There was no ease of an introduction to Rena; there were just the simple contrasts of light and shade, and all the things that came between the day before things changed, and the day that things changed.

I sat on the two-seater couch that was pushed up against the three-seater, the bottom line of a capital L shape, and I imagined Rena sat in a pair of white knickers and a candy-stripe vest, reading the bottle of something that was called ‘Tangerine Dream’ and you’re somewhere between the two of us; a printing mistake.

I didn’t know Rena, she was just a customer at the café where I worked who came in most evenings around six and ordered black coffee, always leaving two or three mouthfuls, and I remember noting how she never seemed to make a mess, her table was always a quick one to clean, and I found this an endearing quality.

After two weeks of seeing nothing of Rena at her usual six in the evening, she came in on a Monday, just after the morning rush, and I thought she looked more tanned than usual, but sweet looking, like a glazed apricot. She didn’t order a coffee, but asked for the manager, and he took her into the small staff room in the back. When I walked past the staff room to unpack some more medium-sized cups, I noticed that the small round window had misted up, and I felt as though I were on a ship, and I thought about how circular things were working in a café: saucers, cups, the rounds of cookies.

When Rena came back out, she had on one of the same red aprons as me, only hers had that new and unreliable gleam to it. I could see my face in her apron, it bled in the creases: and it was what some people might mistake for a holy apparition, and she looked at me like I was a martyr. I in turn studied her like she was a new girl at school; she had that lost in the playground look, and two bare knees that reminded me of blunt ends of chalk.

My eyes and my fingers pointed to my name badge as I said, ‘Frances’ and I poured a cup of coffee for a balding man who said, ‘Thanks Frances’ as I handed him his order, and that creeped me out a little, because I don't like it when customers use my name. Rena didn’t have a name badge yet, so when she introduced herself it was in the sane manner that people use when they are outside of work, when they remember who they really are. Rena looked sweet.  In her apron she looked like a girl playing dress-up. And her apricot skin fell in faint lines like a screwed up sweet wrapper, one of those opaque ones from a box of Quality Street.           Rena was quite obviously older than me, and yet I felt moved to act motherly towards her; an unsavoury motherly instinct that felt somewhat misplaced.

‘Coffee, black?’ I asked her

‘Ah, you remembered!’ She smiled, and she still looked like someone who was on the wrong side of the counter, maybe just researching for some book about urban cafés that she was writing, but I didn’t want to pry too much. When Gary (my manager) came out from the back, he rubbed Rena’s arm like someone would to console someone, only it was for a little too long, and I had long grown used to tucking my arse against the counter whenever he was around, avoiding any busy, stray hands.

Later in the day I heard Rena crying as she started to restock the blueberry muffins. She used the paint-brush end of her ponytail to dab her eyes dry. I felt that maybe this was a job too taxing for her first day, so I suggested that she check milk temperatures instead, and made a joke about not crying over spilt milk, making an agonizing smile as I did.

At the end of her first shift Rena took two toilet rolls from the staff-room toilets and put them in her gingham print Eastpak bag, which I imagined she had probably had since her college days. Sewn onto the front pocket of her bag was a Weezer patch, and it was a nice glimpse into the clutching past of a middle-aged woman, and I thought if I could bite into her, right as she looked then, she would have youth running through her as endlessly as the word printed inside a stick of seaside-rock.

Rena was quick to acquire the elements of the lost-tragic-teen, so popular in those eighties brat-pack films. How hopeless and too old for the part she looked, and I thought of her holding those toilet-rolls, tearing sheets from them, and sobbing into them, sobbing into them in a nightly ritual of self-deprivation.

Sometimes after work I’d go for a drink with whoever was working that day, but today I wanted to get home quickly to see if my rabbit Tea-pot was doing okay, because she had been poorly. I gave Rena a hug, mainly because she was just stood there doing nothing like new people at work do whilst they wait for orders, and that made me feel uncomfortable. Hugging her was like what hugging a giant candle might feel like. She watched me as I unchained my bicycle from the lamppost outside of work, and she waited until Gary had locked up, waiting there like she was missing something, and the way her hands were so tightly packed in her pockets, made me think that she had all her fingers crossed. Gary offered her a lift home, and I felt relieved when they had both gone, because I felt like I had had one of those days where I felt like a bystander in my own life.

That night as I settled into my flat, I noticed that my answering-machine was beeping, and a lava-red number two flashed at me. The first message was from my boyfriend Sam who was living and working in Berlin over the summer. I had been missing him like hell, even though I thought that I'd be fine.  Since he had been away I felt softened somehow, maybe how people feel after dealing with a great loss, as they are forced into a reflection of character and realise how much time had now become lost time. I had so much time, and so much happiness waiting to become real again: suspending it, and craving it, and feeling so much simpler and rounded at the edges for wanting it.  I missed him so much. I listened to Sam’s message and felt his voice tremble over my skin, and I closed my eyes tightly because I could imagine things more intensely in the dark. I played his message over, four times, and felt my toes stretch out in points as he said again and again that he loved me. As I opened my eyes, I felt the distance expand between the two of us, and I felt a sudden weakness: I felt fallible, I felt chanced in an ocean; a battling message in a bottle that began to lose all its grandeur the day it set sailed, the day it began to try to mean something sincere, to someone else.

