Another day, another cake. The boy turned, well, still three years younger than me on Monday. The sour cream chocolate cake was covered in sour cream icing and surrounded by plump, perfect raspberries on a cake stand the colour of a boy’s birthday.

We have a good time, we do. I thought the two of us hanging about around the house all day would lead to no work getting done ever, but in fact – well, I don’t know what he gets up to, but I’ve appeared fairly capable of getting things done when things need to get done. Dinner reservations at Moro? Done. Tickets to Rome? Done and done. Wait, no, I mean, I get work done too. Work! With money! It is possible.



Weekdays, we have midday lunch breaks at the kitchen table. Sometimes, after, we take walks in the ’hood. We find one-pound deals at the Berwick Street market – a pound for a bowl of aubergines, a pound for a bowl of tomatoes, a pound for a bowl of sweet tangerines. “They don’t look too smart,” the grocer said, about the little rounds of orange, each fitting into a closed palm, “but they taste luvly.” Truly.

“The Ber-wick Street market is great,” I was saying to Marc the other day, “and I am never buying fruit and veg at Tesco again.” “Why would I?” I said, “when I can just go to Ber-wick Street?” “Ber-wick Street,” I said, “who knew?” “It’s pronounced,” he said, “Berrick.”

The thing that I like, too, about the Berwick Street market, is that some thirty years ago my mum used to shop down the same dirty lane. I was fondling the goods at Borough Market one Saturday when she called on my mobile. “Oh!” she said, “you are at Borough Market! I used to do my grocery shopping there when I lived in London.” “I really doubt you shopped at Borough Market, Mowmy,” I said, “you didn’t have any money.” “Yah, Borough Market,” she said, “near Soho, a small, filthy street and all the vegetables were very cheap.” “I think, Mowmy,” I said, “you mean Berwick Street market.” Those were the days I was still pronouncing it Ber-wick. “Yah,” she said, “Ber-wick Street market.”

I mean, really. I don’t know that there’s any need for this weather – for this greyness and this coldness and this wetness. Less than two weeks ago – was it just less than two weeks ago? – we were whooping it up outside at the Battersea Power Station, our cries of glee and the Battersea chimneys all reaching for the beautiful blue.

(I was talking about the power station to John the other day, and I said, “And there’re those, um, tubes, you know?” “Chimneys?” he said, because he is both helpful and an architect. “Fine,” I said, “ ‘chimneys’, whatever – you and your technical vocabulary.”)



Less than two weeks ago, then, it was warm enough still that I was in a green dress and red kitten heels, and we were taking, me and Olive, the scenic route along the river to the Battersea Power Station. We saw the chimneys from the curve in Nine Elms Lane, and kept walking till our necks were craned and our faces were turned upwards, till the beast was before us and we marvelled as it loomed.

There were bikes at the entrance for touring the site – assorted sizes of bicycle in man, woman, small and smaller. “I mean,” I said, “come on,” I said, “this is gonna be great.” We strapped on our helmets and took to the wind, crowing as we whizzed past the visitors who’d decided to go on foot. We cycled left and right past the handsome brick exterior while my Jack Gomme bag swung from the handlebar.



The Battersea Power Station was decommissioned in 1983, then partially demolished for one of many redevelopment plans that never happened. Stuck in real-estate limbo, it languished, it dripped, it sat, it sighed. On a sunny Friday, its steely ribs enclosed a damp-smelling hollow. The daylight came in, weakly, through tar-stained windowpanes and, stronger, through broken glass. I’d heard about the Art Deco control room, the Modernist lines, but two weeks ago there were only grim puddles on concrete floors, and bare girders reaching to nowheres. There were spiderwebs on staircases.

It was – is – still stunning.



They’d set up installations by Chinese artists throughout the space – video art, mostly – a Chinese cowboy man singing a Chinese cowboy tune on telly and Cao Fei’s Dancer in the Dark–esque lightbulb-factory music video. Up a dimly lit staircase, we came upon one hundred thousand rotting apples. “Something smells nice,” I’d said, as we climbed the steps, for two weeks ago the rotting hadn’t really started yet, and then “Oh,” I said, as we turned the corner to find ourselves face-to-face with an organic wall in nuances of red and green. “I’m hungry,” I said, and helpfully the on-site Yauatcha tea house was a-waiting with delicate dim sums in green and orange and glowing white.



