I was wrong. He went back to his friends and left me alone in exactly the way you leave somebody alone after you have danced with them, and that was the whole point, and it took me until my thirties to see it.
The girl who had been sat in that corner for three hours got ten minutes of being ordinary and then got left alone like everybody else.
Nobody else in that gym gave me that, before or after, and four hundred people were in there.
Thirty years.
I was at Corwen General on a Tuesday in the October to meet a clinical team, and I came out of a lift and went into the cafe on the ground floor and slipped on a wet patch by the counter, and a full coffee went over both my hands.
Forty people turned round.
Somebody came over fast.
“You’re all right. I’ve got it.”
Worn blue scrubs, a mop in one hand, and he was limping badly enough that I noticed it before I noticed his face.
He cleaned it up. Then he went to the counter and bought me another one, and I watched a man in his late forties count coins out of his trouser pocket onto a laminate counter and come up short by about forty cents and put a pastry back.
Something happened in my chest that I could not name for about four hours.
When he came back and put that cup down I looked at him properly.
The jaw. The eyes.
Rye Colvin.
Older, and tired in a way that goes all the way down, and still exactly that boy.
He did not recognise me at all. Not a flicker.
I did not say anything. I said thank you and I sat there and drank a coffee a man had bought me with his last money.
At about half past two that afternoon I was in the staff canteen on the second floor, which I was in because a clinical lead had taken me up there for a sandwich.
About twenty-five people in that room.
