When Sebastian wakes up late the next morning, Lola is already gone. She has written a list of places he might want to visit: splendid green parks and botanical gardens, meandering canals and homes of literary notables.
But Niamh says: “You strike me as more of a Camden guy,” and so he takes his loaded Pentax uptown to capture Life. It is almost overwhelming, the deluge of punk, the sheer number of faces, piercings, cleavages, and navels. Small-town faces can be studied, known, captured in contours and wrinkles. These faces blur, transient, gone before they arrive. The city teems with unknowable lives, graffiti doodling under ancient bridges like ivy. He buys hot dumplings at a market. He sets up his tripod outside a hotel, shoots the people coming in and out as though they are all celebrities, as though they are all being caught in an act.
In the evening, he returns flushed and fulsome with market treats. A cut of soft, aged cheese, bottles of ale labeled with vivid samurai cartoons. It gives him great joy, and it’s the least he could offer. Niamh and Lola bustle back and forth over dinner.
“How was your day?” Niamh asks.
“Good,” he says. “I saw Trafalgar Square.”
“That big phallic column?”
“I saw it.”
“Every city has one,” says Lola.
“Damn patriarchy,” says Niamh.
Lola fills the pot with water, Niamh turns on the electric hob. Niamh is peeling carrots and Lola is chopping them. “Can I do anything?” he asks.
“You could put on some music,” Lola says.
“You could open a bottle of wine.”
The sun has set, and it’s dark inside the third-floor apartment. Sebastian finds the small, shitty portable speaker and sticks his phone into it and out comes the soulful, acoustic album that he’s had on repeat for the last week. He opens the wine and pours some glasses, which they clink, and then the girls return to their preparations—handing and washing and swaying slightly as Niamh sings the high harmonies despite not knowing the words, and the smell of softening, buttery onions fills the room. He listens to the swinging female rhythm of the two of them chattering, gossiping about people they knew at university, moaning about the mundane passage of their days, and wonders whether this was something she had needed. Whether his boyishness had taken up too much space. He has an urge to ask the kind of question you would ask a stranger:Was it hard for you, being the only girl? Was it hard we never saw it?But it isn’t worth complicating the happiness of a night like this.
“How’s Dad?” she asks. They are on the couch watching a British panel show, faces that she finds familiar now. They have drunk the samurai ale.
“The same.”
“Have you decided to stop hating Tillie yet?”
“She’s not so bad,” he admits.
“I never thought she was bad,” Lola says.
“You were around more.”
“Well, you’re around more now.”
“Only technically.”
“What, like in body rather than spirit?”
“Yes, I’m a zombie. I’m patient zero.” She laughs at this. “No, I just mean, I don’t see them much.”
“Well, you should fix that.”
“It would help if you were around. I’m too argumentative.”
On the panel show, one of the comedians is doing an impression of the Queen.
“Would you ever move here?” Lola asks. “I mean, obviously, I’d need to buy a bigger couch.”
He smiles. It’s the kind of thing he was hoping she would ask. “I don’t know. I’d need to find a British wife or something.”
“Niamh could help. Though I guess she isn’t technically British. European.”
Lola places a pillow on her lap, kicks a foot out against his thigh, loose tonight, happy. Her phone buzzes and she glances at it quickly before shoving it under her leg. She ate a lot of dinner, which he takes as a good sign, even if it was only soup.