But that was a Friday ago, and a Friday later what we have is the rain practicing percussion on the skylight. The good thing about this weather is stews. We had Claudio and Madalena over to dinner the other night, for a hearty chicken tagine spiked with ginger and cinnamon. “I thought I was in a dream!” Claudio said, about being fresh from Italy and crashing at my place for the first couple of weeks. “Every night the dinners, and I found the job for a sommelier!” “London is great!” he said. “But then,” he said, and he remembered the illegally shared flat that leaked, and the boss who yelled, and he lowered his raised arms, fork in hand. “But then,” he said, “it started to rain.”

Last night by Hoxton Square the light through the Venetian glass lamps made the ceiling look like water shimmering. I’d ordered poorly: soup and risotto resemble each other too closely in texture. I felt like I was swimming in a bog of cream-coloured dinner by the end. The macchiato helped.

We were five at Hoxton Apprentice, and we’d come in from the cold. Tonia had on mustard heels and Claire was clothed in shades of blue. Eibhlin’s eyes sparkle. Olive was patient in a group of four girls in publishing.

According to the Brita water filter, it’s been just over a month since we got back from the luminous laze-about in the French summer, me and Olive. I keep saying I’m concentrating on the writing and the freelance proofreading, but I still devour the job pages in the Saturday Guardian for 9-to-5s, and I still get a buzz hearing the old industry gossip. I can’t tell if I actually still want to work in book publishing, or if it’s just like that faint low-grade buzz you feel when you get wind of an old lover.

Outside again, London in late October, we quick-stepped on rain-shiny tarmac to Curtain Road. Downstairs at Strongrooms, Tom had been ringing in his birthday since three in the afternoon. He was speaking very slowly. Damien had been ringing in his birthday since five in the afternoon. He was leaning in very close.

Mia showed up in a dress and boots. “The old housemate left them,” she said, “just left two huge bags of clothes before she went.” “That was nice!” I said. “No,” she said, “she’d also left so much other rubbish we had to take a day off to go to the dump.” “Less nice,” I said. “And,” Mia said, “she’d also written ‘cunt’ all over the walls.” “Oh,” I said, “hm.” We found the jukebox and fed it all our pound coins. Downstairs, in a basement bar off Old Street, the Strokes still feel good all over.

Judith introduced me to James, who was wild-haired and spitting. “He’s absolutely mad,” she said, “but we love him.” “We met when we were twelve,” James said. “I grabbed her bum.” He told me later I spoke really good English.

On Old Street after midnight, the girls and boys are jolly in the road. There was a guy in a large pink hat, and a girl in fat pigtails and platform boots. A girl with bangs and big eyes walked arm-in-arm with a ten o’clock shadow. The N55 came barrelling round the bend.

Today the Sunday paper and the rain.

Well,

I sure haven’t blogged in six thousand years. There was just...stuff. And...things. I don’t know! Time runs away from me! It’s like when you’re holding a piece of paper on a windy day, and the wind grabs it out of your hands, and you chase it down the street, and every time the piece of paper comes to rest, you think you have it, you take a large step and try to jump on it, but by the time you’ve landed the wind’s gone and blown it that few extra centimetres out of reach. Meanwhile the people sitting under the awning at the pavement café are watching you and snorting into their lattes.

Something lah, something. I understand I am supposedly unemployed and should be sitting around shaking my legs and blogging all day, but time is doing that funny elastic thing it does, where the less you have to do, the less time you have to do it. Nights, I am surprised tomorrow is nigh. “It’s Friday night!” I said to Sahil yesterday, and he said, “It’s Friday today?” “Oh – wait – what? – well, Thursday, whatever,” I said, and he said: “It’s always Friday to you freelancers.”

In lieu of a day job, I have been baking.



