Somebody Always Walks Into the Picture

Every family I know owns at least one photograph that went wrong. Someone is blinking. Someone is pointing at something outside the frame. Someone has run back from the phone a second too late and appears to be escaping her own relatives. Those are the pictures that end up on the fridge, and nobody can quite say why.

Four Seats and a Maybe began with one of them. Enna Loke has spent a Sunday afternoon in a Singapore courtyard persuading her son to stand still, her mother to stop adjusting everybody's hair, and her phone to agree to a timer. Just as the timer finishes, a stranger comes through the covered passage holding a cake box. He is Tavin Khoo, he has just moved into the building opposite, and the cake was meant for Enna's mother. It is a terrible photograph. I knew from the start that, for a while, it would be Enna's favourite.

Enna had asked for a photograph of her family. The man in it was new.

Two people who know things in advance

I wanted to write about people who are not starting from nothing. Enna arranges deliveries for a living and can usually tell where a missing parcel has gone, a talent her son believes ought to extend to his socks. Tavin cooks in a staff canteen for people who want the same lunch every day, and privately longs to be surprised. Both are in their thirties. Both have a child, a former partner and a home that works. They are very good at knowing things in advance.

What they have almost forgotten is how much fun it is to want someone who wants you back. Their first coffee is under a lemon awning on a little lane, and Enna discovers that she has no idea what people do with their hands on a date. Her phone lights up twice: once for work, once because her son's father needs to know which shirt is meant for tomorrow. I loved writing that scene, because that is what a date looks like when you are somebody's parent. The messages keep coming. The trick is learning to say, as Enna does, that you may look away now and then, but you are here.

The people at the table

A romance with children in it can turn sugary very quickly, and I did not want that. Jem is eleven, draws comics with complicated villains and very poor maps, and has had quite enough family photographs taken without warning. He already has a father, Calvin, a quiet man with an excellent memory for promises involving his son, and Jem dislikes being volunteered for happiness. Bea, Tavin's daughter, is nine and can fold a paper boat without looking. She is bright and eager, and under the eagerness sits a worry she cannot quite name.

Then there are the grown ups who came first. Maren, Bea's mother, knows Tavin well enough to be pleased for him and worried about him in the same conversation. And there is Siewen, Enna's mother, who believes an extra place at dinner solves most things and sometimes forgets to ask who would like to sit there. On the afternoon of the cake she puts out five plates for four people. One, she explains, is for the knife.

None of these people are obstacles. They are the life Enna and Tavin already have, and they are the reason the question in this book is bigger than whether two people should be together.

What we ask love to do

Soon there are stolen lunches, an evening that lasts until morning, and four seats at a dessert shop. Siewen thinks a shared home would settle everything. Tavin can picture it so clearly that Enna begins to want the picture too. But a beautiful empty apartment cannot answer for the people expected to live in it, and when a hopeful plan becomes a painful family evening, the two of them have to decide whether the future they want can include the lives they already have.

I can promise you this much: nobody in this book stays in a misunderstanding one chapter longer than they need to. Enna and Tavin talk to each other. They make each other laugh, even on the difficult days. Whether they love each other stops being the question. What they are asking love to do is the harder part, and the part I most wanted to write.

If you have ever tried to fit a new person into a life already full of people you love, or watched someone you love try, I think you will recognise this table. Come and take a seat in Four Seats and a Maybe. Bring a cake if you like. Just mind where the timer is pointing.