Hilary Fannin: He was a handsome, gentle boy, a dreamer with a practical streak

I waited for him in the first-floor café where we’d arranged to meet. He’d texted to say he was running late. I didn’t mind; my table was next to a long window overlooking the street below, and I’m never bored when there is life to observe.

I hadn’t seen my friend for a number of years. He is an actor who lives in LA. I’ve never been to that city, so I find it hard to imagine his life there, alone in an apartment in a pleasant part of town. In the past, he has described spells of self-improvement and casual work while waiting for the phone to ring. I don’t say that derisively; waiting is the ongoing fate of most actors.

From my perch I watched him approach through the gloom of late afternoon. He wore a peaked cap and dark glasses in a circular frame. I stood to greet him and, after a mystifying conversation about milk percentages, went to the counter to buy him a latte.

I remembered him so clearly: a handsome, gentle, diligent boy in a bluey-grey duffle coat, a dreamer with an eminently practical streak

“I rarely allow myself,” he said, lifting the glass cup to his mouth. His accent has changed, his voice now accessorised by a slight American drawl.

Hilary Fannin: I now accept I’ll never be a ‘high-net-worth individual’

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Hilary Fannin: Ignoring the elephant in the room – and its enormous erection

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Hilary Fannin: I coveted the freedom other women’s money bought them

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She found receipts for underwear – but her husband hadn’t bought them for her

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We ran though the bones of the past few years. He asked me about my family, my work. I inquired after the health of the parent he had come home to visit.

“Was Covid a lonely time?” I asked, as the afternoon darkened. Without answering directly, he told me that during lockdown he had spent his afternoons hiking in Griffith Park near the Hollywood sign.

In the heart of Los Angeles, Griffith Park is the largest municipal park with an urban wilderness area in the United States. Situated in the eastern Santa Monica Mountains, it is a natural habitat for native bobcats. Those beautiful and elusive creatures, with their glamorous coats and kohl-ringed eyes, enjoy, much like the celebrity residents of that particular metropolis, lives of privacy and protection.

“There’s a mountain lion in the park,” my friend said as we left the café and walked through Trinity College.

The lion, a tagged and monitored lone male, apparently roams the oak-studded hills unfettered, his day-to-day life concealed by his instinct for evasion.

We passed a knot of young students, arms linked, whispering and laughing, their platform heels hitting the cobblestones. The cacophony of their gloriously exaggerated brilliant and injured lives echoed around them.

“Do you know that next January it will be 40 years since we all first met,” my friend said.

I remembered the small theatre on Dublin’s Serpentine Avenue where, for a year or two during the 1980s, a cohort of hopeful young actors, of whom he and I were two, met for classes every weekend. The school – and I’m not sure whether, by today’s standards, that’s an entirely accurate description – was staffed by working actors. The workshops were practical, the camaraderie strong, our dreams of success tempered by a climate of emigration and economic frailty. Despite the unpromising times, many friendships and even some careers were initiated in that shabby but memorable place.

“Forty years?”

I remembered him so clearly: a handsome, gentle, diligent boy in a bluey-grey duffle coat, a dreamer with an eminently practical streak.

Back in the broken days of the 1980s, impatient for the future, I couldn't have imagined the people we would become

I recalled a bunch of us sprawled on torn banquettes in some dark bar or other, speculating about our futures, so unknown, so full of possibilities, and how, later that night, at a bus stop in the rain, he had earnestly advised me to invest in a pension.

“I’m 20!” I protested.

“Yes, but you won’t always be.”

After exiting Trinity, we ended up outside a bookshop on Grafton Street. Looking at the window display, I felt momentarily overwhelmed by all the new titles behind the glass. Sometimes it feels like there’s no end to striving, no end to pushing on, no end to trying to compete and be heard. Though maybe that’s a good thing, maybe it keeps us alive.

At my suggestion, we went to a bar, just for one, even though I knew I had work to do. We sat on high stools, talked quietly about the past, stirring our drinks with recyclable paper straws. My tonic, I noticed, was infused with thyme.

Back in the broken days of the 1980s, impatient for the future, I couldn’t have imagined the people we would become, not that we have really changed so much. Nor could I have anticipated the feeling I have now that past and present are almost concurrent, the gap between the decades closing infinitesimally with each passing year until memory and the existing moment collide.