My exact double is very rich and successful, but vulgar in his tastes and unrefined in his manners. I find him rather overbearing, even threateningly so. We don’t have very much in common. He runs an internet real estate agency that exploits a little-known piece of EU internet legislation to buy up blogs that have remained unused for 18 months or more, strip them of their posts, and sell the server space to multinational corporations. He is a member of the super-rich elite, which he boasts about at length whenever I go for one of my weekly lunches with him. He claims that being part of this elite gives him special sexual powers, and that a whole world of carnal pleasure is available to him that is unavailable to poorer men. I’m not quite sure whether or not to believe him, not least because of his terrible and mysterious wound.

This story tells the tale of how I first met my exact double, and how I came to be obliged to meet him for lunch once a week.

***

One day, my exact double was suddenly thrust into my life when I saw a picture of him in the student newspaper. He was receiving a special award in Business Excellence from the chancellor of the University of Manchester, Conrad ‘Connie’ Block. His visage leered out from the page, huge. It sent a horrible chill all through me: my own eyes, looking right at me. He and Block were pictured in chairs across from each other, shaking hands. My exact double was looking at the camera and smiling broadly, my own smile, with all the same lines. But though identical physically, he was very different stylistically: three buttons undone on his shirt, close-cropped hair, confident bearing. If I held the page away at full arm-stretch, I could look at him and not see myself. But then, if I squinted, here I was again.

I felt like a piece of myself had been cut away. I had to discover who this man was and why he looked exactly like me. I couldn’t think. I paced around my room wondering what to do, tapping the side of my head with my fingertips. But then suddenly, a phone call from a number not recognised.

“Hello?” I answered.

An estuary accent. “Alright. Is that Percy Fallopian?”

“Yes, why?”

“Apparently you look just like me!”

“What? Are you… are you that guy who just received some sort of Business Excellence award from Connie Block?”

“Er… what? Oh yeah! Yeah, that’s me, yeah… you saw it in the paper?”

“Yes.”

“Yeah, that’s pretty weird isn’t it? Anyway, mate, I’ve heard quite a lot about you. Everyone talks about you, they tell me: ‘He looks exactly like you’. We’ve simply got to meet up mate. How about lunch at Corbennie’s tomorrow? Bar-restaurant in Deansgate. I’m there all the time. Fucking fantastic cuisine. Tomorrow at 1, yeah?”

“OK.”

I hung up the phone. Everything seemed curiously empty. I had to look at my hands to make sure that they were still there.

That night I dreamt that I was walking down Market Street and everyone I saw had my face. I kept looking in shop windows for my own face but it always got covered up by passers-by who looked just like me. I began to panic, and stumbled into the toilets in the Arndale Centre, where I looked in the mirror and to my horror discovered that I had no face at all.

***

Corbennie’s is up a long flight of wide steps. The building it is in is very grand, but the décor is of the ‘rubbish modern’ school, and the overall impression thus uninspiring. My exact double sat at the end of the restaurant, in the centre, all the tables cleared leading up to his, holding court, a surfeit of empty glasses spread out over his table, chortling piggishly with a friend who as it got closer it emerged was none other than Mr Connie Block himself. Mr Block, incidentally, in his day job is a real estate developer who specialises in urban renewal through trendification. He came up with the idea for Manchester’s trendy Northern Quarter and is currently heading a major government project to re-develop Droylsden, which will be re-branded ‘Brooklyn UK’.

He is a short, squat man with a faux-hawk. He had some sort of syrupy cocktail mixture spread all over his chin.

“Cocking shit!” he exclaimed, nudging my exact double. “Here he is mate! Unless its just your identical fucking twin!”

“Jesus Christ, you are my exact double aren’t you!” exclaimed my exact double. “What’s your name again, mate?”

“Percy Fallopian. We spoke on the phone, er… what’s your—”

“Yeah, Perce,” he said, shaking my hand as I sat down. “I’m sorry mate, I would stand up, but…”

“He was wounded in the thigh,” put in Block.

“Oh… is it serious?”

“A horrific hole, mate. But don’t talk about it.”

I couldn’t think right. It was like watching myself act a part in a play. I wanted to ask him everything about himself. I wanted to know all about him and know why he looked exactly like me. I had so many questions, but I seemed to be unable to eject them from my mouth.

A waitress pushed a menu into my hands.

“Let’s order some food,” said my exact double. “The food here is fucking great.”

I looked at the menu. It was all very expensive. The food was an unusual mix of the exotic and the apparently inedible. ‘Duck Bill Soup’ competed for attention with ‘Vietnamese Pine Cone’, ‘Young Boy in Thick Chilli Sauce’ (worrying), ‘Mediterranean Stone Platter’ and the intriguingly-named ‘Assorted Heads Bake’.

