The bloody fish is long dead; you appear to be still very much alive – if a little ruffled by time. But it’s been more than fifteen years, so of course you look older now. Can’t even call yourself a girl anymore, can you? In fact you look a lot like your mum in those grainy photos from the ’80s that you used to keep in fading albums with pressed flowers on the front: big hair and blue eyeshadow and holding Baby You in her arms.

Now the door of the pub across the road with the hangman’s noose on the peeling sign opens to cough out some smokers and the Rolling Stones are blaring out; of course it will make you think, Me and Leah would be there right now, if this was 15 years ago. A group of you probably, none of you with jobs yet but somehow still able to afford endless drinks, talking happy shit that seemed important and not knowing yet what time really meant.

Now look at you – sitting upright in a café with a pot of tea in front of you like you’re something Alan Bennett wrote. Time’s a colossal bitch.

At this moment, as though responding to this thought, you look down at your stomach – still clearly sticking out more than it ought to since the baby – and you’re studying your hands. Who cares? You’re fine, of course.

Leah’s late, like always, that’s what you’re thinking – and of course you don’t even know why you’re here, do you? She didn’t give a damn about me really – or anyone, you’re thinking. It was all her, in the end – she turned everything back to herself, even the day poor Grandma drowned in the pond.

About time to ask yourself: why does she want to meet up when it’s been so long you can’t even remember what it was that made you lose contact in the first place? (Only of course that’s not true – you remember well enough, don’t you? It’s just you’ve moved on.) Goldfish are morons, anyway, that’s well known; 10-second memory, that’s what they say (although maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing sometimes; a fish tank is a fish tank is a fish tank).

And then He was…but none of it was worth it; post-adolescent drama, in that flat with the wonky doorways and the smell of tobacco and old food and the stain on the bathroom carpet and the fleas that hadn’t really been fleas. Leah and Laura’s place; Laura and Leah.

You must have been happy there, once, mustn’t you? Yes, surely somewhere inside – deep, deep inside – you miss that festering flat like you’d miss an arm or a leg, or a piece of your brain that had to be cut out because it was rotten. But somehow the window – the one where you stayed together and grew old, two old women living in the same nursing home and losing your minds together so it’s not so buggeringly lonely – that window slammed shut and a different one opened and one of you crawled out of it.

It wasn’t your fault though, was it? Why did Leah do it? you’re wondering again. Why does she destroy things?

The door of the café swings open now and you glance up, and you’re thinking maybe that selfish bint has finally arrived. But it’s an old tramp with his head done up in a ragged scarf and what look, even from this distance, like they might be piss-stains on his trousers but are probably something worse.

The people at the other table – the ones near the door – are sort of shrinking away like he’s the plague. And he’s not doing very much, just swaying a little from side to side like people do sometimes when they’re starting to dance. Maybe that’s the problem – tramps don’t come into trendy eating establishments with elegantly shabby hand-hewn tables and a wide range of super smoothies and dance. It’s like he’s stumbled into the wrong picture and it’s ruined the composition. (Only sometimes the deliberate accident makes the art – who said that? Someone pretentious, most likely.)

Anyway he’s ruined their illusions, that’s what it is. He’s made them uncomfortable with his in-your-face poverty and his Otherness. That doesn’t belong at lunch, although they wouldn’t want to admit it. Bourgeois cunts, with their lattes and their poached-eggs-on-sourdough. We’re just trying to get on with our lives, they’re thinking. We’re not bad, for God’s sake, we’ve just had a long week and we want to kick back and relax and forget that the world’s a disaster and there’s Donald Trump and Brexit and climate change and war and migrants drowning by the boatload. What’s wrong with that? Only we can’t now – thanks, Mr Tramp. Fuckers.

Except you’re doing the exact same thing, of course, which is strange actually because you’d have been the first person to leap up and talk to him and offer him money or even bloody ask him to move in with you in the old days. Maybe, in fact, you’ve changed too, just like everyone else. But you were the one who was supposed to stay the same. That’s probably Leah’s fault too.

And to this day it’s unclear how it happened. The End. (There’s never really just one ending to something though, is there, when you really think about it? – more a series of endings.) And it’d been a good week, too, for you anyway: you’d got work, and you’d been accepted on that art course or whatever it was for the autumn.

And then you came home that day to find it happening on the floor of the sitting room with Hefner on the stereo – you hated that, dirges you said, you never had the same taste in music – half a bottle of vodka down and your videos lying all over the floor (imagine – people still had videos back then) with some of the boxes covered in a kind of sticky substance. Something had made a mess of Julia Roberts’s face. Shit movie anyway. So was that it? The bloody videos? Is that what did it? I can look down on this scene now, from the future here, like I’m floating up in the corner of the room near the cobweb that neither of us ever got round to brushing away. I could have turned to the spider and said, what do you make of all of this, eight-eyes? Don’t trust them though, spiders. Why do they feel they need so many eyes anyway?

