Main Characters

The photographer

He’s looking at her, but she’s not looking at him.

She sits on a flat stone bench in the corner of Golden Square, a sketchbook balanced in her lap.

You wouldn’t guess that they are only a stone’s throw from the thrumming billboards of Piccadilly Circus, the scene kids shrieking in chorus outside the Oxford Street Topshop.

Here, quiet. A pocket universe in the centre of Soho.

Though everyone else is enjoying the late-spring sun, which filters through the trees and glints off high windows, she sits in a patch of shade as if she alone exists in a different season.

He imagines that she lives like this: in opposition.

She’d look like an Old Hollywood actress, if it weren’t for the hoodie and the leather jacket and the thoroughly modern scowl.

The cable of a single headphone hangs from one of her ears.

Behind the other, she tucks a few strands of white-blond hair.

The hair, frazzled by bleach and just short enough to resist confinement, falls back over her face.

She tucks it away again. It falls again.

In her other hand is a pen. Or pencil. Her fingers are black with ink, or charcoal. He’s too far away to tell.

He plays with the zoom, the focus. His days are spent in an office, but everyone in this square wants to be someone else, and he wants to be a photographer.

Through this viewfinder, he can see his whole life laid out before him like developing photographs hanging from pegs on a line.

He allows himself to imagine her in one, her eyebrows darker than her hair, freckles dusting the bridge of her nose.

Then someone shouts, and the light in his imaginary darkroom flickers.

Two men in sleeveless fleeces slap each other on the back.

The girl stares silently towards the centre of the square.

A statue of some king or another. Covered in moss, its face eroded by the rain.

It could be anyone. But she isn’t looking at the statue. She’s looking at the man beneath it.

There’s something statuesque about him, too, something that invites looking.

He sits almost at floor level, on a low stone wall in front of the flowerbeds.

From the angle of his knees, it’s clear that he’s tall.

Broad-shouldered, too, with a tanned forehead over which falls a tangle of thick, dark hair.

His eyebrows are just as dark, just as heavy, and his eyes are almost black.

He wears a pair of black jeans and a band T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up.

He has tattoos on his arms, hints of more where the neckline of his T-shirt meets his chest. Beneath a pair of heavy black headphones, his face is serious.

His jaw is flexing. He’s eating a sandwich, thick and Italian, cured meat and sliced cheese squeezed between two towering slices of focaccia.

For every bite he takes, he tears off another and feeds it to his dog.

The small, scruffy creature is a mirror of its owner.

Bushy black eyebrows over intense eyes. It sits by his side and licks its wiry chops, staring from sandwich to owner with an anticipation that vibrates from its whiskers right down to its softly treading paws.

The photographer sweeps his viewfinder back to his subject, finds a hint of humour in that furrowed brow, a smirk in one corner of those pursed lips.

She’s enjoying the scene. So, she begins to draw, committing it to paper.

Once her sketch is done, she’ll approach the man with the dog, cause him to lower his headphones.

All that is to come. For now, the photographer watches her watching, one hand gliding across the page, the other tucking hair behind ear, hair behind ear.

He takes a breath. Then he takes a picture.