A Private Introduction

Lucy and Jim were an excellent match. Everyone said so. It was very well known. They met at a picnic on Hampstead Heath organized by mutual friends. Perhaps nobody had foreseen quite how well they might connect but in hindsight approval was unanimous. Yes, it was going awfully well.

Jim had recently seen the new movie starring Keira Knightly which Lucy had seen a week earlier at a press screening and both agreed that it was her finest work to date. Furthermore they agreed that the Pirates of the Caribbean series was an aberration on an otherwise interesting career. How could she expect to be taken seriously as an artist after nailing her colours to a series derived from a theme park ride? It was a shame.

The picnic stretched into the warm summer evening and the conversation moved through shared tastes in music, books and galleries, punctuated by comfortable silences where they rested back on their elbows and basked in the sun until it finally sank behind the woods. Three bottles of wine were devoured and yet while the rest of the party descended into singing and tales of wilder student days, neither seemed inebriated. When the group disbanded, each went off into the night with different groups after only the briefest of hugs.

For their first date a couple of days later they robbed a petrol station. How this came about would never be discovered. They walked in hand in hand, he in a baseball cap and she in a headscarf and both in sunglasses. They smiled as they pointed toy guns at the poor boy at the till. They strolled out and around the corner, still hand in hand and carrying £366 in cash.

The press loved it. They lapped it up: A young, white, well turned out couple, outlaws in love. A few columnists pointed out the double standards in reporting but excitement and titillation was the general tone of the coverage. Speculation was rife. Rumours hit Twitter that there were royal connections. Could it possibly be true? London waited.

For their second date they went to the zoo. Jim took some pencils and a couple of sketch pads and they sat for hours trying to capture the processeion of african hunting dogs endlessly circling their enclosure next to the canal. The pictures would later be displayed on the wall of a cafe in Kensal Green.

After the zoo they began to see each other on a more regular basis exploring the city together. Taking advantage of all it had to offer. A month after that first meeting they celebrated by shooting a drug dealer. He whispered to them on street corner in Camden and they followed him along the canal until, in a secluded spot, he turned a knife on them. The shots were heard from a nearby supermarket carpark and when the police arrived they found a body floating in the oily waters, face up and with two clean bullet holes in its forehead. How the press made the connection with the petrol station was unclear but soon it was commonly accepted that the young lovers had struck again.

After this their friends saw them less and less until one day a story hit the papers of a fire station razed to the ground. There were many questions to be answered. Sadly there was one casualty. This time the police preempted the press and annouced that a warrant had been issued for Lucy and Jim, the 'outlaws in love'. A photo, taken at the picnic, was released to the press and though they sat apart there was no doubting the couple.

Speculation grew and died but nothing was heard until six months later a photo appeared on the internet of the couple in the back of a jeep somewhere in the African savanna. The couple smiled into the camera and the world read what it could into it. The couple rested head against head, frozen in time, a final indecipherable record. In their eyes was history and on the paper it was fiction and to their friends there was perfection, of sorts.