OLD FRIEND

You’re sitting in a pub in Leeds, near the railway station, killing time before your connection when a man gets up from a group of four men sitting near you and comes over with a smile on his face.
As most people do, you feel yourself slightly on the defensive when a stranger approaches. But he smiles still, and doesn’t seem threatening, and then he says, “Hello” and then says your name.
You move from defensiveness to that horrible feeling of being at a disadvantage, and risking being rude, so you don’t say you don’t know him, you just say, “Hello!” back, a little too brightly and hope that something will jog your memory.
He asks you how things are back where you live, naming the place, and then asks if you are still doing that sport that you always used to do. The nicer he is, as if you are someone he’s missed very much, the less you want to admit to not remembering him. So you fake a conversation and ask the same questions back at him, and so it goes for a few minutes.
Then you see the time on the clock over the bar and you say, “I’m sorry, I’ve got to get a train,” and he tells you it was lovely catching up, and that he hopes you stay well, shakes your hand goes back to his table with the other three men.
You gather up your bags, and as you straighten up you take a sneaky photo on your mobile, so you can share it with friends and family as someone is bound to remember who he is, and you won’t feel so bad for forgetting.
You’ve left it a bit late and have to rush for your train, so don’t get a chance to pull up the photo and share it to social media until you’re sat on the train, bags stowed away, and its lumbering out of the station with a screech of wheels.
For a while, you sit there and look at the photo, but you don’t post it on social media. You don’t send it to any friends. What’s the point, when in the photo there are only three men around the table, and your old friend is not one of them.