 Someone like you. Read by Julian Rindtutt. Beer? Yes. Beer. I gave the order, and the waiter brought the bottles and two glasses. We poured out her own, tipping the glasses and holding the tops of the bottles close to the glass. Cheers! I said. He nodded. We lifted our glasses and drank. It was five years since I had seen him, and during that time he had been fighting the war. He had been fighting it right from the beginning up to now, and I saw at once how he had changed. From being a young, bouncing boy, he had become someone old and wise and gentle. He had become gentle like a wounded child. He had become old like a tired man of seventy years. He had become so different and he had changed so much that at first it was embarrassing for both of us, and it was not easy to know what to say. He had been flying in France in the early days, and he was in Britain during the battle. He was in the western desert when we had nothing, and he was in Greece and Crete. He was in Syria, and he was at Habania during the rebellion. He was at Alamone. He had been flying in Sicily and in Italy, and then he had gone back and flown again from England. Now he was an old man. He was small, not more than five feet six, and he had a pale, wide-open face which did not hide anything and a sharp pointed chin. His eyes were bright and dark. They were never still unless they were looking into your own. His hair was black and untidy. There was a whisper of it always hanging down over his forehead. He kept pushing it back with his hand. For a while we were awkward and did not speak. He was sitting opposite me at the table, bleeding forward a little, drawing lines on the dew of the cold beer glass with his finger. He was looking at the glass pretending to concentrate upon what he was doing, and to me it seemed as though he had something to say, but that he did not know how to say it. I sat there and picked nuts out of the plate and munched them noisily, pretending that I did not care about anything, not even about making a noise while eating. Then without stopping his drawing on the glass and without looking up, he said quietly and very slowly, Oh God, I wish I was a waiter or a whore or something. He picked up his glass and drank the beer slowly and all at once in two swallows. I knew now that there was something on his mind and I knew that he was gathering courage so that he could speak. Let's have another, I said.