I remember kissing my friend’s mum once in front of my friend by accident.

Me and his mum went to kiss each other on the cheek, except we both went for opposite cheeks and met in the middle.

Everyone laughed.

I guess it was good because it was some small event that made people feel better than they did before.

Probably.

I think about Lisa.

I feel nervous.

I think: I want to kiss Lisa in a small way, and then pull away and kiss her again in a larger way.

I want to be standing next to Lisa and thinking: I am going to kiss Lisa in five seconds.

And then do that.

Because there’s nothing better than thinking something really great and then doing the thing that’s great.

Someone says, ‘Smoko.’

And we walk outside.

There are no chairs left, so Mother Hen sits on the ground next to a fence.

I sit next to her.

I light a cigarette and we stare at the road.

The road is glary and my head hurts.

There’s a copy of MX next to me, so I pick it up.

It’s old, from November last year.

I open it.

Someone named Emma Gibbs is saying, ‘Being offline gave me the chance to really connect with where I was and created this sense of calm I hadn’t felt for a long, long time.’

Then there is a survey that says, ‘More Japanese people support the country’s controversial whale hunt than oppose it.’

And on the next page, ‘Activists have urged US rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs to push for better working conditions after it was revealed that clothing for his fashion line was made in a Bangladeshi factory where 112 staff died in a fire.’

And beneath that, ‘Buddhist monks are putting on too much weight in Sri Lanka because people are giving them food high in fat and sugar.’

And beneath that, ‘A zoo calendar for 2013 features photos of dogs that mauled a boy to death.’

And next to that, ‘A body that was found on a stranded yacht carrying more than two hundred kilograms of cocaine in the Pacific Ocean is that of a Slovak national.’

And over the page there’s something about Gibraltar’s famous monkeys losing their ‘fear of humans and regarding them as a rich source of food’.

The sun intensifies. Reflects into my eyes.

Fifteen minutes pass and we walk back inside.

I slide more bands around KeepCups.

I think: I’m a twenty-five-year-old who slides bands around cups.

And it seems shitty, but I feel guilty about feeling shitty because somewhere people are being eaten by monkeys.

Because last year those Bangladeshi factory workers died in a fire trying to earn in three days what I make in an hour.

And I push another band onto a cup while Anna or maybe Kasey turns the volume up on the same techno CD that has been playing all week.

And I think: this is okay.

Everything is okay.

There is a vibration on the table and Mother Hen looks at her phone.

She smiles.

It’s a different smile.

Like, it lingers in her lip corners.

She says, ‘Skype message.’

And we turn our backs to the whirring fan that’s making my eyes red and my lips crack, and she presses play.

We watch a young girl running around a playground somewhere.

Going down a slide and running onto the grass.

She stops on the grass and looks at the sky.

She sneezes and laughs into the camera.

Mother Hen says, ‘My daughter.’

And if this were the conclusion to a movie, I’d hope to hell for a really uplifting finale, something like a camera fading to Mother Hen and her daughter sitting on a beach somewhere playing guitar, and Mother Hen putting the guitar down and lying on her back, holding her daughter by the arms and putting her feet on her daughter’s stomach, pushing her feet out and holding her steady so that her daughter felt like she was a bird, so that she was staring out over the sand and water, and saying, ‘Mum, I’m a bird! I’m a bird!’ Going ‘Hehehehehe.’

Ahhhhhhh.