It had only been two months since I last saw her, but there was something different about her. It wasn’t the tan, too natural-looking to fit in with the other tans in the room, but something in the way she stood up, in the measure of her words, and I feared this was a new distance between us – a declared dislike – which we would struggle to cross.

‘But this text you sent me doesn’t exist,’ I said. ‘Why didn’t you get in touch when you didn’t hear from me?’

‘I thought you were pissed off with me. I sent you a text from my new phone.’

‘I thought you’d disowned me. The way you ran off like that. I thought you were dead or you’d disowned me. Jesus, I’m so pleased to see you.’

‘You don’t seem pleased.’

‘I’m furiously pleased. How long have you been here?’

‘Two days.’

I was looking at her profile while she stared straight ahead. She was doing her best to seem nonchalant, but I could see something else shaking beneath her straight face.

‘And have you quit your job? I called them too. They said you weren’t working for them any more.’

‘Yeah. Sort of.’

‘Sort of?’

‘I just— I just swore at my boss and stormed out of the office and haven’t been back.’

I looked at her and didn’t say anything.

‘Don’t look at me like that,’ she said. ‘You’re just as bad as me.’

‘I’ve had the same job for the last ten years.’

‘Exactly,’ she said.

*

It had been stupid of her to burn her bridges there. The job had been administrative, it had been stupefying and enraging whenever there was an away-day, or a lecture addressed as if to children on digital innovation, but there were many more boring and more difficult jobs she could have done – and thank God the organisation existed. Nowhere that had to employ people was perfect. She looked after the public-funding relationships with a few art galleries, advised artists who were looking for money for their next projects. It was silly to wish she was sitting on the other side of the table, when she had happily retired from creating ‘art’. What nonsense it was to waste time thinking about the galleries, when you could just make things and sell them on the street, when any idiot with enough working capital could make fifty thousand pounds a go in exchange for a few intense weeks’ work doing up and selling a decrepit flat to some lazy twenty-something whose parents were buying it for them. That was satire, that was art.