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We perched on the edge of the kerb. I watched him send rings of smoke silently up into the ether. Si would go mad if he could see me now. He’d been ecstatic when I’d managed to stop completely and was now on a one-man crusade to get me to join a gym.
‘A meeting,’ he said. ‘To discuss a project I have been working on.’
‘What do you do?’
His phone rang and he looked at it, shaking his head and rejecting the call.
‘I write music,’ he said.
‘You’re a composer?’ I said. Creating music required a certain sensitivity that I wouldn’t have thought he possessed.
‘A composer,’ he said, mulling it over. ‘It sounds very grand when you say it like this.’
I wrapped my arms around my knees. ‘Do you play an instrument, then?’
‘Piano,’ he said. ‘And guitar.’
I widened my eyes, I couldn’t help it.
‘This is not what you were expecting,’ he said, smiling.
I looked down at the ground, rubbing at the stained satin of my shoe. ‘Not really.’
‘And you?’ he asked. ‘You play something?’
I shook my head. ‘I always wanted to try the piano, but we couldn’t afford lessons.’
He looked at me, frowning. ‘So why do you not learn now?’
I considered his question. ‘It feels too late, I suppose.’
He shook his head, as though I’d said the wrong thing again. ‘So your life is already over, at the age of – what – twenty-six? Twenty-seven?’
‘I’m thirty, actually.’
‘So your life is over at thirty.’
‘Feels like it, sometimes. Why, how old are you?’
‘Twenty-eight.’
‘A baby.’
He stood up, doing a side stretch, one way and then the other. ‘You look younger than thirty, anyway.’
I tutted. ‘Yeah, right.’
‘You do not believe me?’
‘Nope.’
‘You have a complex about it, your age?’ he asked, flicking his cigarette onto the road.
‘No. I do not.’
I did, though. A little bit.
‘You are always this negative?’ he asked, grinding the butt into the ground with the toe of his trainer.
