Though Ben and I had been friends as kids we’d drifted apart as we got older. After all, there was a four-year age gap between us and though we had loved playing games of hide and seek and swimming in the river when we were five and nine, the older Ben had decided it was rather uncool to be hanging around with an awkward child. That night, despite my glamorous dress, I still felt like a little kid, and as I walked towards the playhouse my hands were sweating with nerves.

Loud music was coming from inside: ‘How Soon is Now?’ by the Smiths. To this day I can’t listen to that song. I’d stood on the step, practising what I would say. I had to seem cool, like I didn’t really care. After all, this party was full of Ben’s friends from Oxford, clever people with money and the right clothes, and I was just some kid Ben used to play hide and seek with. When I’d finally plucked up the courage to knock on the door it had been opened by a beautiful girl with black bobbed hair, flawless olive skin and pouty scarlet lips.

‘Yeah?’ she’d said, looking me up and down.

I’d tried to speak but I was so nervous I just started stuttering. Then Ben appeared in the door with a weird smirk on his face. I discovered later that this was because he was stoned out of his head.

‘Zoshi, are you scaring little Maggie?’ he laughed.

Every part of me wanted to run away but I didn’t. Instead I followed him inside and sealed my fate.

Enough, I tell myself, this isn’t what you came here for. Just leave it alone. But then, before I know what I’m doing, I’m pushing the door open.

The damp hits me as I enter and I start to cough. I grab my inhaler and take a good few puffs. When I’ve composed myself I look around and am met with a sight so startling I’m almost knocked off my feet.

It’s like I’ve stepped inside a time capsule. The whole room is exactly as it was in 1988. The walls are covered in posters of the Smiths and the Waterboys – Ben’s favourite bands. Used joss sticks are dotted around the stone fireplace and the sofas are draped in the Aztec throws that Ben brought back from his volunteering trip to Mexico. I can still hear the sounds of the party that night, the high-pitched laughter and smash of glass when Ben dropped the tray of munchies on to the stone floor, the way the music seemed to warp as the evening wore on though only later would I find out why. As I stand in the middle of the room it seems like the last thirty years have never happened; that the world stopped in 1988.