𝐓𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐈𝐬 𝐀 𝐋𝐨𝐰. ⁽⁽⁽ᵐᵃᵗᵗʸ ʰᵉᵃˡʸ⁾⁾⁾

Add a Second Light.

Track List:

Drive, Incubus

Summer Romance (Anti-Gravity Love Song), Incubus

~

Summer in London is less a season and more a state of mind, a reaction to a specific set of circumstances. The mercury in thermometers soars, the air grows heavy and humid. The city smells of hot tarmac and cut grass. Every group chat within the M25 demands attendance to beer gardens, BBQs, festivals and raves, its members summoned by pints of lager and cider and balmy evenings under forget-me-not blue skies. It's under this ritualistic madness that Ray finds herself taking a rare afternoon off work. While the group chat continues to proffer bribes and threats for her presence at one of many hidden pubs within the Square Mile, Ray is minded of a higher cause: Lydia's birthday. There's a few short days between the dinner party and her big event, and Ray is determined to make sure that Saturday evening is absolutely golden. Lydia deserves nothing less than total adoration, and while Saturday promises excess of drink, drugs, joy, and people, Ray considers it her duty to ensure that Lydia receives a cornucopia of excellent gifts.

So she treks from Battersea to Jarndyce, the rare book shop. She'd checked their stock ahead of time, eager to secure the perfect gift for one of her closest friends, and taken the gorgeous opportunity to wander the streets of Bloomsbury. Nearly every other building proudly displays a blue memorial plaque, listing the names of each cultural figure to live under its hallowed roof. As she wanders, Ray allows herself the childhood delight of a daydream, pushing away reminders and responsibility in favour of imagining herself a contemporary of Virgina Woolf, a female artist among the modernists. In her fantasy, her sketches have the dream-like quality of a John Singer Sargent watercolour, Salvador Dalí's surrealism, Frida Kahlo's use of symbols and folk imagery. She's lauded as a visionary, a true creative among peers, inspiring characters in novels and sketching Ezra Pound as a favour. For years, she told people her dream dinner guests were Vita Sackville-West and her literary paramour. But adulthood and the contrived, chaotic twists of her friends' love lives changed her mind. Now, she'd rather keep her dream dinner party guests to tried and true entertainers: Audrey Hepburn, say, or Freddy Mercury. The thought triggers a spiral of imagined dinner party guests, the pros and cons of their participation. Patroclus, she thinks, but God forbid you spill a drink on him in front of Achilles.

She records a rambling voice note about this thought, along with a series of rapid-fire questions and an update about a particularly generous American client, sending it to Lydia as she walks. The one thing about her personality that Blaise calls 'distinctly un-London' is her commitment to walking everywhere. Perhaps it came from childhood, from walking to and from school instead of getting the bus - a wise move for any teenager who considers themself low on friends and cash, inhabiting the position of persona non grata among their peers. If Lydia has ever questioned the coke-addled speed with which Ray speaks after meetings with that particular client, she's never mentioned it and Ray feels smugly satisfied that her CEO's little helper remains a secret between herself and the American boys. Ideally, she'd head straight home to Battersea, use her high to productively speed-clean the flat and weigh out her evening by sticking something stupid on Netflix as her comedown inches her towards sleep. She'd even planned an ordered-in feast of sushi to go along with her self-care evening, but Julia has messaged her at the last minute: COME TO MARIE WHITE STORE IT'S AN EMERGENCY!!!!!! Ray's not sure what, exactly, consists of an emergency for the daughter of a Michelin-star chef that can't be fixed by her parents, or why she in particular needs to go to a shop to solve it, but she answers the call nonetheless.