Serious Sweet

Начало книги

A family sits on a Tube train. They are all in a row and taking the Piccadilly Line. They have significant amounts of luggage. They seem tired and a little dishevelled, are clearly arriving from somewhere far away: a grandmother, a father, a mother and a daughter of about twelve months. The adults talk quietly in Arabic. The grandmother wears a headscarf, the wife does not.

Although her adult companions are quite dowdy, the girl is immaculately flamboyant. She has spangles on her perfectly white shoes and wears hairclips adorned with the shapes of butterflies. She shows colours upon colours. There is a complicated pattern of embroidery across her cardigan, like flowers and like stars. She sits on her father’s lap, with her back to windows full of autumn and declining light and she faces out at the rest of the carriage, and is self-assured, interested, genuinely charismatic. She fixes passengers with a quietly adult gaze and grins.

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