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I sit beneath the shadiest tree in Peckham Rye Park

Oak canopy reaching twenty metres in diameter

Full leaf boughs ornamented with noisy parakeets

I'm dressed all in black despite the sun

Across the lawn three generations of friends and family chatter in contact fusion, barbecuing beef and catfish in sticky brown glazes

Everyone marinating together in the fragrant smoke

I watch as X____ stretches her arms around the two-hundred-year-thick trunk, enveloping as much of the knotted stem as she can

Blackberry lips reflected in the fridge-freezer section. Our something at first sight superimposed over a packet of tofu. A dozen oranges tumbling down the market aisle. A tributary of citrus orbs confluxing with a delicate phalanx of phalanges. The performance of her femur and pelvis in orchestration with these appendages. Bending and scooping. Flexing. Extending. Rotating. The fruits passed in sleight from hand to hand.

Heat ripples from the dewy skirts around the burst of ornamental beds

Azalea, magnolia, rhododendron

***

I sit in the recovery lounge and, if you've seen one, you've seen them all

The same clinical sterility with an underfunded NHS grubbiness collecting in the cracks and crevices

The click slurp of antibacterial gel dispensers

The paper half-cup of cooling vending machine coffee

X____ sitting next to me with the woozy indifference of general anaesthetic wearing off

Waiting for a taxi because nobody in the city owns a car and certainly not us

To pass the time X____ tells me everything her doctor told her about idiopathic disease

Which is, “any disease with an unknown cause or mechanism of apparent spontaneous origin”

click

I peer down into that still black coffee pool

slurp

***

I read about how oak trees hollow themselves out as they grow, to conserve energy and stabilise their massive weight

How populations of oak stag beetle are declining globally due to the loss and fragmentation of their habitat

“Even in cases where oak woodlands remain they are often broken up into smaller, isolated fragments. This fragmentation makes it hard for beetle populations to connect and breed, reducing genetic diversity and species resilience”.

I lay back on the grass and indulge my pareidolia in the clouds, daydreaming about leaving the city

Clouds as forests, as lakes, as mountains

***

Down to underwear we give the bedroom a chance, suffering the viscous humidity of an attic conversion in a Victorian housing stock

Draughty rooms somehow mouldering year around

After half an hour we're voiding an over-cautious contract and making our escape through a hallway window, climbing onto the flat extension of X____'s partitioned townhouse

We take turns flicking lit matches off the roof and counting the seconds before they blink out, picturing a rural night sky dark enough to watch trailing rock and dust ignite in the atmosphere

Kids shoot a grime video in the stairwell of a newbuild up the street, our neighbour sits in the gutter playing guitar

He croaks folk songs in familiar Brazilian Portuguese and we decide he misses some part of something he used to call home

While writing this I have the not-entirely-unpleasant sense memory of melted tarmac fumes

Me and X____ talk until late but I can't remember a single thing we talk about, and looking back I can only imagine the things we might have talked about, because I've realised the whole point of memory is the forgetting

In a photograph I find on a usb stick our faces are obscured by digital artefacts, conjured by a phone camera struggling in low-light

I remember that, “technology has made us all ghosts”

The night curls up around us like a ribbon, the roof floating on updrafts, on steam

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