The Filter.

'Eight months of vineyards, swimming, and parties with hippies,' she says. I reply,

- What more could you want?

- Indeed. Well, actually I don't like wine too much. It's OK. I know a bad wine, but can't tell a good one. And hippies . . .

- Hippies.

- The hippie stereotype pales in comparison to the dudes I met.

- An inadequate stereotype?

- I'd say so. The stereotype provides the model, blind enthusiasm does the rest. And despite what they might say, it's not cool.

- Not cool.

- Not cool at all. Regular people wind me up, just think what an exaggerated stereotype does.

- Happy to be home then?

- I'm not home now, I'm away again.

- London's your adopted home.

- I suppose. Yes, happy to be home.

A chocolate sprinkle from her cappuccino, one grain of sawdust chocolate, has found its way to the corner of her mouth. She's looking down at the table, through the table, as if remembering something. Something table-related? I can't be sure. Something from those eight lost months spent with the hippies, swimming? I will never know. Our time apart had not been a time apart, as such. We are not people who could maintain the notion of a distance between us, because we were never together. There is no us. We were an I and a she (from my perspective), in bubbles. In the same city, same room, or merely same language, we had always been apart, unremarkably apart. Our new-found togetherness is strange, as if we are starting again from where things left off, even though nothing ever existed to leave off from. Why were we here? Probably because I asked if she wanted a coffee. People do that in London, right? Meet people who are tragically no more than acquaintances? It's just a sequence of coffees with acquaintances, nothing more. That's what we're doing. It's so banal and yet so breathtakingly significant.

And I say,

- I suppose God gave us a filter so that people don't say things like this but, you were my favourite.

The guy reading The Guardian twitches. He must be crying with laughter inside. Pity me, friend, or jump in and save me. I'm doing that thing that we always regret not doing - seizing, leaping, falling. And why do we not do it? Because it's awful. It feels awful; it sounds awful. No collection of words can get around the glaring ridiculousness of this very moment. No sequence of words can arise like a magical formula to make it better. It's like choosing between a handgun, shotgun or cannon: if you're standing in the wrong place, you're going down.

She peers though the table some more. Lips parted. A tiny smile . . . is this a smile? Perhaps. But her cheeks have something of a smile-adorning quality; she is always somewhat smiling.

- Do you believe in God?

Her eye on mine now. not staring. A soft eye. Not darting between left eye and right eye like people do when they're incredibly intrigued by what you're saying. Just her eyes, doing their thing. If her gaze were a car, it would be going at about twenty.

- No (I say this without much of the conviction I'd hoped to express.)

- So where does the filter come from?

- I don't know. Where does life come from?

- Don't get too profound on me now, explain the filter.

- My filter's evidently faulty.

- That doesn't bode well for the credibility of the things you say.

- Thanks.

- Who knows what might come out. (She tilts her head slightly.)

- I realise the danger.

- Maybe that's enough to disprove God.

- People ignoring the filter?

- People sensing the filter and then blasting straight though it.

- You're not going to let me get away with this are you.

- But God gave you free will, huh?

- Worst mistake he ever made.

- So is it you or God that filters your words?

- What do you think?

- It's not God.

- I think, therefore there is a God?

- That's a circle.

- I say the wrong things, therefore i am?

- That's stupid.

- Lacan?

- That's a God complex.

- Society?

- No such thing.

- Socially acceptable labour time?

- Completely irrelevant.

- Historical materialism?

- You can take your syllables some place else.

- My syllables will be my undoing.

She paused, then said,

- Once when I escaped the hippies and walked out to the vineyard near my cousin's, I managed to convince myself that I was in Italy. Have you been to Italy? Me neither. But I'm sure it was just like Italy. Rows of grapes, all parallel snaking across the hills, paths occasionally splitting them up. The sun was setting and I sat there long enough for the shadow, cast by a wooden trailer, to run from the path I had come from, past the tree where I was sat, narrowly missing my legs, to the barn where my Aunt was making dinner. Pizza of course.

- Of course.

- I became totally convinced that it was Italy: the Mafia were circling the town demanding protection money; Salvatore the fugitive is hiding in the hills, waiting for revenge; the young boys were trying to enlist in the army (it's the olden days and there's a war on). And my sister, who is older and luckier than I am, is fretting because she hasn't heard from Alfonso -

- Alfonso?

- Alfonso - in over a week. He's only twenty, the same as my sister. He rushed off with his machine gun with such excitement. At the end of the first week she received seven letters, all at once. He had written every day, but the post was only delivering once a week around these parts, where only the wine and Mafia operated. The second week she received five letters. Apparently Alfonso was in the trenches, in the cold mountainous regions at the French border. After a month the postman came with nothing but rations for the family, and my sister is heartbroken. She's been crying into his clothes for three days. She's stopped eating pizza. But spring has come to Italy and it's one of those curiously over-hot spring days that reminds you how drastically the heights of the seasons differ, and I'm sitting watching the trailer's shadow, waiting for pizza, thinking of my sister and the whereabouts of her quiet boyfriend. I wonder if someday I will have a boyfriend who I can cry over, who can nearly destroy me with his lack of presence, or uncertainty of life. Whether he will break my heart by finding something special in another girl which for some reason isn't in me, and I can commit myself to finding out what that thing is, mimicking it and winning him back. Because, for me, Italy is beautiful and empty. The shadow would sweep along the track, narrowly missing my leg, and depart as the day cooled.

The small grain of chocolate is still at the corner of her mouth. I almost use this moment to draw her attention to it, but refrain from doing so.

Some people are advocates of the working filter. Some people are not. Some encourage a rupture and then are appalled at the result. Some mirror it with a simultaneous breakdown in their own filter mechanism. Some laugh. Some change the subject. Some embrace the subject. Some are lost for words. Some forget that words need not mean anything. Some forget that words can mean something. Some talk of wine, war, and pizza, and dedicate their afternoon to keeping you wondering. I suppose that's why God gave us cappuccinos.