at the national

My friend seems to know everyone in the audience. We've come to see the lens grinder do his stuff on stage. Friend can't stop nodding and waving and greeting and fancy seeing you here. Our seats would have been together but due to social ramifications I now find myself seated on my own, in the upper circle, several planets from the sun of the stage. During the first interval I fight through crowds on the tiny balcony to find my friend surrounded by a conglomeration of strolling players. I barely get a chance to nod before it's back inside for the next leg. At the start of the second interval I stand up and hear my name spoken, like a question. I turn towards the speaker and see a woman I don't recognise sitting next to a man I don't recognise. She says my name again and then she says her name and I still haven't made the connection and then it all comes together.

I last saw her nearly twenty years ago, at university. I know no-one from university now, so we have no small talk catch-up. University is a strange island in the North. My last memory of the woman I'm speaking to was a kind of Summer ball. One of those absurd events where you wear suits or long frocks. I remember leaning towards her, drunkenly, a little desperately, untypically. In a high Summer garden. On some steps. Wearing a suit.

I try to work out how well we knew each other back then. Perhaps we knew each other well, better than memory permits. She tells me as we walk the crowded interval corridors that she's doing some research on Mona Hatoum. I explain why that's a strange kind of co-incidence. She's writing something on the meaning of asylum. The conversation runs out of steam. At the end of the third leg she and her partner or husband go one way, I go another. Towards the bar, to talk to the lens grinder, whilst my friend, who went to the same university, but left the year I arrived, meets another galaxy of people; and I talk to the lens grinder about how things are; and run into more friends myself.