After Friday

Lynette offers to buy me a coffee. I know why, and I don’t want her to. I tell her she doesn’t have to, but she flashes a quick smile at the moment in her head when we’re both sitting down in our usual chairs and having the chat she so obviously wants.

            Pain au chocolates, Danish pastries and chocolate muffins push up against the edge of the patisserie display, giving us a real good look. She asks me if I want anything else and I say No, thank you. She grabs the tongs and picks up a Danish, puts it back. Picks up a triple chocolate muffin, puts it back; picks up the Danish again, slips it into a paper bag. “Hashtag first world problems,” she says.

            She pushes me one of the Americanos she ordered and leads the way to the seats way in the back of the onsite café. It’s populated by three other staff members with their heads down in a tablet, a smartphone and an actual newspaper.           

            “So, how are you?” she asks.

            “Fine,” I say. Though, I do feel a bit hungry – I should have picked up a damn pastry.

            And I’m tired. It’s the third night in a row I haven’t slept well. Instead of sleep, I get to float around in a dark, silent, peaceful void for a few glorious minutes. It's like I'm dead, but I can come back to life anytime I like. Then my bladder pings and I stumble to the loo. And for a split second I want there to be a warm back waiting for me on the other side of my bed when I stumble back. I doze off just as the alarm goes.

            Even though the thought ‘how nice it would be to flip a switch and start life over’ flashes on and off again, once in a while.

            Even though I've started to notice how slowly time goes whenever I do get the chance to stop and look at it, in the bottom-right hand corner of my PC.

            And how conversations with Lynette are really only ever about her than me. But that’s OK because things would just tumble out of my mouth and make a mess. Sometimes they’re true; sometimes they’re not – it’s just so I can make it through to the other, less phoney side.

            “How are you?” I ask.

            “Oh, I’m good, thanks,” she says. Her lip quivers. She wants to say more and in that same moment, she changes her mind. It’s gone forever.

            “Project woes?” I ask. I have to make conversation because she bought me a coffee. Because she looks very different today and I’m curious as to why. Perhaps because of Friday just gone, which makes this the Monday morning after the team celebratory drinks. And our tipsy, girly trip to the loo, where she’d threaded her arm through mine, laughing, smiling. Until we’d reached the toilet with the elaborately ornate mirror hanging on the wall like it was fresh out of a fairy tale, and she’d stared into it for a nanosecond before bursting into tears.

            “Yeah, a little bit,” she says. “I’m not sure I know exactly how it’s going to go yet, but its early days.”

            “Sure,” I say and sip my coffee.

            “What did you think of Jason’s speech on Friday?” she asks.

            I vaguely remember something resembling a speech from our Head of Department. I was tired, but the second glass of Rioja helped tune the evening to: relax mode. The team sat huddled around a small, round table telling bad jokes and swapping TV show reviews. The jokes got coarser and the reviews grew heated until Jason shushed us with his deep, silky-smooth voice.

            He announced that we were the best fucking team he’d ever had under him and I’d found that a little patronising, even tipsy. We’d all cheered anyway and he’d bought another round and I remember someone’s hand on my arse, but I didn’t catch who it was and I still feel ashamedly sad about that.

            “I thought it was very nice,” I say. “For a drunken speech.”

            Lynette laughs. “Yeah,” she says. She’s not touched her Danish.  

            In the toilet, I’d scrabbled to find tissue and she didn’t stop crying. I kept asking her what was wrong and she’d said, “Nothing, nothing”, over and over and of course I didn’t believe her, but part of me really wanted to, because something was desperately wrong and obviously devastating.

            She did stop crying and said, “I’m really, really drunk,” and I said, “So am I” and then she’d laughed again and everything was all right.

            “He might be leaving, you know,” she says.

            This is news to me. “Why?”

            She shrugs. “Done all he has here, I guess?” she says.

            She’d collapsed onto a toilet with the seat up and asked me to come inside the cubicle with her and lock the door. My heart sank. Even though I was on the edges of drunk, it wasn’t enough to blot out the tightness of two grown women sharing a toilet cubicle and the metal tissue dispenser digging into my right hip.           

            She’d wrapped her arms around my waist and buried her face into my lower abdomen. I’d felt sick.

            “I’ll get the chance to apply for his job,” she says.

            She’d stopped sniffling and looked up at me, and all I’d seen was rain streaked mascara and overly lip glossed lips, and the sadness that came with ending up pissed and vulnerable in the pub toilet on a Friday night with wafts of pretending to forget come Monday morning.

            She’d told me she’d been fucking Jason for months, but overheard that he’d said he’d love to have his way with me if he could, and that she’s an awful person because that’s the thing that upset her the most.

            Not the fact that he’s married, or that she's just gone the fifth year with her man, who I’ve met only once, and reason is possibly the only decent bloke left on the planet.

            Not the fact that my fantastic project work speaks volumes about my choice to have an uneventful life outside of our department, so unlike her. Never like that.

            Not because any of it matters in the grand scheme of those transcendental-but-better than-anything-you’ve-ever-done-with-your-life things.  

            “Thanks for telling me,” I say. “Maybe I’ll have a shot at it, too?” The question just slips out. I take another sip of coffee.

            She looks at me as she slowly rises to her feet. She stands completely still and silent for a split second longer than it usually takes to stand up and stretch. She asks me if I’d like another coffee.

            I accept. I also ask her to grab me a triple chocolate muffin, too.