In a strange twist of events, my old best friend from high school will be living a thirty second walk from my front door as of tomorrow. We haven’t talked for years. The last time we did anything together as friends was for my sixteenth birthday, when we went to swoon over Dylan Moran performing live. She gave me a terracotta pot of cacti, a ribbon bound around the least lethal looking of the three. By this point we had a boyfriend wedged between us, and painfully slowly like velcro pulled apart one hook from loop at a time we’d begun drifting into two completely separate spheres. You are a prickly person, the cacti said.

(I have neglected them with fervour; they have been watered only twice in two years. They refuse to die.)

She works at Sainsbury’s. We collide in the pasta aisle and make hesitant conversation. She draws kohl cat-eye flicks from the corners of her eyes now. She is very sleek and shiny, which is kind of sad, because no sleek and shiny people I know would ever spit out baked beans laughing.

There is a long pause thirty seconds into our conversation. I try desperately to remember what we used to talk about. I think maybe I should start laughing, because we spent more time in hysterics with our hair entangled in the same kirby grip from leaning our heads together, feigning ennui in English Lit, than we ever did talking.

We both do shifty eyes. I look down at the tiles. She shuffles the A4 pages on her clipboard.

Hey, she says suddenly, make me that poppy seed cake for housewarming?