new shoes; there was John, who spoke, ravishingly, about Anthony Powell and a dance to the music of time. We never knew what band was playing, Friday night at the Tate, but it was nice, and sometimes they were good enough to bop your head to. Dan was telling me about Cornwall, about seagulls with sunglasses. He was telling me about sailing, and about crewing for an elderly gent with unlimited means. He was telling me about the moonlight and Saint Malo.

It was just me and Nai, afterwards, and we walked down the Pimlico street to the water. “Look,” he said, pointing at a lit-up building across the river, and he sang: “Nung-nuh-nuh-nuh-nung nung-nung-nung nung-nuh-nuh-nuh-nung.” “Ya,” I said, “dunno,” so he had to act it out with his hands for a gun. “Pierce Brosnan lah!” he said, just like Pierce Brosnan would have done, looking down spirals unto spirals unto spirals. “Mmm,” I said, “yah. And then?” He made it so you could see the speedboat whizzing by the MI5 building lit up orangeyellow as if by the sheer power of boiled sweets.

Marc came running up to us like a secret secret agent out of the night, and then Nai made the call, and then we sat around and looked out for a man on a motorbike. Nai was fidgeting. “It’s like I’m seeing an old flame,” he said, and he was jiggling his knee.

There is background to this love story. Once upon a time, Nai lived in Pimlico, which hosts, it is said, the most perfect fried chicken from PFC. Do you know what PFC stands for? Say it with me: Perfect Fried Chicken. Nai’s happy days of ordering PFC take-out were put to an end when he moved out of their delivery zone, but Friday night, after the Tate, we were smack dab in the middle of the OK Corral.

You understand.

Friday night, after the Tate, while the police boats went left to right then right to left again on the water in front of the MI5 building, Nai made the call. I don’t know how the boy’d managed to get them to agree to deliver to a park bench on the bank of the Thames – maybe he’d sung the James Bond song – but he’d done it. “They were really into it!” he said, marvelling. “You could hear them flipping through the street directory!”

For a good many moments the street was clear of delivery men on motorbikes, though, and, closing in on ten o’clock, some of us were very hungry. And then, it seemed, all of a sudden, he was there, a white helmet and a white box on his motorcycle, and he may well have been in shining silver on a white horse, we were so gleeful to see him. Nai crossed the green to meet him while Marc and I hung back, discreet. They met under a streetlamp. They gave each other big, thumpy pats on the back. They were chatting, smiling. Our hearts swelled and glowed as if we were aging relatives at a Chinese betrothal.

“That was nice!” I said, when Nai sauntered back to us. “I think he was laughing at me,” Nai said. “I think he thought I was homeless.”

There were three boxes that said, each of them: HOT & TASTY. There were little Styrofoam containers of coleslaw and brown sauce. There was a giant bottle of Pepsi. It was some years since I’d had a Pepsi, and it was some years since I’d had fried chicken, so I said, as I reached for a chip, “This is gonna be great.” The first bite of chip tasted of nothing. The second, finishing bite tasted of thrice-used oil in a crusty deep-fryer, of a strangled, desperate fowl fighting its way out of your throat. “Oh,” I said, and then, swallowing, thinking: “Oh.”

The chicken, though, hats off to you, Nai, was, I mean, come on, perfect. Just salty enough, just greasy enough, and eaten, standing barefoot in the bald grass, with the Thames and the boats and the MI5. We licked our fingers, and then Marc squatted on his haunches and said: “Now I wanna vomit.” “Yah!” Nai said, “that’s part of the experience!” “I feel okay,” I said, and they said, “You need to eat one more piece.” I may have flinched.

We sat about, then, because what else can you do after fried chicken, and looked at the lights across the river. Friday night settled in around us. I had goosebumps on bare arms.

At work earlier this week, I thought: I’m just gonna see how many hours I have to be here before I can leave, just to see, really quickly, just to know. So I looked, and the answer was: eight. That was a sad day. Outside it was heavy with cold and grey, and inside we moped around, sloped around like moles, like wombats – Do moles mope? Do wombats slope? – I don’t know, but it’s dark where they are, and it was just like that, that day there were eight hours yet to get through before we burst out into the air, free and clear.

