I spent the first ten minutes of my second life sat on the carpet hugging my own knees, saying "okay, okay, okay" out loud like a man trying to talk a horse out of a burning barn.

Then I spent the next ten going through the flat like a burglar in my own home.

Creak went the bedroom door.

Bang went the bathroom cabinet, and there I was in the spotty little mirror. Me. Twenty-four.

All the hair. None of the chins. Eyes I’d forgotten I used to have, before forty years of touchline drizzle and motorway service stations wore the shine off them. I prodded my own cheek.

Pat, pat. Solid. Warm. Real.

And then, because I am only human, I had a proper look at myself.

I peeled the Henley off over my head, whump, and stood there in my pants in front of the mirror like an absolute wally, turning side on, breathing in, doing the thing everyone does and nobody owns up to.

And do you know what? Not bad. Not bad at all!

Twenty-four-year-old me was a streak of nothing, really, all elbows and ribs and not much shape to him, but he was lean, he had hair in places that forty-year-old me had waved a tearful goodbye to years back, and, best of all, nothing hurt.

No grumbling knee. No lower back that locked up solid if I sneezed at the wrong angle. I bounced up and down on the spot a couple of times, thud, thud, thud, just because I could. Just to feel a body that didn’t moan about it.

"Right," I told the mirror, jabbing a finger at my own reflection.

"We are not wasting you this time, sunshine. We’re looking after you. Gym. Proper food. None of this four-Red-Bulls-and-a-Greggs-at-3 am carry-on. You and me, son, we’re going to be an absolute unit."

Funny thing was, I’d made almost that exact speech before. Other life.

I started dragging myself to the gym in my early thirties, when things with Karen were quietly coming apart at the seams and I couldn’t for the life of me work out why, and some daft little voice in the back of my head decided the problem must be that I’d let myself go a bit.

So I grafted at it. Six in the morning before training. Chicken and rice out of a Tupperware, the lot. Dropped the best part of a stone.

Which, when you say it out loud, is mental, honestly. Because here is the thing nobody warns you about. I had a cracking wife. Karen was thirty-one when it all finally went, four years younger than me, and I’m telling you now, the woman was an absolute knockout.

A body that stopped traffic in the Tesco car park. Clever, funny, the lot. And what was I doing, blessed with a gorgeous younger wife and one short little life to enjoy it? Grinding. Working. Falling asleep on the sofa halfway through her programmes because I’d been up till three watching a Bulgarian left-back on a laptop.

So she left.

Thirty-one years old, her whole life still stretched out in front of her, and she took one good look at the next forty years of being married to a skint dreamer who loved a spreadsheet more than a Friday night in, and she did the only sensible thing a beautiful, clever thirty-one-year-old could possibly do.

She got out while the getting was good. I didn’t even blame her. That was the worst part. I carried the boxes to her car.

And here’s the truly pathetic bit. The bit I’d never say out loud to another living soul. Five years.

Five whole years she was gone, right up to the morning I drove in front of that lorry at forty, and I never once tried to win her back.

Not a text. Not a knock on the door.

Not so much as a "fancy a coffee, for old times’ sake." Nothing.

I’d lie there in that freezing flat missing her so much it actually, physically hurt, missing her laugh and her temper and, yeah, all right, that body an’ all, and then I’d just roll over and do absolutely sod all about it. Because doing nothing about the things I wanted most was basically my entire personality.

State of me.

Ah, Karen.

And there she was.

Back again.

Strolling into my head uninvited, pulling out a chair, getting comfy. I leaned my forehead against the cold glass, clonk, and let her have her ten seconds, the way you let a song you can’t stand play right to the end because snapping it off halfway is somehow worse.

And then a thought landed that was so mad I actually laughed out loud, ha, on my own, in my pants, in the year 2010.

Karen would be twenty right now.

Out there somewhere this very morning.

Probably at uni, probably skint, probably dancing to dreadful music on a sticky nightclub floor, with no earthly idea that a twenty-four-year-old stranger on the other side of London had once been her husband in a life that hadn’t happened yet.

She hadn’t met me. Wouldn’t meet me for years, if she ever met me at all, now that I’d gone and changed every single thing.

Would I even be able to find her this time?

Did I want to?

Was that even allowed, by whatever mad rules this second life ran on?

"...Right. Enough of that."

I shoved the whole impossible business to the back of my head, where it point-blank refused to stay, and pushed off the mirror, sniff. "One miracle at a time, Sam. Get dressed. You’ve got a football club to go and rob off a High Court judge."

Bzzzt. Bzzzt. Something buzzed across the kitchen counter, and I nearly hit the ceiling. A Nokia. An actual brick of a Nokia, the kind you could hammer a nail in with and then ring your mum on. The little screen said RAJ and a tiny envelope, and I picked it up with my heart in my throat.

Raj: oi sleeping beauty

Raj: you working today or what

Raj: theres a fry up at marias with your name on it. im buying. dont make me regret it

I read it about six times.

Raj. Raj was alive. Well, Raj had never not been alive.

In my old timeline, Raj was forty-three and doing Uber and moaning about his knees in a WhatsApp group.

But here he was, twenty-six years old, texting me about a fry-up in the year 2010 as if the entire universe hadn’t just been turned inside out, squeezed through a five-pence piece and posted back to front.

I nearly cried over a text about a fry-up. I’m not ashamed to say it. I’d done enough crying for one morning, mind, so I held it together.

I got dressed, and God, my old clothes. The grey Henley with the bobbling. The one pair of jeans.

The trainers with the hole starting in the left toe. I went out into the morning, and East London in June 2010 hit me right in the face, because it was a face, a big greasy diesel-and-bakery face, and I loved it.

Shutters going up all down the parade, rattle, rattle, CLANG.

A fella power-washing the pavement outside the bookies, psssshhhhhhh.

A pigeon on a windowsill having an absolute breakdown about nothing, coo, COO, coo.

And over everybody, faint in the daylight but there if I looked, the panels. The numbers. Drifting over heads like little weather balloons.

A traffic warden. CA 9. A toddler in a buggy, Potential Ability: 71, and I actually stopped dead in the street and went, "oho, steady on, son," at a two-year-old, who stared at me, because I am a normal man having a normal morning.

Very normal indeed.