I felt a bit nervous before my photography class today, as I’d rashly invited Sara to come round afterwards. I wasn’t sure how I felt about her any more. But then we smiled at each other during the class, and I ‘fell in like’ with her again. The class was fun — we did a still life. There were lots of odd objects in a big box at the front of the room, and we were asked to choose some and put them together into a good composition. It felt like when you had to choose a card at school to help you to write a story. Sometimes it was the first few words of the story, ‘When I got up this morning, I couldn’t believe my eyes when…’ or it was a little scenario — ‘Mrs Waterman, the lady detective, has a cat called Marmalade. Tell the story of a murder through the cat’s eyes.’ There was such excitement in rifling through the cards. You could take your imagination to all these beginnings and let it leap off in whatever direction it wanted. For my still life I chose some dried flowers and a battered old hat. I liked the colours of them, all washed out.

It was odd walking home with Sara, being with her outside of the class, out of context. I talked about rubbish to fill up the silences, stuff on TV, work. I’m not sure if it was very interesting for her. She didn’t say anything about my flat and plonked herself on my sofa as if she’d lived there for years. I didn’t know what she liked to drink, so had bought Coke, lemonade, orange, apple and cranberry juice and mixed fruit squash for her just in case. She wanted juice, so I could offer her three types; we both drank sharp cranberry with clinking ice. She’d brought along an old ‘femme fatale’ video she wanted me to see, Detour, and we put it on straight away. It took the pressure off our conversation.

A few seconds after the film started, she asked me how my day at work had been, and we ended up talking through the whole thing. I told her about the weekend with Red — I felt good to tell someone about it, and she said she was jealous. I ended up telling her things that I haven’t even told Abbie or Zoë, which made me feel a bit guilty, but it felt like she was really listening, and I don’t know her very well yet, and it just felt easy to talk. We talked about my mother a bit, and I even told her about Dan and my seven-year ‘thing’. I’m still not sure what to call it; the word crush doesn’t do it justice. She told me things about herself as well, so it wasn’t just me spilling my guts. She’d had a pretty tough life — she’d been ill when she was little, seriously ill, and had spent most of her school years in hospital. Then when she came home, her father had a breakdown and went into a different type of hospital. I admired her in a new way when I knew all that about her.

She said that she was happy now, and I believed her. She glowed in a contented way, as if nothing could ruffle her. Although when I said she seemed really happy, she laughed and said, ‘You should see me when I’m not feeling so good.’ She said that she’d been ‘in therapy’ for years and that her therapist had saved her life; it sounded a bit over-dramatic to me. I asked her lots of questions about it, what the therapist expected her to say when they first met, whether she had a couch, what she told her she should do… When she commented that I seemed very interested, I told her I was thinking of going. I even told her why I was going, in a roundabout way. She didn’t seem very shocked, which was a relief, but I also felt bit disappointed, I don’t know why. Eventually we talked ourselves out, and she asked me if I had anything sweet, so I made chocolate sauce to go on ice cream: golden syrup and cocoa like Mother used to do it; you just put it in a saucepan and bubble it up a bit. If you get it right, it changes into chocolate toffee. We laughed about silly things while I was cooking. And then when we’d eaten our ice cream, I walked her to the tube. When we said goodbye it felt awkward suddenly, like the end of a first date. I went to kiss her goodbye on the cheek, and she went to hug me instead, so we did a strange kiss/hug.

I called Red when I got home — he asked me to; I think he’s still keeping an eye on me. We told each other about our days. And now I’m lying in bed thinking about my weekend in Brighton. If my fairy godmother meets me outside work one day, with fat rosy cheeks and a white puffball dress, and she says she can grant me a wish, I’d ask her to flick her silver wand and give me my weekend in Brighton all over again, exactly as it was. Maybe I’d have longer in bed with Red on Sunday morning. No — I wouldn’t want to change anything. It couldn’t get any better than that.

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