I knew a bloke once for about a week. His name was James, but his friends called him Jim. It took about 5 days for me to start calling him Jim.

We were on a job together. He was amazing. Really, I wanted to call him Jack, because he was a proper jack of all trades. And a master of many. He could turn his hand to just about anything. I don’t know whether he had formally trained himself in all those disciplines, or if he just had natural aptitude, but in that time I never found anything he was hopeless at. I stuck to James, then Jim once I felt comfortable. Like I said, I only knew him a week, so I didn’t call him Jim for long.

His wife had just written a book. It was a short novel, and he carried the manuscript around with him everywhere, reading it when he got the chance. I don’t think she had a publisher for it at the time. He let me read some of it, and I didn’t think much of it. I didn’t tell him that – I didn’t want to be negative about his wife’s achievement. And even though I didn’t like the part of the book I read, I was impressed. She had completed a whole novel. I wanted to write books back then, but didn’t know how. Jim loved his wife. Maybe that was the difference. My wife thought I was an idiot, but I bet his loved him just as much as he loved her. They didn’t have any children at the time, although I suppose they might well do by now.

I hadn’t thought about him for years, not since I had bailed out of that job we were doing after the first hurdle. That was fine – we were only contracted for a week initially, and there was no particular agreement anyone would stay on after that week. I didn’t much care for the people we were working with and decided to jack it in. The job was in another country, and I went home. Jim stayed. I thought it was weird at the time that I wanted to go back to a wife who thought I was an idiot, while he chose to remain separated from the love of his life.

So I hadn’t thought about him. Nothing unusual about that. He was just a bloke I worked with. There are people like that everywhere, scattered through all our pasts. Now and again some particular thing will happen, somebody will say something specific, and I’ll be reminded of someone I never knew very well and haven’t seen for years. But that had never happened with Jim. Then, last week, I got on a train. I was going to Leeds, so the journey was set to be pretty long by my standards. I don’t leave London very often.

I was sitting in first class. I always like to travel in first class. It’s not as if modern railway travel is ever truly “first class”, like it used to be, but I know I can reserve a seat on its own if I do that. I watched the train leave the grime of Kings Cross out of my window, like I always do, then turned back around Finsbury Park to take a look at who I was sharing the carriage with.

That was when I saw him. He was the only occupant of a bank of four seats around a table, not far from me at all. He had just taken a book out of a compact black leather bag, one of those with a long shoulder strap, then shoved the bag in the shelf above the seats and sat down again. He wore a faded blue linen suit and a cream shirt with a couple of buttons open at the chest. He looked around my age, slim, his hair still as dark as I imagined it had ever been, and his face was obscured by a full dark beard. Jim hadn’t had a beard when I had worked with him.

He looked like he might be Jim, but I watched him a while just to make sure. I would certainly go and say hello if it was him. He was reading the book now. I couldn’t make out the title, or even the author’s name, but it looked like quite a serious book. Thick, and with a sober cover. For all I knew, it might have been his wife’s latest work. That would be a good story, I thought. I wondered if she ever got published.

Could it be Jim? I concentrated on his eyes and the top of his face, above the beard, which I reckoned was just confusing the situation. Should I go over and say hello? Would he even remember me? I would have thought so; he was the sort of person who had time for others and would remember a friendly face. I couldn’t be sure. I definitely wanted it to be him. Why did I want it so much? I hadn’t thought about the bloke for what must have been fifteen years. If this wasn’t him now, my life would continue just like it had done in all that time. Would I really give all that just to see him one more time now? I returned my concentration to my newspaper, confused about my feelings.

Before we had even passed through Stevenage, he had put his book down. He looked out of the window at the passing green belt for a few minutes, before unfolding his newspaper; a Times, like mine, and refolding it with the crossword page showing. He made his way steadily through the grid, never rushing and barely stopping to think for any extended period. It was finished within half an hour and he hadn’t even broken sweat.