“The Mediterranean Stone Platter is the fucking tits,” said my exact double definitively.

“Fuck off,” replied Block. “You want a big fuck-off Giant Otter Steak when you come here. Get that.”

“I think I might go for the Vietnamese Pine Cone,” I said. “I quite like the sound of these seasonings…”

“More cocktails please, waitress!” yelled my exact double. “Another one for my new friend here! My ‘twin brother’! Haha.”

“I’m really curious to know—”

“I’d like to fuck her, wouldn’t you Connie?”

“Yeah just look at her back won’t you? I’d bend her over and split her in two.”

Block whispered something to my exact double, and then turned to me: “Wouldn’t you like to fuck her, Perce?”

I looked at the waitress. She was blond, bland, tanned, and smiling. “I don’t know… she’s not really my type.”

“Fuck off, are you gay or something?”

“No but—”

The waitress came with the drinks and we ordered our food. I looked suspiciously at the rather abject cocktail put before me, and didn’t drink it.

“She’s got great tits,” said Block after she’d left.

“I want to bite them off and have them stuffed as pillows,” replied my exact double by way of agreement.

“Think what you could achieve now that you’ve got an exact double,” said Block.

“I could fuck her up the arse and in the cunt at the same time.” My exact double began rubbing his thighs furiously, until he apparently jabbed himself in the wound, and winced.

“What do you do for a living, Percy?” asked Block.

“I actually study at the University of Manchester.”

“Oh, right? Yeah, I think I have something to do with that don’t I? Ha ha ha! No but seriously it’s a total non-position. I don’t even know where the university fucking is! I couldn’t even tell you the vice-chancellor’s name, what is it, Madame Nonce? I’ve been getting away with calling her that anyway. I know so little about the university that I once referred to it publicly as the Owain Tudor College of West Wales, and ascribed to it a speciality in Oceanography. My ignorance of the university is so deep that, even if I was to put in the effort to learn anything about it, I would fail, as I lack the basic conceptual capacities to make sense of any information you might give me. With that in mind… what do you study anyway, Percy? Business? Engineering? Economics?”

“Philosophy and Politics.”

“Fuck that! Why aren’t you studying something useful?”

“Well, I’ve always been interested in —”

“Do you have any idea how much money I make?” asked my exact double. “Do you have any idea how much Connie here makes? More than you’ll ever fucking see in your life, mate. I have so much money that I use £50 notes to stuff my couches. I own houses in cities you’ve never even heard about – in countries you’ve never heard about – because they don’t tell poor people about them. They only send you the real Atlas once you become a millionaire. Island paradises, in the Arabian sea. And one high-up in the Andes mountains, a city-state really, a great crystal metropolis where all the appliances are powered by molten gold that cannot be re-used. I’ve paid for sex with some of Europe’s wealthiest heiresses. These women are much in demand as escorts in the rich world as wealthy women are born with an extra, tighter hole called the Argolis. I can fuck them in this hole – a hole of such intense erotic power that I feel like I’m watching a eunuch knowing that you will never behold one – and blow my load in it as many times per night as I want, for I take special tablets to increase semen production that are not available for general sale, and I use a rare lube taken from sea-snails to prevent chafing. I drink to excess daily and snort mountains of drugs but I will never feel any ill-effects, for every Sunday I undergo an exclusive spa treatment where I have all the fluid sucked out of my body and replaced, and then have my liver massaged by way of a probe to prevent cirrhosis. I have crashed a supercar into a cliff at such intensely high speed that my body was ripped into quarters, but so magnificently wealthy am I that not only was I able to afford surgery to restore my life and put me back together, I was also able to pay 500 skilled artisans to repair the monument overnight so quickly and with such accomplishment that no one ever noticed any damage had been done to it in the first place.”

“Is that how you got that wound in your thigh?” I interrupted.

My exact double ignored the question, and continued: “And do you know what? I got this all – all this money –” (he flashed a wad of £50s for effect) “I got all this because I did a useful degree. I did Business. I didn’t do history, I didn’t do English literature, I didn’t do philosophy, I didn’t do Media fucking Studies. I did a useful fucking degree that people want to pay me money for. And do you know what? I don’t know a single fucking thing about any of those other subjects, and I’m proud of it. But of course, I’ve always been a businessman, really. I started my first business when I was aged fucking twelve (you remember that, the same age where your balls hadn’t dropped yet mate). It was a service company that did a deal with the council to buy the rights to all my school’s textbooks and lease them back to the school. But I was clever, see? I made it so I could alter what they were paying on the lease every year if my ‘maintenance costs’ increased. But I wasn’t maintaining a fucking thing! Haha! The books all fell apart! And I raised it up and up. Eventually I was charging £600,000 a month. For broken books! Paid 700 quid for them at the start. The school threatened to expel me, but shit all good that did to them because they were already bankrupt by the time I left. Stupid cunts.”

