Flashes of a life that is not my own

TODAY - a modern tale of the supernatural]

Even if you haven't read Marcel Proust's great novel In Search of Times Past, most people know the story of its unusual genesis - of how Proust one day, sitting in a Paris Metro station called Madeleine, suddenly saw the whole of his previous life flashing in front of him and decided to write it down as soon as he got home.

I know the feeling. The other day I was stuck for hours on a London Tube, and to begin with I tried all the usual things to while away time - reading someone's paper over their shoulder, wishing I had a mobile phone, wondering if mobile phones would work deep underground, deciding that perhaps they wouldn't, being glad after all that I hadn't got a mobile phone, trying to imagine myself married to everyone in the carriage in turn, and so on.

But after 10 minutes I got bored and let my mind slip into neutral. It was at that point that the whole of my past life started flashing in front of me.

First I remembered the holiday I had spent as a child in Yorkshire, when my father had embarrassed us all by running out of money after the first week. That wasn't the embarrassing bit. The embarrassing bit was that he sold the bicycles we used every day to get around the dales, in order to raise a bit more spare cash. And what was so embarrassing about this was that the bikes didn't belong to us - my father had hired them from a man in Skipton, who took a dim view of father's attempt to redistribute his wealth.

Then there was the time he (my father, not the man in Skipton) brought home a budgerigar which, he claimed, could talk. This was something of an exaggeration. All the poor bird could do was repeat a phrase learnt from his previous owner, a military man, which was: 'Carry on, sergeant]' My father thought this intensely amusing and called the bird 'The Major'. Not only that, but he insisted on making a tiny false handlebar moustache, which he then glued on to the budgerigar, saying that it made him look the part, which, I have to admit, it did.

It was when I remembered my mother's ambitions to be a concert pianist and how she had slipped off for lessons secretly till my father became convinced that she was having an affair, that I suddenly sat bolt upright in the train and realised something had gone terribly wrong. My mother had never wanted to play piano in her life. Come to that, she had never shown any interest in music at all.

What's more, we had never been on holiday in Yorkshire, with or without bicycles. And to my certain knowledge we never had a cage bird at home, as my mother had thought it cruel to keep living things cooped up.

So why was I thinking all these things ? Why, like Marcel Proust, was I having an extremely clear vision of one's past life, but why, unlike Marcel Proust, was I only remembering things that had never happened to me?

Why wasn't I remembering things that had really happened to me, some of which I usually enjoyed remembering? Like the time my father took his golf clubs on holiday, only to find that there was no golf course near our hotel in Scotland, so he decided instead to play his way across the moors - to this day I can remember him chipping out of a wee loch, hitting a passing grouse and wondering if he was within his rights to drop the ball on what he was pleased to call the fairway . . . .

Instead I was remembering a totally false past life, full of budgerigars and things, a bit of instant fiction. Or was it? Was it not also possible - the thought struck me with terrible clarity - that I was remembering someone else's past? Someone else in that same carriage, perhaps?

It was then that I ran my eyes over the people sitting across from me. All were staring into space, except one young man, who was sitting, staring at me, smiling slightly. I knew instinctively that he was the culprit. But what could I do? I couldn't lean over and ask him if he was inflicting his life story on me, could I? Or even vice versa?

As soon as I thought about it, the idea seemed ridiculous. At that moment, anyway, things were taken out of my hands. The train suddenly moved again. We drew into the station, and he jumped up and got out. Not, however, before bending over to me and saying: 'Thanks, pal - I enjoyed that. Especially loved the bit where your Dad played golf across half Scotland.' And then he winked and vanished.