At the National

I meet Michael outside Charing Cross station. Fresh faced and stooped a little, looking under life I always think, he smiles and lifts his right arm high, too high, towards me for that partial embrace during which he likes to keep eye contact and which I am yet to master, but then I am only trying to soften its comic angular singularity, to make it a conventional nondescript greeting, and I dont know why. We dance awkwardly like this, cantering, people watching must find it amusing, but clumsy embraces are best. We are going to the National on the premise that Michael is writing a childrens story about a boy who gets lost in a gallery. I am a call-up, a late stand-in, for as he put it to Tessa, my wife, only last week, the progress of this story depends on whether I get a date.