She orders tea and cakes and laughs at something the girl behind the counter says. Her laugh is different now. It sounds like broken glass being swept but I can’t think how it used to sound, just that it has changed. A lot about her has changed. She dresses differently, but it’s more than that. She stands a little taller, like she is squaring up to things. Like she belongs wherever she happens to be.

In my pocket is a mix CD I made for her before she left but I never gave it to her. It has been on my bookshelf at home untouched ever since. It was designed to express exactly how I felt about her, but with sufficient ambiguity woven in to give me plausible denial. It’s like a Rorschach test; whatever she thinks it is, that’s what it will turn out to be.

She carries the tray over to our table and passes me all the paraphernalia that comes with tea. A cup and saucer, the teapot, a jar of brown sugar cubes. There is a tea strainer too but I am not sure what this is for and I have to wait for her to pour so that I don’t do it wrong and make a fool of myself. I can’t stop staring at her hair. It is cut short now, neatly revealing her ears and the back of her neck. It used to be long and shapeless and this new hair has changed the shape of her entire head.
“Do you like it?” she says, after I have been staring at it for too long.

I want to tell her that it doesn’t suit her but it does. “Yes,” I say.

“I can’t believe it has been a year already,” she says.

It hasn’t quite been a year. She left in September, now it is June. An academic year. We measure time differently these days.

“So have you met anyone?” she asks me.

I don’t know how I was supposed to meet someone in the last ten months, where she thinks that was likely to happen.

“No,” I tell her. “No one.”

“You will,” she says and the knowing confidence she speaks with makes her sound like a mystic.

She shows me photographs on her phone. This one is of her dorm room, with the neatly made bed and the little pile of text books on the desk under the window. This one is the en-suite bathroom with her own shower and I try not to notice the box of sanitary towels on the shelf. This one is her new group of friends. They look nice, these friends of hers. One person is giving a peace sign. Another is wearing a trilby and sunglasses. They are all huddled tight in the photograph, like they are afraid of being cropped out. They look so young to me, even though we are all about the same age.

I point at a guy in the picture with his arm around her, his face a little too close to hers. “Who’s this?” I say.

“He’s Dan Hanson,” she says, but I mishear her. It sounded like she said Damn Handsome, and so I swipe the picture away.

This one is the university library. This is the green where they sit outside on sunny afternoons. This is their favourite pub, they serve chips in flower pots. “But what’s new with you,” she says, finally putting her phone away.

I think about it and then tell her that nothing is new. Nothing at all. It’s not strictly true. My dad’s cat is diabetic now and I have to give it the insulin injections because it turns out my dad is phobic of needles. That’s new. I have a job too, which feels like it ought to be impressive but isn’t really. The money is nice but the work is tedious and the hours are weird. I start at five am and finish at one, unloading lorries into a warehouse. My days start too early and finish too soon. I feel like I have been desynchronised with myself and I don’t really like the people I work with. Today they called me at five thirty in the morning because they thought I was late, even though it is actually my day off. When I explained they somehow managed to figure the misunderstanding was all my fault and I was so annoyed by the whole thing that I couldn’t get back to sleep.

We have cakes with our tea as well. She bought us a selection that came on an elaborate three tier cake stand. She is really impressed by the intricate craftsmanship of them. I think they are too small, not because I want more to eat but because they make my hands seem oafish and clumsy. I don’t feel at home in this café. We are the youngest people here by a generation and a half. Everything is so delicate. I feel like I could ruin the place with one careless gesture, one thoughtless swing of an arm. She is thrilled with it all in a way that I just don’t understand.

“I want to get a cake stand like this,” she says.

She picks up her phone again and takes a photograph of it. For a moment I think that I am going to be in the shot, and that maybe her new friends will wonder who I am when she shows them the picture, but she angles it in a way that I am not included.

“So what about you?” I say. “Are you seeing anyone?” The mix-CD seems conspicuous in my coat pocket. It doesn’t really fit and I had to stretch the fabric a bit to get it in. I am trying to remember which songs I put on it. If they will still work the way I thought they might ten months ago.

She shakes her head but there is a wistful quality about it and the way she looks down at her tea cup gives me the impression she doesn’t want to talk about it. I am sure there is a someone. There is always a someone.

She picks up a miniature éclair and pops it whole into her mouth. It takes her a while to swallow it and when it has gone, so has my question. I help myself to an éclair. The cakes are excellent. I can’t help but wonder how she can afford it. I assumed students ate cheap soup in squalid living conditions for three years before emerging as successful graduates, the desolate years acting as a counter balance to the eventual prosperity that follows. But I guess she has her student loans. She will still be paying for my tea when she is thirty.

“How is the job?” she says.

I shrug. “The money is okay,” I say.

Actually, for as much as I don’t like the job it has got some fringe benefits. I never would have expected it but I quite like being there. For eight hours a day there is no doubt in my mind that I am in exactly the right place. The question of what I am supposed to be doing with my life is put on hold while I deal with what I am supposed to be doing with my day. There is a tranquillity in that that I couldn’t have predicted.

“How is the course?” I realise that I haven’t even asked about it, so caught up were we by the photographs of the library and the en-suite.

“Very challenging,” she says. “A lot of reading, and some of it is…”

She falters, then makes a gesture with her hands like an explosion bursting from the sides of head. She laughs her broken glass laugh and again I wonder what it used to sound like, but I still can’t remember.

“I’m sure you’re doing really well,” I say, and for a moment I catch a hint of sadness in her and I feel guilty for saying it. The truth is, I’m not sure she is doing really well. I just assume it and my assumption tumbles so easily out of mouth. Maybe she is really struggling. Maybe everything is falling to pieces around her and she doesn’t know how to pull it back together. What the hell do I know?

“Yeah,” she says. “I’m sure it’s going great.”
She offers me the last éclair but I decline and so she takes it. I pour some more tea but there is only enough for half a cup and it is too cold now so I don’t drink it.

She tells me that she has other people that she needs to visit while she is in town so we stand up, put our coats on and walk outside. We stand in the street, not sure which direction the other wants to go in. She folds her arms. I go to put my hands in my pockets, but the CD is taking up all the space. I take it out.

“What’s that?” she says, looking down at the CD case. For a moment I think that in the last ten months CDs have become so completely obsolete that if I am going to do something like this I would have to email her a link to a play list on a website or something. But then I realise that I didn’t write anything on the case and so it just looks like pirated computer software.

Suddenly I feel too old for a gesture like this. That a person with hands as clumsy as mine shouldn’t be making mix-CDs for girls any more. I still can’t remember any of the songs I put on it.

“Nothing,” I say. “Forgot it was even in my pocket.”

I squeeze it back in and then stand there awkwardly, not sure what to do with my hands.

Neither of us seem sure how to walk away. We say things like ‘it was good to see you’ and ‘we should do this again’ and other formal words that sound strange because we have never said them to each other before.

“I don’t want to miss my bus,” she says, gesturing over her shoulder.

“Right,” I say, “of course.”

And then there is a moments silence which I don’t know what to do with, and so I add “don’t miss your bus,” like it was all my idea.

“See you,” she says.

“See you,” I say.

She steps forward and we hug but I get it wrong, gripping too tight and holding her too long. Her short hair brushes the side of my face. Her perfume smells like it is someone else’s. Then, when I have finally managed to let her go, I decide to walk with her to the bus stop, which is uncomfortable for both of us because of how thoroughly we have already said goodbye.

###

Toby Wallis. His work has previously appeared in Glimmer Train after he won their New Writers award. He has also been short-listed for The Bridport Prize. 

Photo: Rudy and Peter Skitterians