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.

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.