mind a very opal, age likewise

I’m holed up in Lily and Denise’s new flat. There’s a Rousseau poster up, and beneath it a zebra-print armchair and a spiny plant, as if the jungle were climbing through a chink in the wall, filling out and becoming realer as it spreads across the room. This new joint is in West Hampstead. When I got to London a year and a half ago Lily was living in Hackney. She used to have a crack den down the road from her house—now she has a gardening centre. If she continues this meteoric rise she’ll be installed in a Richmond mansion by my next visit. I’ve spent the morning reading The Edible Woman, which is pretty good but shows its seams—I can see how Atwood built it and why, and it gives me that twinge of mingled satisfaction and disappointment of discovering how a magic trick is done. Still, she captures something of being in your twenties, and I like to be reminded of that fraternity that spans the ages and makes all 27-year-olds a bit like all others, whatever decade or century they are being 27 in. I’m being it now, and I don’t mind a bit. If you’ll allow me to go a bit synesthetic for a moment, it’s peacock blue (the two) and bright yellow (the seven), with the factor three pulsing through, for some reason, in shades of grass green. It’s an appealling number, and it’s mine for a year.

I’ve been here over a week, but it doesn’t feel like it because I haven’t had to make my own fun—people have come to me instead, bearing hugs (thank youse orl). I went to the Heath with Nik one day, and we talked writing, and I went another day with Pete, and he made me drink too much, and I thought I was going to have to lie down in a ball on the train platform on the way home, but it turned out alright. We were talking about the time when I first got here as an epoch past. Returning to London is like getting back to Narnia. I feel like no time has passed and I expect everything to be the same, but I find everyone’s living in new digs and working new jobs and getting married. What a bustle. I like to make appointments and meet people and do things because when I sit around too long I swear I can feel my bank account depleting with that alarming London rapidity, and my body itself feels like it’s dissolving along with the cash.

It’s worth it, because Lillian is here. Maybe it’s the mountain air (she’s just back from an alpine holiday in a relative’s summer house) or maybe it’s love (she and Denise are smitten enough to voluntarily spend a Sunday in Ikea together, and that’s saying something)—but anyway, she’s just gob-smackingly beautiful. Her hair sort of floats around in great girly swathes, like she’s constantly underwater. We’ll be down the pub, all engrossed in serious discussion, and suddenly it’ll strike me again, and I’ll be like, gaaaaaah... that’s my fwend. I’m so so so so so soooooo so proud of her, of how she’s been living in London for two whole years without getting eaten by a rat or turning whiney and brittle or giving up on the things she wants. And I’m grateful for this: that we can always untangle the other’s thoughts and see them in their perfect completeness, just as if we weren’t mad, neurotic, patchwork-brained things. I was getting depressed for a bit there, what with having nothing to do and no settled work commitments ahead of me. It came as a surprise because I haven’t seen hide nor hair of it since I’ve been abroad. I’ve done incandescent rage, fist-gnawing boredom and lingering sadness, but not this. It rustles around in its dusty skirts, clicking closed all the doors in my mind. Lily nods thoughtfully, says the right thing, and sets about opening them all again. It’s a marvellous arrangement.

You’ll excuse me if I go and check my bank balance for my summer pay cheque. This work --> get paid thing is also a marvellous arrangement. If only one didn’t have to keep on re-arranging it all the time. I have a plan. I shall find a lovely school that offers a generous salary and paid holidays, and I’ll fit the premises with wings and a big propeller so I can just move it around the world as the mood takes me. See if I don’t.