The Same People

“Is now all right?” Gethin asked.

I looked at the book beside my plate. “Yes.”

“I spoke to them at the café. The people who were at the hatch.”

I let him continue.

“I told them I’d made the joke easy to go on with, and that it wasn’t fair to make where you dance a reason to treat you as if you didn’t belong.”

He stopped. I could hear traffic at his end.

“Where are you?”

“Outside my flat. I walked home.”

“Go in. You don’t need to give the whole street this conversation.”

A key scraped in a lock. I heard the door close, then his steps.

“I didn’t want to put it off,” he said.

“You haven’t. What happened?”

The music man had said that he had only meant a joke. Gethin had said he knew; he had meant one too, and that was why he was…