Bianka, companion in Islington

About Bianka

Small in a room until she starts talking, and then the room adjusts around her: that is Bianka in one line. Curvy and 165 cm, she wears light brown hair long, the ends still lifted by last summer, and her hazel eyes read green under theatre lights and nearer amber across a dinner table. Her clothes are chosen for Islington rather than for a lens, which means a good wool coat, a dress that needs no adjusting when she sits down, and one piece of jewellery where another woman would wear three. At twenty three she has already worked out that looking unhurried is mostly a matter of leaving the house ten minutes earlier.

Warmth is the first thing people borrow from her, and she is curious enough to remember what they told her the following week. One language, English, spoken easily, with the useful habit of leaving space in a conversation rather than filling every pause in it. She reads the way people used to read, in whole evenings rather than in snatches, and she will say plainly when a play did not work for her, which is rarer and better company than enthusiasm about everything.

Her Islington evening usually begins at the Almeida, a hundred yards up Almeida Street from the top of Upper Street, where the stage sits close enough that a whisper carries and the interval queue is short enough to bother joining. She travels up from Knightsbridge, a straight run on the Piccadilly line as far as King's Cross and then very little after that, or a half hour in a car when the Euston Road is in a generous mood. After the curtain she eats late on Upper Street and walks south towards Angel with the traffic thinning behind her.

Curtain times run everything here, so give yours when you send word to the evening desk, and say whether the table should come before the theatre or after it. Bianka builds the rest around that, and the theatres, the late kitchens and the rooms within walking distance are named on the Islington page.

Asking for her

Bianka prefers an evening with a shape to it, so she asks for the curtain time when there is one. A theatre start and a late dinner after it runs to three hours at £700.

Every figure she works to is already public on the board, and the order of the evening is set out on the booking page.

An evening with Bianka

A Wednesday, curtain at half seven, which means meeting at quarter past six so nobody is running. Bianka reads the cast list properly rather than folding it into a pocket, and she will have an opinion on the set before the lights go down. In the interval she wants a proper conversation about the first half, not a polite one.

Dinner is at half nine, somewhere on Upper Street that keeps its kitchen open, and she orders as though she has been hungry since five, which she has. By eleven the street has gone quiet enough to hear your own footsteps, and she will walk you down to Angel rather than let the evening end under a bar light. It takes about nine minutes and she considers that the best part.