Being, in a sense, invisible, and therefore omniscient, I could spy on those I loved, or even use and mock them. It was an unpleasant loneliness to which I had condemned myself. Still, six months was a small proportion of a life. What would be the purpose of my new youth? I had led a perplexed and unnecessarily pained inner life, but unlike Ralph, I had not felt unfulfilled, or wished to be a violinist or pioneering explorer or to learn the tango. I’d had projects galore.

My bewilderment was, I guessed, the experience of young people who’d recently left home and school. When I taught young people “creative” writing, their excessive concern about “structure” puzzled me. It was only when I saw that they were referring to their lives as well as to their work that I began to understand them. Looking for “structure” was like asking the question: What do you want to do? Who would you like to be? They could only take the time to find out. Such an experiment wasn’t something I’d allowed myself to experience at twenty-five. At that age I moved between hyperactivity and enervating depression—one the remedy, I hoped, for the other.

If my desire pointed in a particular direction this time around, I would have to discover what it was—if there was, in fact, something to find. Perhaps in my last life I’d been over-constrained by ambition. Hadn’t my needs been too narrow, too concentrated? Maybe it was not, this time, a question of finding one big thing but of liking lots of little ones. I would do it differently, but why believe I’d do it better?

That evening I changed hotels, wanting somewhere smaller and less busy. I ate three times and went to bed early, still a little groggy from the operation.

The next day was a fine one, and I awoke in an excellent mood. If I lacked Ralph’s sense of purpose, I didn’t lack enthusiasm. Whatever I was going to do, I was up for it.

There I was, walking in the street, shopping for the trip I had finally decided to take, when two gay men in their thirties started waving and shouting from across the road.

“Mark, Mark!” they called, straight at me. “It’s you! How are you! We’ve missed you!”

I was looking around. There was no one else they could have been motioning to. Perhaps my leather trousers were already having an effect on the general public. But it was more than that: the couple were moving through the traffic, their arms extended. I considered running away—I thought I might pretend to be jogging—but they were almost on me. I could only face them as they greeted me warmly. In fact, they both embraced me.

Luckily, their talk was relentless and almost entirely about themselves. When I managed to inform them that I was about to go on holiday, they told me they were going away too, with friends, an artist and a couple of dancers.