“He keeps crossing my mind without even looking,” says Alison Fell. A witty illustration, the phrase is scribbled on the black lines of a zebra crossing. In front of it, a woman with a wheely bag stares into the street ahead. I wonder if she’s waiting for someone, or about to cross herself. I wonder what’s in her wheely bag. It looks funny.
The other day I was tipsy enough at a bar that I started talking to men - friends of friends that I had just met. Before I knew it, I was telling some guy about Jean Dujardin and his insane acting career: the guy won his Oscar for The Artist and then fell off the face of the Earth and into the lap of bizarre French cinema. Last year he starred in the weirdest dark comedy about a guy who - get this - convinces a community of hippies to get cosmetic surgery in Ukraine in an ultimately failed attempt to get rich. Now, at the LFF, he’s coming back with a film about a murderer with a fetish for leather jackets. You can’t make this shit up, dude. You just can’t. My man Jean is doing whatever the fuck he wants and he’s loving every minute of it. Isn’t that amazing? Like, who cares about branding, prestige!
The guy did that kind of half-nod, half-shrug thing people do when they don’t really get your point, but they don’t want to be rude about it. Then he told me about some Westerns he’d watched, and his last holidays in Spain, and then ditched me as soon as he spotted someone he knew; literally just cut me off mid-sentence and left. That last bit hurt a little, but then again he was the type of guy who could tell me the year Jean Dujardin won his Oscar when I forgot, but then couldn’t remember his name. He called him Jean Varjean. So it was probably for the best.
Being single in London is weird just because of the sheer amount of people you meet - all the time, constantly - and how little they seem to stick around. It’s like a revolving door of faces, of names, of details that you learn once and have no use for again, ever. Where are all my first-year crushes? My one-time hellos? My friends-of-friends with whom I think I’d get on? Vanished. Dead. Gone. It is so easy to never see anyone in London - you just have to keep moving, which is what the city wants you to do, so for once she makes it easy: an endless barrage of coats and bodies rushing cacophonously down streets and under tunnels and over bridges.
Once in a while one of them stays for a bit, and it’s nice. I’m a little stupid, and I always think they might stay for good; that I might finally become one of those lucky city-dwellers who get to say “my boyfriend this”, “my girlfriend that”, “my partner this”, “my date--” how did they manage? But then, no. Of course not. And the crowd keeps moving, sliding into sidestreets, ignoring traffic lights.
“He keeps crossing my mind without even looking.” Yeah, that.
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