Luna, companion in Liverpool Street

About Luna

Liverpool Street empties in twenty minutes flat and then refills with an entirely different crowd, and Luna has always liked being there for the changeover. Curvy, 171 cm, with dark auburn red hair worn long and brown eyes. She crosses the concourse at a pace suggesting she has never missed a train in her life. Good coat, simple dress, a bag with nothing unnecessary in it.

She is in her early twenties, speaks English fluently and has the useful gift of being easy to talk to within about ninety seconds. Luna likes high rooms and long views, she reads about cities rather than novels, and she is straightforwardly delighted by weather: fog over the towers, rain against a window forty floors up. She laughs often and never at anyone's expense. She keeps a running list of the best windows in the City and revises it every time a new tower opens.

Her evening here usually begins at Duck and Waffle on Bishopsgate, on a high floor with the City spread out underneath and the kitchen running all night. After that it can go anywhere, since Shoreditch is nine minutes on foot and the hotels are closer than that. She lives in Mayfair and is realistic about the trip east: fifteen minutes on the Elizabeth line, twice that by road at the wrong hour.

Liverpool Street is a minute from the barriers and the last trains out run properly late, so an evening here never has to end early. The whole list sits on rates, and a single message to booking holds the table and the hour both.

Booking her

Nell wants the hotel and the hour, and confirms in writing with the minute Luna will be at the door. After work bookings around here fill first, so the earlier evenings are worth asking about ahead.

Every figure she works to is public on the board, and the steps sit on the booking page.

An evening with Luna

The high table first, because it settles everyone. Luna sits facing the glass and tells you which towers went up in which year, most of it right, and asks what you can see from your own office, which turns out to be a better question than it looks. Dinner runs late by design; she is not in a hurry and the kitchen up there never closes.

Afterwards there is a choice she will put to you straight: down to the station and nine minutes on foot to Shoreditch for noise, or back to the hotel bar for the quiet version. Either is fine with her. What she enjoys most is the last hour, when the concourse below has gone silent and the departure boards are running the night's final services, and the whole area feels like it belongs to about eleven people.