That’s the stupid thing: he was just a man. A man of all things. And you could have forgiven me – should have done – but it must have been the videos, right? That’s what must have pushed you over the edge. But it was only stuff; why dismantle everything over some stuff?

Oh, and the goldfish of course; that too. I can still see it in its murky green tank: blank eyes with nothing behind them, and yet they still manage to look accusing.

“Nice tits.”

The guy’s got grey junkie’s skin and seems to have some teeth missing, but maybe I ought to be grateful for the attention all the same. I almost want to shout back, “you should have seen them 10 years ago,” only he’s already weaved off to wherever it is people like him go.

And now he’s distracted me from the scene across the street in the café. I go back to trying to study your face again from the safety of my spot behind the bus shelter – to imagine again what you might be thinking – but you’ve gotten up. Have you thought better of it and left after coming all the way down here? And it took a year between deciding I really had to write that email and actually bringing myself to do it, and maybe this is the only chance I’ll get.

But no – you’re still there. You’ve just gotten up and walked over to the swaying tramp. You put your hand on his arm and you’re saying something to him. Bleeding heart. Always had to be fixing people; fixing me, even – or at least you tried.

But the winter sun is shining in through the window now, just at the place you’re standing, like it knew, and I imagine I can almost see your eyes. I wonder if your little girl has the same blue eyes as you, or whether she has someone else’s eyes.

I’ve dressed carefully today, and maybe in some sad way it’s because I want you to know I’m doing alright, money-wise in any case. Just so you don’t think I need you – just so there’s no mistake. Heels, even. And a red Alexander McQueen coat (it was eBay, but still).

Only now I wish I looked the way you’d remember me: black dress over torn jeans and hair long and all over my face and barely any make-up, just mascara and the merest hint of messy eyeliner (not artfully messy, just because I couldn’t do it properly). You might not like how I am now – all carefully highlighted hair and red lipstick and sinews. I know how I look – after all, I’m the one who did it – but you were never the sort of person to be impressed by appearances anyway. Look at you – you’ve barely bothered to brush your hair.

Now you’re handing the tramp something and you’re giving him a bit of a pat on the shoulder and he’s shuffling off. Saint. And that ray of sunshine has disappeared behind a cloud, and I become aware again of the street sounds in the background: a car horn gives a long burst, someone shouts “Oi, come back!,” a baby’s crying, a seagull’s screaming, a bus roars past with a warm rush of wind full of dust particles that I breathe in and it blocks my view of you for a moment. But it’s all happening outside of what really matters, because I’m still looking at you and the music’s still coming out of the pub – Ruby Tuesday. You said I listened to music too much on my own and I never let the real world in. But I’m not afraid to be alone, I always told you that.

I am frightened though, is that different?

Was it you? Or me? Or was it something else altogether? Why did you leave, over some videos and a goldfish for crying out loud?

I take a step forward, to cross the street and join you in the café, but then a car comes out of nowhere and honks its horn at me and it actually clips the side of my hovering foot. For a second there’s the shock of the contact with the hot tyre, and I see the face of the old guy in the hat inside; half alarmed, half accusing (stupid bloody woman), and then he’s gone and I’m left with a sharp pain in my ankle. People look at me with their mouths hanging open but they say nothing and I’d like them to die.

But maybe that wasn’t how I let you down after all, and maybe I’ve known it all along. A mistake – that’s what it was. She’ll forgive me. Laura’ll forgive me because that’s what she does. She’ll understand that I wasn’t ready today in the end. One day maybe I will be.

I turn around and start walking, and I find I’m actually swallowing back sobs so I keep my head down because women in their thirties don’t walk down the street in broad daylight crying. I blink at the tears that are fighting to come out and for a moment it causes something to flash in front of my eyes, like an orb breaking through for a second from another plane of existence. (Or it could be my body has chosen this moment to have a stroke.)

Then behind me I hear, “Leah?”

So I stop dead and a woman with a pushchair behind me tuts and swerves to get by and she and her toothless pink baby both give me the Evil Eye.

I close my eyes and turn around, and when I open them it’s your trainers I see first: all scuffed and your jeans baggy but not the fashionable kind of baggy and Jesus does that matter? What does it say about me that I’ve seen you after all this time and all I can think about is your jeans? No wonder you left.

You didn’t leave me.

Now I let my eyes travel up your body to meet yours; totally blue – no little hint of any other specks of colour, just blue. I look at you and you look back at me and I know one of us has to say something at some point and that probably it should be me, but nothing seems adequate.

Finally, “I’m sorry about the goldfish.”

You’re silent for a moment.

Then you say: “Screw the goldfish.”

And I’ve known it all along really, haven’t I? What I should have been apologising for is everything else.

Your little mouth pulls itself into just the slightest smile, and I can see those tiny, neat teeth of yours. You reach out your arms.

Yes, screw it. Screw the goldfish.