I laughed. ‘The millennium bug! Y2K! I’ve heard of that. No. Either it was never going to happen anyway, or they fixed it in time. It was a total non-event.’

‘Oh. Cool. So what’s been happening instead?’

I gave him highlights of the past twenty years as best I could. It wasn’t great. There was 9/11, the Iraq War, and every bad thing that had come about after that, and then there was climate change, Brexit and Trump. It was an avalanche of crap. I told him that, by contrast, the nineties seemed really cool and that I envied him for living in them.

‘Oh shit,’ he said. Then he took a deep breath and said the thing I hadn’t wanted to speak out loud. ‘I guess,’ he said, ‘that I might not be alive in your world. If I was, then I’d be, like, thirty-five. And that would be weird. To be here now, talking to you, and also to be out there somewhere being thirty-five. But I’d rather that than the alternative.’

‘Yes,’ I said. I looked at him and knew that I didn’t have a single reassuring thing to say. ‘I have no idea. I mean, am I hallucinating this? Are we both imagining it in our different years? We might be. We’re probably both alive. I’ll see what I can find out, if you want. Right now.’

‘No! Don’t go.’

I smiled. ‘Don’t worry. I’m not going. I’ll look you up on my phone.’

‘What?’

‘Online.’ I held up my phone. ‘On here.’ I saw him frowning and slowed down. ‘On the browser. I can search your name and location. And it will give me information from the internet.’

‘On your phone?’

‘Yes.’

We held each other’s gaze for a while, each baffled. He was only from twenty years ago, but this was alien to him. It hung between us, making no sense. He really didn’t get what I was saying.

‘Go on then,’ he said in the end.

I nodded and turned my attention to the screen.

‘Joe … What’s your surname?’

‘Simpson. Literally the dullest name ever.’

‘Joe Simpson. That’s nice, not dull. Like the Simpsons. I’ll put in Devon too, and 1999.’ I typed it all into the search bar. ‘Joe. Simpson. Devon. 1999. Oh.’

I looked at the screen. I looked at him. The boy in the old news articles matched the boy in front of me. They had the same messy light brown hair. They had the same eyes, the same sculpted cheekbones. That was him. Joe Simpson. Robert Pattinson, Cedric Diggory, Joe Simpson.

Joe Simpson was the star of such news articles as ‘Local boy vanishes on eve of French trip’. The subject of: ‘Joe’s dad: please let my boy come back to us’, ‘Joe on CCTV at Beachview,’ and then: ‘We may never know what happened to Joe, say cops.’