‘Where did you spring from? It’s a delight to meet you. I haven’t seen a new ghost for … well, for a long time. It’s hard to keep track, isn’t it? It took me ages to work out what was going on.’

My brain is trying to catch up. For a second I’m surprised at her casual use of the word ghost, but I can hardly argue with it. So I got on a train and sat beside another … ghost. It doesn’t seem possible, but neither does anything.

‘I don’t think I’d ever have worked it out,’ I say.

‘But you did. March the eleventh 1999, right?’

I stare at her. ‘You die today too?’

She sighs. ‘I do indeed, my dear. I stay on this train to London, get off it at Paddington, and walk up that ramp where everyone smokes, and then it all goes blank, but I’m pretty sure I get knocked down by a taxi or maybe a bus. Not sure. I liked my job in London, but I never get to do it any more.’

‘Right,’ I say. ‘Oh my fucking God, I have so many questions.’

She leans back and nods. She’s grinning. ‘Good. Fire away. Tell me your story.’

I start talking. When I get to Ariel, I see her face change.

‘Back up,’ she says when I move on to Gus. ‘Back to Ariel. Holy shit. You’re saying that your friend Ariel is a live girl, living in the future, but that you can speak to her?’ She shifts forward in her seat and leans right in towards me. ‘You speak to a real girl? Are you actually saying that?’

‘Yep.’ I see from her reaction that this isn’t normal for ghosts. ‘We meet in the room where I guess I’m going to die. She was upset because … well, she has family stuff. We see each other there every day. Almost every day. She can’t come when it’s Sunday for her because the shopping centre’s closed.’

‘Right,’ says Lara, almost to herself. ‘Holy, holy, holy shit. So we can talk to real people. You lucky bastard. And she’s in 2019!’ She leans back in her seat. She turns her face to the window and stares out at the fields outside, and then turns back to me, and so many of my feelings are on her face that I want to stay at her side forever. ‘Oh my God – 2019. We’ve been doing this for twenty years? Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. What’s it like in the future?’

I tell her. Millennium bug, World Trade Center, climate change, the internet, Brexit, Trump. I see her confidence in me beginning to waver. Her expression becomes a bit horrified, a bit sceptical.

‘Anyway,’ I say, wanting to move on, ‘can we only meet other ghosts with the same death day as us?’