That got me excited. That was the sort of thing Jim could do. One time when we were working, we were waiting for a cycle to complete and he’d got his crossword out. He’d finished another chapter of his wife’s manuscript and wanted something else to do to fill the time we had left. The other blokes were chatting about nothing much and I suppose he didn’t fancy joining in. There wasn’t much point in their conversation, I had to agree. Our supervisor told him he didn’t have time to finish it, that there was only about twenty minutes to run on the process and then we’d have to get started straightaway again once it was done. Jim grinned at him. – That’s fine, he said. – Twenty minutes is plenty. I could do two or three in that time. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be ready to start work when you are. Well, that was a red rag to a bull. The supervisor got a couple of the other guys to hand over their papers and lined the crosswords up in front of him. He checked the console. – Twenty one minutes and twelve seconds, he said. Loser buys dinner for the whole team. Jim’s grin grew as wide as his face and he set off. He attacked them simultaneously. First a clue of his own puzzle, then a clue of the second and then a clue from the third. Then back to his own. Never paused to think about a single answer. There were nine of us in the team, and dinner was expensive in that country. He finished with over a minute to spare. They got me to check them, because I did crosswords too, but nothing like he did. Sure enough, he’d solved them all perfectly.

It had to be him. The crossword thing was too much of a coincidence. He put down his pen, closed his eyes peacefully and took a few long deep breaths. I was sure I remembered seeing him doing that before. He liked to clear his mind completely between activities. The idea appealed to me, and I had taken to doing it myself, and that was just after spending a day or so with him. I didn’t even call him Jim until the week was nearly up, but I started to act like him after a day or so.

The beard made everything difficult. I couldn’t get it out of my view of him, especially now that his eyes were shut. Even without a whole face, the eyes normally give enough away about your identity. How sure am I that it’s him? I’m not going to go over and say hi unless I’m more than 90 per cent sure, I resolved. I’d made a fool of myself before with that. It was at a concert. I saw a guy, just a few feet away, who I’d known at university. He was a year ahead of me but we were both studying Bulgakov and we kept clashing over library books, so we’d come to an arrangement that allowed us both to complete our assignments on time that term. We became quite good friends, and I even got him to turn out for the football team once or twice.

When the support act finished, I wandered over and said hi. He looked straight through me. Apparently it wasn’t the same guy at all. In fact, he got a bit shirty about it in the end. I couldn’t believe it. He must have been my friend’s doppelganger. I probably went on about it too much, when he was just trying to enjoy the gig, but I struggled to come to terms with it. Since then I had never approached anybody else on the same pretext.

Jim – I’d taken to calling the guy Jim by this point – had folded away his crossword and taken out his phone. He listened to his messages, and as he was listening he wrote down the relevant details in a small pad he’d got from his jacket pocket. He wrote with his left hand. I had seen that while he was doing the crossword, but it seemed more noteworthy now. Was Jim left-handed? We worked mostly on computers, and I’m not convinced I ever saw him write anything. But he did something odd with his mouse. Of course! He’d move it to the other side and reprogram the buttons. I remember trying to use his machine once and it freaked me out totally. I had never seen anybody do that before. I’m left-handed myself, but I’ve never done that. I laughed about it at the time.

He’s a crossword fiend, a left-handed crossword fiend, who has something about him that made me think he was Jim as soon as I saw him. He reads novels. Ok, so that’s probably not relevant. Loads of people read. But the crosswords. Why the beard? Without the beard I’d be fine. All those thoughts were tumbling through my head as we approached Peterborough. Then he stood up, took down his bag and got ready to leave the train. There was no way I could start a conversation with him at that stage. We were less than a minute away from the station. He walked along the carriage to the far door. When the train came to a halt he disembarked.

I was so angry with myself. Why hadn’t I introduced myself? Was I really so scarred by some distant minor embarrassment that I could never take a chance on somebody again? I watched him through the window. Instead of making straight for the exit, he spoke to the guard on the platform. The official listened, then indicated something at the very far end of the platform, judging by his gesticulations. Jim thanked him, it seemed, and headed off in the direction the guard had pointed. But he only went a few yards, and stopped in front of one of those information stands, the type with lots of fold-out glossy leaflets in plastic holders that tell you about local tourist attractions. He took the bag off his shoulder and put it down on the platform. Then he picked out a couple of the leaflets and read them. He looked like he really meant it. He studied every word of those leaflets as if his life depended on it. I know, because the train hung around at the platform for much longer than anybody expected it to. We couldn’t get a green signal.

I watched him the whole time we waited in Peterborough station. He had devoured four or five of those crappy little things that would have given him the most basic information on local petting zoos or pottery museums or crazy golf. Every now and then he would turn his head just slightly, but not so that I didn’t I notice. It came far enough around for him to confirm that the train was still not moving out of the station. That did it for me. Jim would never have done anything like that. I don’t know what had got into me. It can’t have been Jim.