My bank work was routine, automatic, as was my smile and good cheer. I had watched nearly everyone I knew there move on over the years, either gaining promotion or being headhunted, and had never achieved the quality of relationship with my new colleagues that I had had with my old ones. Jonathan had had a health scare and returned from a long absence for treatment thinner, sadder and quieter. Mr Self had fought against premature hair loss and lost. My annual review with them was an awkward one. Mr Self presented me with a glass globe paperweight and pressed me on my professional aspirations, as though torn between losing me and yet desperate for me to have some career development. I was formally promoted to a newly created post of desk assistant manager in recognition of the leadership I had shown and of the mentoring I had given new desk assistants, and I was given an above-inflation rate pay rise.
‘Well done!’ said Mie, when she heard the news from Jonathan. ‘Does this call for a celebratory drink?’
I was so pleased and so confounded at the prospect of going out with Mie after work for the first time in years that my strangled reply was inaudible.
‘I know, it’s been a long time,’ she said.
We revisited The George, which seemed populated by ghosts of a past life and lacked the atmosphere and promise of a decade ago when we had crowded the high, small tables with Adam Johnson and David but, of course, it was we that had changed.
We sat on bar stools on either side of the tall tables and watched the ice melt slowly in our G and Ts. I took in Mie’s dress, her successful businesswoman’s attire, and thought, She’s got it, now.
‘Have you kept in touch with Adam?’ I asked above the loud music.
‘No, not really. Well, we meet occasionally for lunch.’
‘And David? Do you see him a lot?’
‘No!’ Mie sat back with a sudden look of distaste.
‘Oh, I thought you were still friends? That you’d remained friends? Despite… you know.’
Mie pouted and shrugged as though to say that they might have, but no longer were.
‘What happened there then?’ I persisted.
‘Nothing.’ Mie met my look unblinkingly as she drank and crunched an ice cube. ‘Are you still dancing at that club?’
‘Yes,’ I said. Discomfited by the direct question, I reached for my glass and took a long swig. I assumed it to be a reproach for my having broached the subject of David, Mie’s way of telling me that the topic was not up for discussion.
Mie said nothing.
‘It’s good exercise,’ I added, in weak justification.
‘It seems to be,’ said Mie, in what I took as a compliment.
‘Mie,’ I said, ‘do you ever look back at, you know, your life or certain events and, while recognising that they happened to you, not really feel that they did? As though all along, behind you, there are just a series of people who were you or looked like you, but there’s no continuity of you?’
‘No. I never think that,’ said Mie decisively.
I considered her enviously.
There was a finality to our evening together – the sense that it was the last time we’d share a drink and a private conversation was overwhelming. It was as though she had invited me out not to renew a tired friendship but to meet one last obligation, and to draw a line that ran from Putney through Clapham all the way to the City and along the aisle between her desk and mine.
Already, in the present, I was looking back as though through a series of windows that each presented a different scene, distinct tableaux of past lives into which she and I happened to have ventured: brief, framed moments in which we had coincided. While Mie remained resolutely unchanged behind the façade of her new wardrobe, constantly and recognisably Mie in each image, I had no notion of existing for myself for more than two or three seconds at a time. The only factor that contributed to any sense of continuity, however ironically, was the thought that this notion was familiar to me. While Mie glided serenely and purposefully across a bridge, in that way she had of walking by moving her legs from below the knees only, I advanced hesitantly from one stepping stone to the next, unable to ascertain whether, if the far bank were to be reached, it would be me who would reach it.
Mie had depressed me and shaken my confidence. A little ashamed of my fragility and wanting a friend’s non-judgmental warm arms around me, that night I crashed at Gaia’s.