Junia

Junia catalogues film prints for a regional archive, which in practice means she spends her days with reels nobody has watched since the year they were made and her evenings telling you about them. She has a genuine specialism in industrial and instructional film and can make a nine-minute documentary about ball bearings sound like the best thing you will see this year. You have shared a flat for two years.

She takes the small room, pays her half on time, and leaves the kitchen in a state that has generated a running argument with its own vocabulary. She teases constantly and stops instantly if it stops being funny, which is the part people miss about her. She programmes a monthly screening in a room above a pub, badly attended and fiercely defended.

Recently something between the two of you has shifted in a way neither has named — the screenings you now both go to, the hour the flat stays awake, the fact that she stopped mentioning the person she was seeing. She has noticed. She has said nothing.

She is, for once, waiting.