Ward asked as many questions as Matt did. Matt told him that he was thirty-three, that his nines were two and six respectively, and that he had no children.

How did you get here? Matt wrote.

I came from there. Ward pointed at the kitchen wall. This made no sense to Matt, and Ward didn't elaborate. He had already returned to the newspaper. He turned a page and ran a finger over the colour photographs there, as if he thought he might be able to touch the people in them. He turned the next page, and his hands stopped moving. He was staring at a picture that took up half the page. It was of a smiling man in his forties. He was slim and fit-looking. He was sitting back on a vintage couch, his legs propped up casually on one of its arms. The top three buttons of his shirt were open. The three-day stubble on his face improved rather than detracted from his looks, and his salt-and-pepper hair was shaved close around the ears and hung naturally over one eye. He somehow managed to exude vigour, youth, experience, and authority, all at the same time.

"He could be our next prime minister," Matt said, forgetting that Ward couldn't understand him.

In any case Ward was fixated on the newspaper. He read the article slowly, using his index finger to mark his progress, as a young child might. It was as if Matt was no longer there.

Matt was still struggling to accept that the boy from the dream was in his kitchen. Perhaps he was still dreaming? He closed his eyes for ten seconds, but when he opened them again Ward was still there. His eyes lighted on the schoolbag again. Perhaps it was the picture of Tom Hennequin in the newspaper that had jogged his memory, but he suddenly realised why the bag looked so familiar.

"That's mine," he said.

Ward, not understanding Matt's words, but hearing the change in his voice, looked warily up from the paper.

Matt pointed at the bag. Then he wrote on the notepad. That's mine.

Ward's eyes widened.

How did you get it? Matt wrote.

Ward shook his head, turning so that the bag was out of sight. The look of revelation had been replaced with another. Fear.

Could this morning get any stranger? Matt hadn't seen his old schoolbag in what, twenty years? It could be a different bag. They would have made more than one. But somehow he knew it was his. He had only to check.

Matt didn't know why he did what he did then. Perhaps his nerves had been stretched too far. Perhaps he was trying to reassert reality by force. In his mind's eye he could see the terrible bear, its lips peeling back from its teeth, its face deformed into a snarl. The bear. He had forgotten all about the bear.

He lunged at Ward.

If you liked this lunge up and smack that old star icon.