“Hey Ben, dw. I had a nice time and you didn’t really embarrass yourself. I’m at the opening at the Otter tonight but maybe tomorrow?” Then I send, “Anju seemed really nice btw.”

“Didn’t really embarrass myself? That means I did a bit right?”

“Lol. Maybe a bit,” I reply.

A cyclist swerves around me. He tuts. I’m on the embankment again, walking against the wind. It’s raining. I try to hold my phone at an angle so the screen doesn’t get wet. “Text later,” I type. “Am out. Rain.” Then I lock my phone.

While I walk, I keep an eye on the riverbank, to see if I can spot anything I might be able to eat. I’m getting toward the end of the duck blood now. It’s the worst part of a meal, the part right before the end, during which you can sense the animal’s last few moments of life: for a pig, this usually means waiting in a queue of other pigs, listening to the sound of those farther up the line being shot with a bolt gun, realizing that it shares the same fate, and squealing and trying, in vain, to escape; for the duck, however, this means its last few flights over the Thames, feeling not free, but a kind of sense of impending nothingness and trying to escape it. As I walk, I feel not only my own hunger, but the hunger of the duck that spent its last few days with nothing to eat.

I watch the sand. If I do spot anything, I wonder what I’ll do. I’m on my way to the gallery opening, so I wouldn’t be able to take it with me. Perhaps I’ll just eat whatever it is wherever I find it. It’s London; I don’t think anyone would do anything about it. Once, from a bus, I saw a guy who looked completely normal and who was wearing a suit jump on a sick-looking pigeon, and it popped, and everyone who saw screamed, but the guy just carried on walking and no one did anything. The river seems quite high today, so the patches of sand I see are narrow, with barely anything on them—just bits of rubbish and a couple of bones that look like they’ve already been sucked dry by the current. A couple of taxi boats bob past, going up and down on the waves. There’s a guy sitting on a patch of grass with a can propped up between his feet. He looks at me and smiles, then puts two fingers in front of his mouth and waggles his tongue between them. “Dyke,” he says under his breath as I pass.