We walked past plants with fractal leaves; each one a tiny, curled up copy of itself. Tony stopped by an unfurled one and held the largest, lowest leaf in his hands. He beckoned me near, his hands overflowing with green.

'Pull it back,' he said, and I gently unrolled the curled up leaf-bud. I wished it not to break, and it didn't. A perfect frond unrolled, identical to the one in Tony's hands, down to the curled leaf-bud at the point it joined the main stem.

'That's proper fractals,' he said. 'Not your Mandelbrot stuff. This stuff's real. This exists.'

I smiled; it was all good-natured stuff. 'If we only stuck to what's natural, life would be boring,' I said. 'Come on, let's go down the canal.'

Nowadays, when I think of the canal, I think of an expanse of green water, a thin rainbowskin of snake floating on the surface. I think of prams pushed into the forgiving waters, and the League Of Gentlemen's first ever radio series: 'Down the canal where they found that cat's head in a sock'. Nowadays, it's a barren wasteland, a place of desolation. The place of dreams.

Back then, way back when I was sixteen, the place was different. A riot of green and blue, with rippled water spinning past and all manner of boats. Pleasure cruisers mostly, because we formed the junction between a river popular with tourists and the nearest major town that had appropriate moorings. This was long before the British Waterways Authority imposed their various acts, and business was good. We'd sat on the bank and waved at passing boats. Everyone waves on the river; it's how you sail.

Later, towards evening time, things settled. They always did around evening time. And Tony looked at his watch and seemed surprised. I wasn't: the day fades away when you're on the river. The Water Rat and The Mole knew this, or at least Moley did once he'd been out a few times. A concentrated, constantly-changing body of water soaks up time. It's all part of sharing the same flow.

I didn't see Tony much after that. I still look, sometimes, at a beautiful river and wonder why it would be that anyone would take their own life. That's two, actually, if I might be callous for a moment. My father's friend, way back when I was twelve, blew his own head off with a shotgun. It made a mess of the wall, his family's lives, and the lives of all his friends. Even now, my father gets drunk on the anniversary and returns home after midnight, barely able to make himself understood. We assure him that, yes, he can certainly hear Mick in the wind, how about getting into bed? It makes my head whirl.

I believed, and despite the best-meaning ministrations of my friends, continue to believe that Tony killed himself because of me, and because of the canal. I couldn't come to terms with what he told me, and I couldn't find a way to say 'let me think about it'. What's worse, I couldn't tell him what was at the forefront of my mind. It burns like acid inside me now, a need to simply ask him for one kiss. Instead, I turned him away, said I'd think about being friends with him from now on. I was no friend to Tony.

The canal haunts me. Tony pulls a leaf out one night in fifty while I'm supposed to be sleeping soundly. He's naked, and I look at him standing there, too proud. The words 'pull it back' make morbid, disgusting, humorous sense, in a ghastly, innuendo-laden way. There are leaves all around, matching the one in his hand, and their lush, fleshy lobes mock me, because I loved him then, looked at him with hungry, over-hot eyes. I'd have run rather than kissed him.

There's a Roger Waters' song, probably a Pink Floyd song; it all depends which album it's from. So fuck all this, we've gotta get out of here they sing. The backing singers back him up, and they all run. I run with them, like I ran that day you tried to kiss me, Tony. I'm sorry, so sorry. I made it home alone. We could have made it together.

I believe.

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