He took a long, messy sip of his cocktail, and groaned. “Did you do A-levels? I didn’t. I bought mine from a sixth-form college in Guernsey. Don’t know fuck all about anything except making money. But that doesn’t matter, because there’s nothing else. And people like you, you… you think you’re contributing at all to the universe? You make me fucking sick. I want you to realise that everything you say is nothing more than just vomit.”

At the end of this speech, my exact double belched loudly. I must admit, I was rather taken aback by the whole tirade.

“Hey do you know what?” asked Block.

“What?” asked my exact double.

“I think we should get Percy here to do us a favour.”

My exact double nodded, apparently knowingly. I shifted uneasily in my seat.

“Myself and my friend your exact double here both want to fuck this waitress,” began Block. “But we need – as they say – an ‘in’. So, what I want you to do is… what did you order again?”

“The Vietnamese Pine Cone.”

“Right. Well, when your Vietnamese Pine Cone comes, I want you to make a bit of a fuss. Actually, a big fuss. Whatever she says, its not good enough. Get aggressive. And then, your exact double over here will step in like a gentleman. You’ll calm down (because you were never angry in the first place), he’ll get her number, and then he’ll fuck her. And afterwards maybe I’ll fuck her. You up for this, Percy?”

This sounded like the opposite of anything I’d ever want to do. “No. Sorry, but… I don’t really like complaining in restaurants. I’m sure you can get her number some other way.”

Block’s face dropped. “OK,” he said, suddenly a lot more serious, wiping all the muck off his chin. “Listen. This might sound strange to you… but then, you’re sitting at a table in a restaurant across from your exact double. My friend here: your exact double, has been wounded in the thigh (it doesn’t matter how). It’s a really serious wound. Even the most advanced medical science – the stuff only available to us rich people – can’t heal it. Your exact double can’t walk anymore, and his business is failing. All he does is hold court here all day, drinking. What a pathetic figure of a man this colossus of the business world has been reduced to! But there is hope, see. For it has been prophesied that his wound will heal if his exact double – i.e., you – was to become aggressive with a blond waitress – in this restaurant, it has to be here – and then he (meaning, he himself) has her touch his thigh. Then, he will be able to walk again, and his business will flourish once more. Until such time, he cannot perform. We have been searching for you for months, waiting here for you, and yesterday we finally found you. That was why we rung you up. We even planted that picture in the student newspaper hoping you’d see it and find us yourself, but in the end it wasn’t necessary. You must help us. Please, Percy!”

This sounded stupid to me. But I was kind of frightened of them, so I agreed to do it.

“Oh thankyou, thankyou Percy!” exclaimed Block. “The waitress now approaches… but a word of warning: although you must become aggressive, you can’t physically hurt her. Otherwise, you will scare her off, and the prophesy will not come to pass today.”

The waitress came to the table, and placed my pine cone in front of me. It sat on the plate, dusted red at the bottom with spices, looking like a severed head. I made an effort to look nonplussed.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Your Vietnamese Pine Cone,” answered the waitress. I looked up at her dumb face and it gazed back at me like an arse with eyes.

“But it’s cold,” I said, by way of making something up that was wrong with it.

“It’s meant to be like that,” said the waitress. “That’s how they serve it in Vietnam. Its a delicacy!” She grinned. A particularly stupid grin, I thought. In fact something about this waitress really was bothering me intensely.

“No!” I yelled, banging my fist down on the table. “Take it away and heat it up. I want a hot pine cone!” And at that moment, I realized that suddenly, I really, really did want a hot pine cone. This frigid dead head of a pine cone was an insult to me. And this stupid tart of a woman was directly responsible for it.

“But sir—”

I got up from out my seat. “No! No, I won’t take this!” I shouted, brandishing one of the empty glasses. Her face, a hated ham…

Block and my exact double looked on in horror as I threw the glass at the waitress’s face. Shards and blood everywhere, and she ran off as I was wrestled by some other staff members to the ground.

I was arrested, and would have been charged with assault if my exact double hadn’t used his influence over the police to have them release me. But now I was in his debt, so of course I was obliged to return to Corbennie’s the next week (the next auspicious moment, apparently), to try the prophesy out again. But the same thing happened. And the week after that, and the week after that, forever more.