The more he thought about having bumped into Alain in the days afterwards, the more amazing it started to seem to Mal: like getting a glimpse of a ghost, or finding again that one girl he'd talked to once and then had never seen again. There were so many girls he'd seen once and never again.

But nobody else seemed as excited as he was. He wondered if they'd all forgotten who Alain was, how central he'd been in their lives: then he wondered if maybe, somehow, it was only him who hadn't seen Alain for ages, and everyone else had been going to parties with him and having regular drinks and keeping in touch just like they did with everyone else. Except that nobody he knew really kept in touch very much with anyone else.

He'd gone to the party that Alain and Alain's girlfriend - whose name he'd quickly forgotten - had been going to, but he'd only really gone so that he could use the toilet, and he hadn't stayed for long. It'd been impossible to talk to Alain: Alain was either dancing or kissing his girlfriend, and when he wasn't doing either of those the music was deafening.

"What kind of music was it?" was the only question Steve had asked when Mal had told him about the whole thing.

"I dunno, like, doof-doof music" Mal had replied helplessly.

"Thanks a lot, Mal" Steve had said. Electronic music had become a recent interest of his, so much so that he'd insisted more than once that they "Spice up their music, put more beats in". Eric had asked him if he was going to pay for the necessary equipment, and that had shut him up.

When Mal had told Rona about Alain, she'd just said "So he's still around, huh? That's cool, I guess." Then the 'phone had crackled, and Mal hadn't been sure if they'd been cut off or not, but it had turned out that it was just the 'phone trying to over-compensate for Rona's silence. She'd said all she had to say.

"He doesn't still think he's our manager or some shit, does he?" Eric had asked, and when Mal had said that he didn't think so, and that in fact the subject of the band had never come up in their conversation (though, truth be told, nothing much had come up at all), Eric had just said "Good", and the he'd started counting in the next song at the rehearsal.

Mal had played the song, did a good enough job because he'd done it so many times before, but he'd been thinking of Alain, and Alain's girlfriend, and the strangeness of seeing him after so long a time.