A Man With My Face Signed For A Parcel At My Address

The app sends you a photograph. Proof of delivery. It is meant to be reassuring.

The photograph shows a man at my front door, taking a parcel, signing on the little screen. He is wearing a grey dressing gown. I have a grey dressing gown.

He has my face.

I was three hundred miles away, at a conference, in a room with forty people, at 11:14 in the morning, and I can prove it, and I did prove it, twice, to two different people who did not want to be told.

My flatmate was at work. Nobody had a key.

The parcel was a book I had ordered. It was in the hall when I got back on the Friday. Opened. Not damaged — opened, carefully, and put back in its packaging, and left on the hall table where post goes.

The book is a novel I had been meaning to read for a year.

There is a bookmark in it. At page 41. I did not put it there. It is a receipt for a coffee, from a café near my old flat, from four years ago, and the receipt is real, and I have looked at it under a lamp like a lunatic.

The courier remembers nothing. I rang. He was very nice and slightly bored and said, essentially, that he delivers two hundred parcels a day to two hundred doors and every one of them has a man in a dressing gown.

I have zoomed in on the photograph until it is just pixels and my own face is a rumour.

Here is what I have decided, because you have to decide something in order to sleep.

I have decided that it is a compression artefact, a stranger, a coincidence of build and dressing gown, and that my brain has done what brains do, which is find me everywhere.

I have decided that, and I believe it in daylight.

I have also, quietly, and without telling my flatmate, started taking my key out before I reach the door, so that I never have to stand there fumbling with my back to the street.