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      ‘Erm, yeah, not as much as you lot …’ Then, in friendly frustration, you took my phone off me before scrunching into my side and miraculously working out how to put on the flash and some kind of flattering filter before handing my phone back. I loved how good we both looked in that picture. How close. In age. In comradery. In friendship. You were giving me a direct line to who I used to be: young and fun, someone you would fight to be friends with, not avoid.

      I’ve looked at that picture you took of us a million times. It was far enough away that you can’t see my pissed redness, my dark circles, my desperation. Nor could I see the black energy hiding behind your eyes. Like our selfie, I vowed that at our planned Sunday lunch with Iain you would see the very best of me again.

      It got to chucking-out time and you said you needed to get your bike from the yard behind the office. As we started to leave, I was overwhelmed by the idea of hugging you. I felt like we’d breached something, moved somewhere together. I stood up woozily. I remember you holding my forearm to steady me and that somehow becoming a prolonged embrace. I could feel something between us, something powerful. I didn’t want the night to end. We finally pulled away from each other.

      ‘You going to be OK, cycling half-cut? You could leave it overnight; I could pick up a couple of bottles along the way. We could keep talking.’

      ‘Think I’ll sit the next dance out, thanks all the same. I’m not actually that much of a drinker?’

      I faltered for a second and clawed back an image of a finger of wine untouched in the bottom of your glass.

      I was mortified.

      I’d drunk and blathered on about myself and my life, while you’d listened on soberly, watching as I gulped down the booze, telling you another one of my difficult little secrets, throwing in a good amount of intimate and revealing details about Iain for good measure. You’d topped me up again and again, but you hadn’t refilled your own glass once. Was it because you were one of those oh-so-serious twenty-odd-year-olds who barely drinks, needing to wake up with a clear head in order to optimise their days? Or perhaps you felt bad because you hadn’t money to pay for any of the drinks? Or was it more deliberate than this? Paranoid anxiety needled me. But I didn’t know who I should trust less, myself, or you. And I desperately didn’t want to take the sheen off those moments where we seemed to connect.

      Yet dread still rose to the surface of my uncertainty and embarrassment: the sense of you wanting me malleable, that you set out to expose me and you’d succeeded. I had the idea you somehow knew the ways to see me for what I really was. And once again, I’d spent time alone with you and discovered almost nothing about you in return.

      I didn’t say much else before I sloped off into the night, moving with the drinkers spilling out of Borough Market pubs in the direction of London Bridge, pissed and alone. I know you watched me as I walked away, waiting a minute or so before turning in the opposite direction. I felt it.

      Lily, I knew somewhere you were no good for me, that I was unravelling again and you were tugging hard at the threads. But whatever your interest in me, you were interested.

      I had been seen.

      I wasn’t invisible.

      I had someone new to talk to, someone I could see on the weekend, someone who had some insight into my most ancient pains. So if it seemed to me you’d barged your way into my life and under my skin, I was ready to plough right back into yours. You can’t unlearn how to fight.

      And there was something else. Somewhere, I had the idea that you liked me even though you didn’t want to.

Lily

       6th March – Time for a Drink?

      Down with the brown. Down. With. The. Brown. Seriously? This woman gets more and more clueless. She’s talking about ‘coded language’ when we know this is code for, ‘I’m not being racist but …’ or worse, that jokey kind of racism people her age are prone to, which they think is funny and ironic but everyone with half a soul knows is just good old-fashioned racism.

      But I can’t stop looking at her, into those bright blue eyes. She can tell. She likes how it feels.

      I ask her to come for a drink with me and, my god, she can unload: on The Partner, on her career, her depression, the lot. This crazy monologue she has to get out with only the smallest little nudge from me to keep it coming. Gotta admit, it’s pretty fascinating, being this close to those eyes as they dance round her memories while she sweeps her fingers through that extreme black wave of hair over and over. She doesn’t know she’s still beautiful.

      I liked listening to her, even with all the appalling things she said, the most disgustingly least self-aware ideas she thinks are absolutely fine: ‘a rolling buffet of interns to keep the lights on and sponsored content to pay me.’ She thinks she’s doing us some kind of favour. Offensive in the extreme but because she’s so completely othered young adults, in her eyes it doesn’t matter what she does or takes from us.

      But still, sometimes her words fall out of her studded with tiny gems of something that feels like truth, like little pomegranate pips in a bowl of bitter leaves.

      I needed to keep my usual guard up, but it was hard. I haven’t found it this difficult since Ruth. That was the first, and until now, the last time I let myself open up. I wanted to be honest with Ruth about what Mum and Gem did to me and what I’ve done to other people. Ruth wanted to hear me and I wanted to tell her about everything that’s inside me.

      With KR, I feel like I want to tell her things about me too. Real things. And I find myself wanting to learn more about her. That’s when I pour her another drink.

      It was the plan to see her inebriated, get a view of what’s behind the leather armour. I make sure she’s fully drunk, so much so that when we leave the pub, she’s all over the show. I actually have to stop her from hitting the deck. I grab her before she drops to the cobbles. I could have let her fall, I should have let her fall, but I can’t believe it was actually my first instinct to save her.

      I rescue her, despite all the times I’ve been allowed to fall and break into pieces by people like her, despite how many injustices and abuses people like me suffer at the hands of people on her level, casually using young people in their workplaces and their beds. Her bed. But even after she admits that’s exactly what she thinks is her right, to have sex with unpaid graduates in a clear abuse of power that she can’t see, I still want to help her. It’s weird.

      Eventually, she’s off home, but not before she’s tried to extend the night. Way too soon for that. She’s stomping off to the bus stop in that way that’s so her. I wait and watch and I’m thinking how KR always strides or stomps everywhere when she should be treading carefully.

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