That evening I made dinner for Tea-Pot and I, (we ate a lot of the same things). She would eat the raw cast-offs of my disastrous soups, and I think she felt that she ate like a queen. I on the other hand couldn't wait for Sam to come home, as he was the talented cook of the house-hold (or, at least compared to me he was. I had learnt ‘cookery’ from the school’s P.E. / Food Technology teacher, whose one fitting criteria for cookery, was I am sure, her knife and fork earrings).

The second message was from Rena, asking if I’d like to go out tonight. I guess Gary had given her my number, which I thought was a little odd, but she probably would need it for work related things. I didn’t really want to go out, but her message sounded more like a plea than a casual request; her voice reminded me of the sound of cellotape being peeled away quickly. I couldn’t really figure Rena out. I thought she was a weird one. And maybe for that reason alone I decided to meet up with her. I was also pretty sure that she was screwing Gary, and I really needed to keep this job, and that meant keeping Gary on side, so if that required me being friends with Rena, then maybe that was something I would have to get used to (and better at).

Before I left my flat, I checked on Tea-pot one last time.  She looked like she was feeling much better, and she nuzzled at my finger with her twitching nose. I sliced up a carrot and placed it in her bowl, along with some water, and closed the front door as gently as I could, because the flat where I live is a soundboard for echoes.

I met Rena in town, at a jazz-bar that served drinks in cut-glass glasses, with thin black straws; and our glasses sat like wild children upon black napkins that left a five-point frame of wettest-black as we picked them up.

We sat on stools at the bar, and let our legs dangle like pieces of overcooked spaghetti. I noted that each time Rena sipped her drink, she closed her eyes, and the eyelashes on her upper lids curled inwards in motions of contrary waves. Her fingers clasped her glass like those of an experienced lover, and I sat watching her, waiting for an opening for myself to become, all of a sudden, useful. Her voice rasped and pulled at the hairs on my arms as she spoke, and I felt that maybe she was there to challenge the peaceful plateau that my, ‘existential dilemma’ had become. I felt like I was beginning to wear the wooden cladding of the bar like an overcoat. I felt hot and flustered, and too energetically young to feel at home anywhere at that moment, least of all there.

I thought about how butterfly wings are decorated with scrapbook-eyes. I thought about what Rena’s intentions were, and how beautiful she could look when her head turned in profile, to a soft, low light.

In the toilets we checked our make-up. I applied lipstick and sucked at my finger and then looked at the red-ring that hesitated around my finger’s middle; a less than useful rubber-ring. Rena leaned against the stalls and swallowed a pill, and passed her hand across to me in a loose fist that dropped an ecstasy tablet into my palm like the most unromantic valentine. I felt no obligation to play along with this improvisation, but the little that I could remember of adolescent peer-pressure had found me in that chilly ladies bathroom. The pill fell down my throat as my head turned uncomfortably underneath the taps of the sink, and my mouth felt warm, as though I had been to the dentist and had swished that minty-pink liquid around it for an uncomfortably long time.

Back in a high-school science class that was hyped up in a false controversy, I remember studying the key topic – drugs – as though it were the word equivalent of swearing at your parents. We watched an educational video that was set to steer our lives clear of drugs forever. But what I remember most clearly, is the song ‘Live Forever’ being played in the background of a report on the death of a sixteen-year-old ecstasy victim, whose life support machine was about to be switched off, and at that moment understanding what my English teacher had meant when he had tried to explain the term, ‘irony’  and feeling that irony could also mean the same thing as feeling sick to the teeth, and that drugs were something hinted at with mild sarcasm, nothing deadlier.

Rena’s mascara had left black prints on her face much like the process of lithography. She had been crying, and her hair had fallen, and everything tightened about her had become undone; and this felt like a long outwards breath, a sigh of relief, something real and deliberate. A surprise birthday party that you feign surprise for.

She asked me to keep a secret for her, because it couldn’t be a secret yet, not until it wasn’t a lump in her throat anymore, and I wondered since when had I accepted any responsibility for this woman’s conscience, and maybe this was what happened after you had poured someone a certain amount of coffees: Congratulations! To whom do I write my sincere thanks to?

I miss you Sam.

Rena’s lacquered lips muted as she used all her concentration to unearth something from her handbag, a place where I decided she must keep her secrets, although her mouth looked big enough and brazen enough to store many. In her hands she held her mobile-phone like a piece of soap, or a plate hot out of the oven, and her hands were finding it hard to keep a grip of things: of her phone, of this entire day, of how she would feel about me, a minute from this moment now, as her phone illuminated my boyfriend Sam’s number, and her lump would leap from her throat to mine, and I would feel that everything had been exaggerated, and that chemically this was nothing more than a horrible state of irony composed for a purpose beyond just hurting me.

Rena gave me nothing more. I was in on no secret. I felt like something that was part of the process of lithography; a transfer, a print, a duplicate, a secondary afterthought that had lost it's true meaning along the way somewhere, something that is now nothing more than a rumour, stuck and rooted like a weed, that finds it hard to be acknowledged as a plant, too, because this all feels like some strange joke that I just don't understand the punch-line to.