I get my phone out again when I’m walking down Cheyne Walk, a road that’s famous for being where J.M.W. Turner died; I don’t know if it was in a house or just out on the street or what. I know the road, though, for being where the poet and artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti took all his exotic animals on walks. Apparently, there’s a law about walking wombats in London because of it; I think it’s that you’re not allowed to walk wombats after a particular time, or maybe that you’re only allowed to walk them on this road. The wombat that walked down here was named after William Morris, whose designs are on everything at the moment: lunch boxes, bamboo reusable coffee cups, notebooks. I like thinking about the ghosts of Rossetti’s menagerie all together now, all walking along the river here, their spirits peering into the Pizza Express just around the corner, wandering the studios in the Royal College of Art, which is nearby. I keep walking, and imagine a reality in which I consume all of Rossetti’s animals—in which I bite into the William Morris wombat, and experience that wombat’s life in Rossetti’s studio, seeing Rossetti’s portrait of Proserpine being gradually painted, the pomegranate she is eating being formed in oils on canvas. I wonder if the wombat went with Rossetti to the grave of his wife and muse, Elizabeth Siddal, whose body Rossetti exhumed so that he could retrieve and publish the poems he had buried with her. I wonder what the wombat thought, while watching from the shadows.

I write a text to Anju: “Hey, it was really nice meeting you last night. I was wondering if you might fancy meeting up? I did my first painting in forever basically after seeing you guys, and I don’t really know any painters, so . . .” I delete the last part, so it just reads, “Hey, it was really nice meeting you last night. I was wondering if you might fancy meeting up?” and send that. I have a missed call from Crimson Orchard, but I ignore it for now, and tap on recent calls so it’ll stop showing up as a banner. I turn the corner, the river behind me. The Otter is all dressed up for its opening tonight. Its front is covered in strings of lights. Its door is open. A carnivalesque glow comes from inside.