There is so much outside, is the thing, even when it is heavy and cold and grey, whereas inside we are going nowhere fast. Wednesday night at the Elk in the Woods – and truly outside it was cold and grey and drizzling pinpoints of icy rain – I was sitting in the booth with my back against the red wallpaper. The printed line drawings of lotus flowers reached up the wall and into the corners. The waiter in the striped jersey – he was tall. His hair fell over his eye – brought me a pineapple mojito, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Jennifer coming up Camden Passage. Jennifer, we hadn’t seen each other in six years, maybe, and we hugged, and we smiled, and then we couldn't stop talking. She is exactly the same as and exactly different from six years ago. This is Jennifer: One morning in Atlanta, Georgia, some six years ago, she introduced me to grits. One afternoon in Paris, France, some nine years ago, we stood outside her apartment with Melissa to watch, through the open window, Kate roasting a turkey in the kitchen. We were on Study-Abroad, it was Thanksgiving back in America, and Kate had smoked up the room. She was wearing goggles. Later that night, we had the turkey. A green bean casserole. Sweet potatoes, baked, with browned marshmallows on top. Pecan pie. It was my first big American feast – in Paris, France. Jennifer, she works with trees. She is going to open a restaurant in Asheville, North Carolina. There will be ice creams. I might write her menu. Jennifer, she has these eyes. She has this smile. We talk about our mothers. We talk about the world. We talk about art.

This morning in the office, everything is different, because, one, the bosses aren’t here yet, and because, (b), as Olive said last night, “C’est le week-end.” There are two boys who are working in the office this summer, one is the son of the boss, the other is the friend of the son of the boss, and they are boys in the best sense of the word – lanky indie boys who go to indie gigs, who are just out of uni, who eat massive sandwiches. They go out with girls in bands, and have crushes on girls whose art projects are strong and soft at the same time, like dreams. Sahil juggles. Jamie plays us music. They ballroom-dance, sometimes, in the middle of the room, and you don’t know if it’s Fred or Ginger being twirled in the rolly chair.



Truly, c’est le week-end. When I got home last night, Suzzan had left a message on my answerphone. “I have made the brownies,” she said.

“Donch bluff me,” I texted Nai in the middle of the afternoon yesterday, “I hear a rumour you are back in town today.” There was silence, and then there was silence, and then, some hours later, the reply: “I never bluff you,” he said. “I am behind 10,000 Arabs at Heathrow.”

There were calls about town, then, to Marc just back from Provence, and Nai just back from KL, and Marc had said, “May I suggest some kind of food- and drink-related carry-on,” so of course the next thing I knew I was saying, “I think we should come to my house and I will make a roast chicken, no?”

Stephanie Alexander, she knows things, and her roast chicken gets better every time I make it. I even got it to brown perfectly this time, no thanks to Stephanie Alexander. “Put the pat of butter inside the chicken,” Stephanie Alexander says; she doesn’t say “Rub down the chicken with butter”, but she should. Oh, my word: the chicken, the kitchen, Claudio kept mixing up the two, but it was understandable, because come nine o’clock Monday night, both were scented like buttery heaven and rosemary bliss. The blustery summer day had turned into a blustery summer night, and we were glad for oven heat and the sharp smell of Marc’s cigarette.

Nai’s head was swimming from jet lag and weariness, and, minutes in, he’d forgotten where we’d begun – “What?” he’d say in response, to anything, really, and then he say, again, “What?” Oh, how we like boys!, and how boys like football. “What country you are,” Claudio had said to Marc, and Marc had said, “I’m French.” “Ah,” Claudio had said, and he’d put his hands out in front of him, his palms facing out like innocence. “Ah,” he’d said, “I don’t like football.” This from the boy who, just the day before, was proudly telling me and Nora, upon his return from a game in the park with his new English-class classmates: “Italians, you know, we play football, we stop to – how you say – applaudire for the girls.” So boys like girls, but boys also like football; Juventus this and Fiorentina that, and they were all big grins and firm handshakes by the end of the night.

There were garlicky roast chicken leftovers in a sandwich today for lunch. “Roast chicken leftovers are better than roast chicken!” Suzzan e-mailed. “How come ah?” “Can’t talk,” I didn’t say, “eating.”