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expressing out loud for the first time what she’d been dwelling on for weeks: that she’s a city girl. Ambivalent about the countryside and hostile towards the suburbs.
‘I just feel like I’m always waiting for something to happen, like one of these eight million lives is going to collide with mine and knock me off course towards something else. But they never do! Nothing ever happens. People keep their heads down. They mind their own business. People in London are too tired to be colliding with each other all the time.’
Now, sex is too much or not enough. Phil can rarely form an opinion on whether the touch of another hand is pleasing. To most partners, he usually says, I’ve been having a hard time with sex lately. I had a weird-sort-of-non-consensual-encounter and have been getting in my head a lot. That’s OK, the other person would say, and they’d kiss him, but even the kissing would be too much, and kissing noises in films were too much too, and sex scenes were certainly too much, and a lover’s head on Phil’s shoulder felt like someone scaling the walls of a city to set it alight and Phil needed to pour
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everything good about this country was good because of migration. Everything. London wouldn’t be half the city it was without the people who had dragged themselves there from all over the world.
The priest says that love isn’t a feeling. It’s not the butterflies in your tummy you get in the giddy early days of a relationship. The butterflies don’t last, he says. Love is something you deliberately decide to do through repeated actions of care. Love is something you make.
