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.