The tea party called for it, a couple of Sundays ago, with a sweet-sour plum tart and a mound of lemon slices, a raspberry pavlova with chocolate shavings raining down upon it, and a tin, because she is nice and knows things, of Emily’s chocolate-caramel slices. “I thought I might make a pavlova,” I’d said to CC during the week. “What will you do with the yolks?” she said, inquiring-like. “I –” I said, and she said, “Make lemon curd!!” “See,” I said, “I thought I might make a strawberry shortcake,” and she said: “Make lemon curd!!” There was lemon curd, hence, that Sunday morning, cooled on the windowsill, and sequestered in the fridge in a Le Parfait glass jar Sunday afternoon.

The sugar hit, fast, and we were curled up on the sofa or cross-legged on the carpet, me and Emily and Suz, Elaine and Nai and Marc and Olive, the gang re-ganged, and Gerry in on a surprise visit from Hong Kong. “Guess who’s in town?” I’d said to Suz, “aiyah, you will never guess lah.” “It is Gerry!” I’d announced, with exclamation points, then precised, with the name from those days when we wore the blue pinafores, and Gerry had the porcelain skin and the delicate fingers: “Little Gerry!” “That,” Marc said, after Gerry’d left, “is the smallest person I have ever seen.”

I was saying.

The sugar hit, fast, and we sprawled and shouted. Everything was funny, and we laughed till we were weak.



Other weekends, there were other things, like a lao jua Chinatown dinner Friday night to ring in my thirtieth, followed by a surprise shower of foil and glitter in the street. “What’s that?” I’d said, when I saw the sparkle fall from Olive’s palm. “C’est trop tard, les gars !” he shouted, and they gathered around, Nai and Emily and Marc and Dan, and flung celebration in the air.

We trooped upstairs to mooncakes and the moon, and champagne cold from the vegetable drawer. “I have to give you this before the mooncakes,” Nora said, and the bubble-wrap package was in the shape of a cake stand. “Ooh,” we said, and “aah”, for it was robin’s egg blue and curvy-edged, and we were girls in from the nippy air to the promise of cake.

So many presents upstairs!, including the full week’s haul from Japan and Singapore and Sydney, and Dan gave me a card with a drawing of dessert rats on it. The dessert rats, one of them was called Chérie Trifle. One of them was called Barbara Split. One of them, no, listen – listen – one of them was called Graham Brulée. “Sherene gave me a tea-scented candle, and a test tube of fancy chocolates, ya, a test tube, dunno lah, and eight White Rabbits,” I said, when I was on the phone with CC later. “Eight?” she said, and she was indignant. “Did she eat the rest of the bag?”

So the birthday party, and the mooncakes, and the moon bright and shiny, and champagne on our lips. And everything was good, and I went to bed, and in the morning Suz, before she ran out the door to volunteer to build houses for moorhen at the Natural History Museum, raised her arms and waggled her hands in the air and yelled “Happy Birthday!!” “Happy Birthday!!” I yelled back, and popped into the shower. Olive was sitting on the stairs when I came out, with the big weekend paper on his lap. “You are nice!” I said, and I probably had a towel on my head, and I was bustling, because I like a bustle, and – and looking back now, I know it was because he panicked and realised the bustle could bustle for hours – here Olive folded back the front section of the paper to reveal the bonanza of weekend supplements that come with. And here, well, here my eyes widened with confusion and questions, and a prickle of wondering tickled its way up my arms, for the first weekend supplement in the paper, it appeared, was a full-colour sheet titled, in pink, “The Stellou”, and which came with a photo of me, all “Lost in Translation” glamo-blurry, above the fold. “Olive !” I said, for sentences were no longer possible, and I said: “Comment ! Mais ! Olive !” before I collapsed: “C’est niiiice !!”

There’d been an international task force behind it all, I was to learn, but not before I read the notes in the Stellou – from CC in Sydney and Maud in Paris and Jazon in New York and Tom in Beirut and Panda not quite yet in Wellington, New Zealand – and not before I realised the horoscope from Emily Starwoman was about to lead me on a hearty traipse around town. “The cosmic stars have aligned to take you on a journey,” the horoscope read, “but you must look for the clues around you and follow them if you want to fulfil your true destiny.” Further down the page an ad for Bar Italia winked and beckoned.

I had on a polka-dot button-down and a pink silk skirt, I had on purple heels and I was running to the corner yelling “Come on!!” at Olive.

