P returned with a frescachino and a mocha latte. The mocha was pushed at me wordlessly and P sat there, arms folded along the edge of the table, head down but face peering up at me while I took the first sips of the mocha. And sighed. Ah, the first bite of the hot milkiness, the promise of forthcoming caffeine.
No wonder early civilisations made a ritual of coffee, tea, all those things, praised it for its mystical properties. Beer and a caffeinated beverage. That’s when you know a civilisation has really started. I could feel an isolated, isolating calm settle over me. Which was weird, as my body was beginning to speed up. The effects of caffeine are very similar to adrenaline. But more sophisticated, eh? And we can add sugar. And, in my case, milk. P’s intolerant.
I looked up. P’s look of concern swiftly morphed into something more sardonic, eyes flicking down briefly to switch the mode. One eyebrow raised slightly, with a corresponding tilt of the mouth.
“J?”
“Yeah?”
There were some fluttering finger motions across the forehead. Eyes scanned my face right to left. “You’ve got some, er...”
I frowned and brushed shortly. “Yeah. Gone?”
“Ish.”
I huffed, brushed, hunched, and looked down at the table.
“J, what’s going on?” P’s voice was rimed with suspicion.
“I don’t,” I lowered my voice, “fucking know, do I?” I heard a sigh from the other side of the table. It was the kind of sigh a parent or teacher gives – medium length, controlled, probably involving either a raised eyebrow, slotted eyes, slightly flared nostrils or all three.
I caught myself scratching at my forearm, shoulders hunched, body bowed forward, searching the tabletop for something ostensibly more interesting than my friend’s face while my mouth worked side-to-side.
Classic defensive behaviour.
What?
I looked up. “P, why are you acting like my tutor?”
“Why are you acting like a fucking teenager, J?” shot back.
We stared at each other for a second, and then luckily we spotted each other’s noses twitching, our faces softened, we backed down, did the frowny grin. I stuck my tongue out at P, got a stern wagging finger back.
“Bollocks,” said P, and took a big gulp of frescachino. That about summed it up.
P sighed again, this time one of those ones that we use instead of ‘Alors,’ a resetting thing.
“Okay, what’s the last thing you can remember?”
I was taken aback. “Eh?”
“Before the story started. Work backwards”
I felt peeved for a second. ‘Story.’ Still...
“I... There was...” Random images washed and swung, crossing each other. “Well, I don’t...” My voice started to rise with panic. “It’s all, I dunno, like...”
“Okay, chill,” said P. There was a sigh. A frown. A tongue-probing of molars for food fragments (at least, that what it always looks like, that particular face-twist of P’s). “Ah, crap, I’m never any good at this shit.” Fingers drum on the table. “I know – think about what clever, understanding-type thing you’d say if this was me, or someone else.”
I blinked. Then: “Oh, I see. Well, I’d say – ‘work forward’.”
“Eh?”
“Pick a time you can be really sure of and work forward...”
“Gotcha. Go on, then.”
I swallowed. “Okay.” My brain stuttered at me.
P must have seen it. “Okay, I’ll do it. We had lunch on Tuesday.”
“Okay, yeah, in Europa.” Europa’s roughly halfway between our respective places of daytime employment and nicer than other choices. We meet at Aneurin Bevan and walk up.
“Talked about?”
“The unbearable lightness of being.”
“Har. And?”
I cast my mind, placed myself there. “Your viva.” P uncharacteristically quiet and focused. “Who it was going to be, what you thought they’d ask.” Playing out strategies. Image shift. “They were playing 4Hero’s second album, and that woman asked them to turn it down. And it was too loud for conversation really, fair play.”
“You are getting so Welsh,” said P.
“Eh? Shit, yeah, ‘fair play.’ I should be saying ‘right enough,’ right enough, eh?”
“Go on.”
“She was wearing this weird orange, crushed velvet, small-mirrors skirt, like I haven’t seen in about ten years and you reckoned it was full of the Chapter crowd – all hippy, artsy, tofu-eating, herbal tea-drinkers. Queer or queer-wannabe.”
“How do you do this?”
“Ssh.” Images flip past – P’s arms waving, more animated again. “And we talked...” my eyes flicked open and I grinned, “of the unpredictability of dating new people and the intransigence of Pip.”
“Bastard.”
“Then I went back to typing up and subtly correcting the grammar of terminally dull reports written by other people. And you went back to fretting about stuff. And sending me, as I recall, a link to your latest webcomic obsession which, luckily, work’s firewall blocked otherwise I’d’ve got no work done and instead checked it before going to bed and was instantly hooked you bastard.”
P smirked. “I’m a pusher of subversive art. Sue me.”
“The Council will, I’m sure, if I turn up again as out of it as I did on Wednesday morning, four hours sleep and two hundred-odd four-by-fours later.”
“Bah, you’re only a temp...”
“Bite me.”
“Nasty. So, okay, we’ve got Wednesday morning.”
“Hah! Yes. Okay, so: dull, dull, terminally dull, some fucking meeting about stuff and... more interesting... I got to make some pretty graphs with the boring stats of the latest survey.”
“And what are the results of the latest survey?”
“People said stuff.”
“Ah,”
“And we made the stats say stuff.”
“Ok..>”
“And then people will look at what the stats say and say something about it.”
“Huh.”
“And after that serial filtration process it will all mean precisely dick.”
“Yes, K.”
“Har.”
“Wednesday night?” P was smirking.
I smirked back. “Like the predictable muppets we are, cheap beer night at Elite. Chicken-spotting and reminiscing about our student days.” I paused. “Mel came with, wearing my white shirt. Chloë was ensconced with her latest laydeee, Sarah was telling some improbable tale of late-night perambulations among the freaks of nocturnal Cardiff. Martin was actually chatting someone up. Gina was trying to persuade us all out after and...” I shook my head, briefly warm around the temples. “And you,” I pointed, “were a big old lightweight, claiming some nonsense about a ‘viva’ the next day or something.” I gave P a big, shit-eating grin. “Though I think you just wanted to go home and send Pip more texts...”
“Fuck off.”
“Lightweight.”
“Fuck off.”
“How did it go, anyway?” P looked at me nonplussed. “The viva.” P was still staring, frowning at me like ‘What?’ “What?”
“Oh, J.” Rapid headrattle. “Ok,” briskly, “I guess we’ve come up to our first point of no entry.”
“Oh, God, P, shit... I...”
“Hush, hush, chill.”
“But did you...?”
“I got it, only a couple of minor corrections, like tiny. It’s in the bag. I’m graduating in July.” All this was said really rapidly.
I slumped. “What did I say?”
P gave a small, wry smile. “To the best of my recall, something along the lines of: ‘Aahaaaaaaaa! Ya basstad!” and then ‘Wicked! So you’re now officially a genius?’”
“Heh.”
“Then,” quietly, “You said ‘I’m proud of you, mate.’” P swallowed what looked suspiciously like a lump in the throat.
“Did I?” I said weakly. “That was uncharacteristically sentimental of me.”
I got clipped round the shoulder for that.