It’s like you’re walking out in the fields by the river, nowhere round here, and you meet this really pretty girl (you can’t say “girl”, but then again this is in your head, so you can say “girl”), only you know she died years ago. So you smile and wave from a distance – a small wave of the fingers, not a big Hallo! wave, and the smile is the sort where you flash it and then look briskly away so as not to catch the reaction, productive as it might be of almost limitless grades of embarrassment, and then you walk on past (it happens every day) and the moment of blind terror recedes so rapidly that you forget you felt it. Anyway, that’s what you do, but she stops walking and calls you by name. Of course, in her position, there’s no need to rush (being dead she’s got nowhere special to be), and possibly not much reason for embarrassment either. And there’s no ignoring that call: there are limits to the levels of rudeness that are socially acceptable, even when you’re dealing with people many years dead. Also your heart is screaming and yelling at you not to be an idiot. So you stop, and turn back, feign the shock of belated recognition, rub your eyes as though to perform the number everyone knows as “I’m tired and got distracted”, focus on the dead girl and say, “My God, it’s you!” And then you call her by name. “I haven’t seen you in… it’s got to be years!”

“No, well, I’ve been dead,” she says, smiling.

“My God,” you say, “I don’t believe it! How long has it been?”

“It’s been a while.”

By now, willy-nilly, your paths have brought you so close that you have to stop walking or you’ll collide, and by not stopping quite soon enough, you’ve now ended up a little too close for the mere quick hello of old acquaintances in a hurry to get somewhere (and anyway, where could you be in a hurry to get, out walking in the fields by the river, and where could she be in a hurry to get, having been dead and buried for years?). And so some sort of physical contact is now surely inevitable, and it’s up to you to decide what sort it’s going to be (the living surely have to take the initiative in these cases): a genteel handshake that gives nothing away? those awful pretend kisses within earshot of each cheek, those emptiest gestures at the absence of contact? or a real kiss – just a social kiss, of course, old friends, except that the boundaries of those things are terribly ill-defined, and is it really wise to re-open that particular can of worms?

You kiss. God, her lips are cold.

“So, how’ve you been?” she asks.

Tell her.

Thinking all the while: truthfully, it’s not as if you knew her that well – not really knew, it was just being the friend of a friend in a group of friends, that was how it started out, so you hung out quite a bit, just in the same crowd, and though of course you were completely dazzled by her pretty much from the first meeting, you tended to keep your thoughts (and certainly your hands) to yourself, give or take the odd party where everyone’s memories were sufficiently hazy afterwards that you really couldn’t be sure what had been said or done by whom, if anything. So it’s strange that it should be you two that meet now, rather than, say, that boyfriend of hers, the faintly odious Owen – irritating self-satisfied man, well, that’s not altogether fair, but – it wasn’t anything very specific about him, just him in general; you know, sometimes you just take against people. Anyhow, here she is, for whatever reason, you, and not the odious Owen, and you’re walking along, chatting and thinking, and her cold and dead and right there at your side after all these years.

And by now, what with the walking and chatting and thinking, you’ve found yourself, before you knew it, at her open grave – no longer in the churchyard as it was when she was buried (and you were at the funeral), but in the open air, tucked away in a slight dip in the hillside, with the river snaking away below and to your right. You’re hanging back, which is understandable enough, and she turns round with a bright smile: “Coming?” Peering into the darkness of the grave you can see that a set of rough steps have been cut into the earth, digging into the hillside; there may be some sort of rock passage ahead, or perhaps a door, or just a sheer wall, it’s impossible to tell without going down. But you’ve heard the stories, and you know that if you go with her, cross over into the land of the dead, a hundred years will have passed on your return, and all the faces will be the faces of strangers. And likely enough, the memory of your time there will melt away all too quickly (the poets used to ask, “where are the snows of yesteryear?”), and when you try to tell anyone about it your tongue will refuse to move. But then again, you might think to yourself, what’s a hundred years, when the faces are almost all strangers’ faces anyway? How many people have you really known? And who wants to remember everything? You have to live in the present, after all.

And then it’s as if you realise that something’s not quite the same about her, apart from the inevitable change of manner that will come over someone when they’ve been dead for years, as well as the lack of a shadow, more obvious now that the sun has come out; and you turn to her with a small smile of your own, as though it’s a gesture of recognition and acceptance, because after all it is a good likeness, and you say, “It’s not really you, is it?” And she laughs and says, “Now that’s just male vanity.”

And so you’re standing irresolute on the lip of the barrow, and she’s beside you, waiting with that particular kind of forbearance reserved for those who’ve done all their living, and it’s as though you could stay in that exact spot for all time to come, never having to choose.