Jack says if I’m the unstoppable force, he’s the immovable object. I ask if he’s sure it’s that way around and he says he thinks so, he does, at 8 in the morning on Tuesday, but this could change depending on how drunk he is, how fed or fed up he may be.

I get déjà vu often. I’ve been places in dreams first, then ended up in them, eventually in life. But these are never exciting places, it’s more the feeling of sealing an envelope, of pacing a hall in the right sort of light.

“What if my family never moved where they did? What then?” I ask him.

“Then,” he says, he replies, “I guess I’d have a version of you who was really someone else, but I wouldn’t know, and you wouldn’t. You’d know even less because you’d never miss what you’d never seen: the paths and the places, the geography. But I’d know more, like I’d lain in wait for a summer and no-one had shown up. But I’d make do. I’d find something. I’d have someone now to stop me. Just not you.”