The boy looks up. He screams much louder than you can shout. A pounding, intense wall of sound, louder than anything you believe you have ever heard. The scream makes your ears ring, your head reverberate pain, and there is nothing you can do but stop, attempting to withstand the onslaught, a man walking into rushing wind, and you are caught in place, power washing over you. The scream lasts a few seconds, five at most, before coming to a random, complete and nearly as surprising an end.

But that isn’t what makes you stop.

What makes you stop is the face. And the expression on the face – terror and indecision, that’s for sure – but also the face itself. Large brown eyes, fleshy cheeks. Thin eyebrows, no more than a smear. A faint scar beneath the chin where you have grown a beard partly to disguise the injury when you were hit by a cricket bat aged nine (separating drops of blood flying beyond your peripheral vision like summer insects on that terrible day). Thin lips, too dry, flaking, constantly bitten by protruding teeth, a habit that returns when withdrawal kicks in. The face reminds you of you. The face resembles you back then. The face not only looks like you, awareness says in that quick instance, when silence tumbles into the space once occupied by the loudest sound you ever heard, the face is you.

There is no uncertainty. No question. You are staring face to face with your eleven-year-old self. And now, it is your turn to scream.

Your eleven-year-old face does nothing. Simply looks. Your scream, although loud enough to cause an ache in your chest, is hardly strong enough to be heard outside your dishevelled room. When you realise the only person affected by what you are doing is the you that is actually screaming, you stop. The eleven-year-old face seems amused. It makes you ill to admit this, but that is the truth, it’s obvious, because the boy smiles.

‘Go!’ you hiss, yet the adrenaline is gone. Your skin feels like a washcloth left overnight on the side of the rusting tub, and your hands shake, and what’s worse, you’re still unsteady on your feet. The boy stares at you. Perhaps he has realised, you think. Perhaps he can see.