She thinks, I could drink the colours of this city until my throat swells like a kaleidoscope. Purple jacarandas. Pink mimosas. Balconies dripping yellow lemons. And azure—a word that sits long and full on the tongue—azure everywhere. She helps her daughter down the slide. The baby trots and she lets her roam, like the French parents do. They aren’t always cloyed to their children like chicken feet. There is a woman with long eyelashes, also following her trotting child. She decides: this woman and her would be friends. This would be the park they would come to every day. Their children would play under the fig trees. She wonders what it’s like to grow up here, somewhere with peaches plump as fleshy fists. Not mealy peaches or hard peaches packed on supermarket shelves but soft peaches, jubilant amid the cherries, the fresh-cut watermelon shimmering on the street vendor’s stall. She also wonders what this woman—her new friend—would think of her home. Of the housing estates that spread and spread until the little white houses fall …