There is a certain taste to it, a weight. It has its own roundness, depth and texture. There is the sweet-sharp tang of a raspberry. The lightness of a balloon drifting across a cloudless sky. A cool blue note, like a love-song played at twilight. A sleekness, a flicker, a whisper, and it’s gone.

Memories move and shift like waves on the shore. I dabble my toes and the story flutters, showing me glimpses, moments, then evading me again. There are no cold hard facts after all, but only speculation. Nancy again: “Stop. That’s not how it happened. I didn’t say that. Why do you always have to do this? You’re just making stuff up.”

And it’s true: there is so much I have forgotten, and so much more that might never have happened at all. I was always making up stories, telling and retelling things that had happened, to make them more interesting, to make them mine. “You tell lies,” this girl said to me once, at school. But Alix just looked at her with her cat-green eyes and said coolly “You have no imagination.”

Of course, I didn’t know then about the pitfalls. Deception taking shape on the tip of my tongue, its rich snake coils. Now, they tell me it is best after all to stick to what’s real. The only problem is I can’t seem to separate what was from what might have been anymore.

What’s real is now. Myself here. High summer again and the streets are hot and dry, a desert seemingly without end. The blankness of time to be filled with nothing but the sounds in the distance: a siren, a thumping bassline. This small room, these paper walls, this house. Looking out of my window. There could be anything out there. There could be something.

Something. A story perhaps? Out there are our stories, haunting the empty streets like ghosts. On days like these I feel restless, buoyant, as if I could just take off and fly into a story. I could tap the heels of my old red sandals together, one-two-three, and I would lift up from my window on invisible wings. I’d fly beyond the city limits, back over the fields and the woods, and touch down by the house on the hill, back in another story. There’s no place like home. Back again, through the gate, down the path, into the garden. Stop. Play. Play it again. Down the rabbit hole, into the eternity of a moment that has long since passed me by.

Of course, it’s the house I think of now more than almost anything else. I imagine it as it was back in the days when we first knew it. I build it up again, brick by brick. My dark chateau, my sleeping beauty castle, half-suffocated by weeds and fingers of ivy. The long lawns tangled, and the garden heavy with dying flowers and overripe fruit rotting in the grass.

Inside the dusty windows, there could be music playing: scratchy old jazz records, a tinkling piano melody. The secret sound of footsteps, one-two-three, of a heavy satin skirt dragged across the bare floorboards. There is the smell of cigarette smoke, a fur stole tossed over a chair, and there are suitcases waiting in the hallway. They are labelled with the names of exotic destinations: Constantinople, Zanzibar, Timbuktu. It is as if a party has just ended, with empty glasses and full ashtrays and a sudden loneliness, a sharp edge of regret.

The house must have been there forever. It was ageless: it could never have been built from ordinary brick and plaster. It was not a house at all but something else altogether: the ruins of a medieval castle, the site of sacred standing stones. It was a dream-place: it had sprung fully-formed on the hillside, complete with its marble bathrooms, its fountain, its chandeliers, its drowsy garden of old roses and ancient trees.

The garden was green and gold. It was the colour of leaves shot through with sunlight, of Isobel’s green skirt, of light skipping across the water, of surfacing as the spray flew upwards and turned to glitter. It could never be forgotten. I know it's supposed to be “all about the future” now: I’m supposed to be moving forward, but somehow I find myself coming back again, through the gate, down the path, back into the garden, pacing out the story.

Maybe I do think about it too much. Behind my own words, there’s tinkling laughter, mocking voices. They always did say I was too serious, too ponderous, too intense. “Don’t take everything so seriously,” Nancy used to say, exasperated with me yet again. “You’re being weird,” Alix said, her voice marshmallow-light, milkshake-pink. But this is my story now, so I can be serious if I want to be. I can tell it however I want.

