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Cliche or not, it feels like they’ve never been apart. The ease of it spooks Adam a little, as though if they left the pub and headed down to the woods, they might stumble their way into their old dens again, find the same resigned frog, find their last lot of game pieces still waiting to be moved.
Touches of grey hair, shadows of scars, new names worn with lightness. Same old jokes, old ease between them all. No-one asking how come Dog is still here, wagging his tail with furious joy at the reunion.
‘What do you mean, you’re a dentist?’ He demands of Wensley, who laughs. ‘You were meant to be doing maths or something.’
‘Teeth are sort of like a chart,’ Wensley protests.
‘Eew! They are not!’ Pepper chimes in. ‘They’re three dimensional for a start.’
‘You can too have a three dimensional chart.’
Adam hardly dares to blink. He’s scared of what he might see if he closes his eyes. He doesn’t remember time being quite this thin before. Doesn’t quite remember why he knows anything about the properties of time, comes to that.
‘You ok?’ Brian asks, through a mouthful of peanuts. He nods and then Pepper’s trying to distract him, talking about working for Natural England, and Brian’s raving about Surfers Against Sewage and it’s a long while and a lot of jokes before anyone asks him ‘what do you do now, Adam?’
It turns out all three of them have come across his comics. They’d all had an inkling that the stories were familiar, that it felt like something half remembered from a dream. Especially the one about the angel and the demon and the end of the world.
The conversation wavers to a halt, and none of them dare ask how much anyone else remembers.