From one spot to another, then, from clue to hidden clue in the city sunny like it was part of the plan: Titiana outside on the pavement and Luca behind the big red Gaggia at Bar Italia; the grinning desk clerks in the cookbook section at Foyles – “I have to whisper a clue to you,” I said to the girl with the biggest grin, and she said “Okay!” so I leaned in and said, quietly, me and my voice both on the tips of our toes: “Stellou!” “Yes,” she said, and the grin widened, and she slid me a clue across the desktop; a smiley bespectacled stranger appearing out of nowhere at the Jazz Café; Hens on the phone from Singapore while the pelicans went on a Saturday swim in Saint James’s Park. The clues were everywhere, and I wanted them all.

Well, the clues were everywhere except behind the counter at the café at Foyles, for, misunderstanding a clue, I’d rushed up to the counterboy and said, almost shoutily, wild with the excitement of the chase: “Do you have any green eggs?” He was a student from a non-English-speaking country, and he said, “Do we have – ?” “Green eggs?” I said, and here my voice may have lowered itself just a notch. “I don’t – ” he said, while thick brows furrowed, and he turned to his foreign student colleague behind him. “Do we have any – ” he said, and turned back to me to allow me to dig my own hole. “Green,” I said to the other aproned counterboy, and my eyes may have darted aside, and I think I understood it was too late to back away slowly, and much more calmly I finished what I had begun: “eggs?” “No,” he said, and it was not followed by “Ha ha!” For “No,” he said, and nowhere behind him was a birthday dancing.

Oh! But I tell you! It was like everyone knew, the concrete on the city pavements came alive encouragingly behind my heels and pushed me on. There were four old folks stuffed on a park bench in Saint James’s, a man and a woman and a man and a woman in white hair and sensible coats, and it was as if they smiled and nodded in silent blessing as their heads followed us walking past left to right.

“I think this is the end,” Olive said when we sat down at Yauatcha, and the waitresses brought us a chocolate-tea cake and a blackberry cake. “What do you mean, you think?” I said, and I was happy to be sitting. “There were a thousand changes to the plan,” he said, “and I forget.” “Hm,” I said, and within the hour a text message came in from an unknown number. I might have screamed, a very small scream, when my phone vibrated on the tabletop. “Victor Bravo Come in!” the text read. “Await further instructions at 20.00 hrs. Over and out.”

Home was for lie-downs and a pasta dinner, and there was a tingle in my stomach at two minutes to eight. And then the baby in a text message, and I squinted at the screen on my phone, and I said to Olive, “I can’t make it out.” “Soho,” I said, reading, “circle?” “It’s not a circle,” he said, “it’s filled in.” “Some circles are filled in,” I said, “that doesn’t stop them being a circle.” But I tried again anyway: “Soho,” I said, to give myself a headstart, “doughnut?” “It’s not a doughnut,” he said, “doughnuts have holes.” “Some doughnuts don’t have holes,” I said, “some doughnuts are filled with strawberry jam, or chocolate, or – ” “Whatever,” he said, and he stirred the pasta sauce in the pan, “it’s not a doughnut.” It took a while, and some very precise prodding – “It’s a what-colour circle on a what-colour background?” Olive said – before I crowed: “Soho Japan!”

“Oh,” I said, “I would never have gotten it.” “That,” Olive said, because he is my boyfriend and not the baby’s boyfriend, “is because the baby drew a shitty circle.”

I put on my cowboy boots and we clumped up Tottenham Court Road and Charlotte Street till we got lost in the wilds of Fitzrovia. “We’re lost,” Olive said on the phone to HQ, “and it’s because I let the lady drive.” Marc read us the A to Z and we got there, finally, left on Riding House, left on Wells, and down the steps to the secret basement with the shiso mojitos.



Oh! I like you! Emily and Marc and Dan and Nai and Elaine; Suz, who built no houses for moorhen; Olive, who held my hand; and Nora, who was in the loo when I arrived because the glowering Japanese bartender had poured a drink on her head.

There was the retelling, of course, and the re-retelling, and more opening of more presents, and then it was very clear we were not underground enough to stay in the underground.

Outside, the night was young, and so were we.