Once upon a time it seemed easy to move forward. We couldn’t wait. We were following a line marked on a map in red ink, fast-track to the future, on the express route to tomorrow, no stops, no waiting. We skipped blithely along towards the horizon, arm-in-arm. But now I always seem to be walking in circles that spread outwards just as a pebble falls into water. A carousel, a circle of candles to be jumped for some reason I’ve forgotten. It’s as if I’m lost on the Circle Line, going on and on, down and down, rattling through the long dark tunnels with a tinny silver sound reverberating in my ears, always missing my way and ending up strung out at the end of a line I never wanted to take. I miss the exits, and now the future is just a dim light in the distance. I can no longer see it clearly: it’s just a blur, an imaginary thing. Maybe I am slumbering somewhere in an enchanted poppy field, though I still wear my red sandals for luck.

As to the past, that is done with now, shut up in books with hard covers, and arranged neatly on shelves in sections and sequences: maybe some old yearbook in the school library, doodles on the yellowed paper. It’s just history, like the lessons where we learned the dates of things: births and deaths, wars and peace treaties, controversies, grand betrayals. I wrote them down in my exercise book but somehow I never could remember them. They were erased by the slow, flickering tick of the schoolroom clock, and Alix’s hair gleaming in a shaft of sun. Of course, she wasn’t writing down dates: she was staring out of the window, or drawing swirly patterns in her exercise book: hearts and flowers, moons and stars, a kaleidoscope of colour like a bad acid trip and her name, ALIX, written in giant pink and purple letters, filling a whole page. She said history was boring. She rolled her eyes and said, “Who cares?” She was always more interested in the here and now, but she came top in all the history exams just the same. It was one of her paradoxes.

Of course, that was back when her own future was tangible, bright and light, a door opening, held out to her in the palm of an outstretched hand. “She’ll go far,” people said, and the headmistress wrote on her end-of-year report that she was a young lady with a bright future. She always seemed destined for driving down long, empty highways, glamorous in a gleaming white convertible, with the radio turned up and her blonde hair flying free beneath a wide blue sky. Of course, back then I would have seen myself in the passenger seat, but now I’ve drifted too far from the days of blue-sky dreams of open roads. I’m here now, trapped in this context: these four walls, this city, the yellow light of the afternoon. In the next room, the radio buzzes like an angry fly.

“So, what about the future?” people ask me: the personal tutors, the uncles who can’t think of anything else to say. “What’s next?” I can’t answer them. I shrug and say something non-committal; I have trouble imagining a future, trouble thinking about it. Perhaps that’s because I don’t want to think about it, not really. In the end, I’d rather think about the past.

In the beginning, there was only green. Green and green and nothing more: the green haze of meadows; long leaf-green summer days; the glass green of a pool. In spring the trees were electric. The hedgerows flashed past me behind glass, bending away into nothing. There was only the endless green of the garden, blurring before me as far as the eye could see.

But I don’t want it to begin this way. The beginning ought to be so much more spectacular. This is our Big Opening, after all, so surely there should be fireworks, a band striking up, velvet curtains swishing open with a flourish? I want the shimmering of strings as the opening titles roll and we descend from above in a pool of light, a shower of glitter and confetti. The wave of a magic wand, the silver clash of cymbals, a puff of smoke, a cosmic explosion. The heavens and earth rising out of chaos as we slide out of the void and burst into being in tiaras, feather boas and sequinned shoes. The wave of our hands - hello there! we’ve made it! - and trumpets sounding out a triumphant ta da!

But perhaps there were no fireworks. Perhaps instead we came to life quietly, awaking first in the garden. Say it all happened slowly, amongst the roses that bled fat petals into our empty hands, with mossy grass between our toes. Or maybe it began the bare room, beneath the cold ticking of the clock on the wall, far from the green of the garden. Some sleight of hand and here we are: perhaps after all the end is where we start from.

Back to the start. Stop. Rewind. In the beginning there was green and only green. I’m going back through the gate, down the path, back to the beginning. I’m telling you how it really happened: with distant voices, and laughter. High summer again and the garden callow, viridescent. The garden is green and green and nothing more and I am lost again the long grass, where the lawn slopes away towards the still lake shore.