Perfect Day

woodlouse on his back towards the lichen-spattered stone where the ants lived. All the ants had jobs to do and places to go. Sasha wondered if they talked to each other in ant language, and whether some of them were friends and others didn’t like each other much. He looked down at the city which stretched as far as the eye could see and much further. The vastness of it was as amazing as the smallness of the world beside his foot which he stepped over carefully as he climbed back onto his magic carpet...

    London stretches out before them like a huge model village.
    ‘I always thought Sasha was a bit of a fraud,’ Alexander says.
    ‘Why?’ Kate asks.
    ‘He never really goes anywhere on his bloody carpet.’
    Kate turns her head sharply away from the view and looks at him.
    ‘He does,’ she protests. ‘He goes into his imagination. Sasha finds magic in everyday things.’
    Alexander’s eyes trail along the horizon. ‘Sasha!’ he repeats with contempt.
    ‘I always wondered why he had a girl’s name,’ Kate agrees.
    ‘It’s not a girl’s name. It’s the Russian diminutive of Alexander.’
    ‘Was your mother Russian?’
    ‘No, just pretentious.’
    He watches a plane drift slowly across the sky towards Heathrow.
    ‘I think my mother would have loved to call me Sasha, but I wouldn’t have it. From the earliest age, apparently, I would always correct people who tried to shorten my name. You know. In that very precise way that children do?’
    ‘Were you like Sasha?’ Kate wants to know.
    ‘Probably. I don’t really know any more where Sasha ends and I begin. Look,’ he says pointing, ‘can you see Big Ben? It’s just to the right of the Wheel.’
    Kate squints.
    ‘Oh yes! And look, over there, St Paul ’s! It’s a bit of a well kept secret, this, isn’t it?’ she says.
    ‘What?’
    ‘The view. I never knew there was somewhere you could see all of London ,’ she says. ‘Should have done, I suppose.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘The Twilight Barking, of course.’
    She links his arm excitedly. His instinct is to wriggle away from this little act of possession, but he likes the sensation of her arm squeezing his each time she spots another familiar landmark.
    ‘ Canary Wharf ! It’s so far away it looks like a shadow,’ she says.
    ‘Is it your favourite big view?’ Alexander asks.
    Kate considers the teasing question seriously.
    ‘I think it probably is now. Not because it’s more beautiful, but because it’s, like, infinite. You stand here and you know that London ’s so big, you couldn’t possibly ever come to the end of finding out different things about it...’
    He remembers watching her hurrying along in front of him down by the Thames yesterday, and the strange sense that their meeting had been foretold. Now he thinks that perhaps it was simply that her ideas about big and little views echoed across the years from his childhood. Perhaps the way Kate sees things was even formed by reading his mother’s books.
    ‘Why didn’t you tell me about your mother being a writer?’ Kate asks.
    Again, her thoughts seem to be running alongside his. ‘You didn’t ask,’ he says.
    ‘Oh I hate it when people do that,’ Kate says, impatiently. ‘Making something that’s their fault into your responsibility!’
    Her eyes flash with annoyance. To see her as a product of his mother’s writing would be a perverse denial of her identity. A hundred thousand children read his mother’s books, but no-one is like Kate.
    ‘Sorry,’ he says.
    ‘It’s not the sort of thing that just crops up, is it?’ Kate argues.
    ‘I’m sorry.’
    ‘You let me bang on about being a writer and now I feel a right idiot.’
    ‘Why shouldn’t you write?’
    ‘It’s easy enough for you to say...’
    Another plane floats slowly, silently westward.
    ‘My mother used to get cross with people who said that they thought they had a book in them. “The point is not whether you’ve got a book in you,” she said, “but whether you can get it out!” You’re only a writer if you can write.’
    Kate thinks about that for a few minutes.
    ‘Where did she get her ideas?’ she asks.
    It’s one of the questions the brighter children would ask when Joan came in to give a talk to his primary school. He hated the days she visited when his teacher would be uncharacteristically nice to him and speak in a slightly louder voice than usual. However much he asked Joan not to mention his name, she always did, and he would