Just as I’m about to explode, 11.58 becomes 11.59.

I breathe out raggedly. I’m still here.

This is it. This is the rest of my life.

Alice mutters something and turns over.

‘What was that?’

‘I said: what’s that noise?’ she mumbles.

I listen carefully. ‘It’s, erm … I think it’s …’

I hold my wrist up to my ear.

The watch has started ticking.

Chapter Forty-Seven

For years, when I was a kid, I used to have this recurring dream.

I’m in my bedroom at home – home home, Mum’s home – and the doorbell rings. I run out of my room and down the corridor, and as I get to the top of the stairs, I can see the outline of a person behind the stained-glass panel on the front door.

I jump onto the banister and slide down gracefully, but as I approach the door, I still can’t make out the figure behind the glass. I reach up to open the latch, and then … nothing.

Either I’d wake up, or the dream would just fizzle out.

I started having this dream when I was about ten, soon after my dad left, so it doesn’t exactly take Sigmund Freud to figure out that it might have been about him; about me wishing desperately that he would come back.

Anyway, it’s a dream I haven’t had – haven’t even thought about – for decades.

Until now.

As soon as I raise the ticking watch to my ear, everything goes dark, and there I am again: in my bedroom at home, hearing the doorbell ring out downstairs.

As usual, I sprint out and see that shadow behind the glass. And as usual, I slide down the banister and run towards the door. But this time the figure is clearer – I can make out that he’s wearing a blue suit and some kind of colourful tie – and the dream holds together even as I reach up and place my hand on the latch.

But when I open the door, there’s no one there. It’s not even my front door – it’s the door to another room entirely, a room I don’t recognise, dingy and grey and sparsely decorated, with two people sitting on a sofa in the centre.

I realise instantly what I’m looking at, and even though part of me somehow knows this is a dream, the shock is still visceral.

It’s me, as an old man, and Alice as an old woman.

We’re sitting at opposite ends of the couch – so far apart that we might be strangers – our heads bent, not speaking.