Clone Ranger

Here's something: I have an evil clone.

Really, I'm serious. He’s been in Manchester at least as long as I have, as I can remember only weeks after my arrival my bezzy mate Nicky telling me she’d seen me in the city with some blonde woman. At the time, I dismissed it as mistaken identity, as I'd not been round there for a few days. Then, a year later, while slumped in a pub with my then-girlfriend, her friend turned up looking shocked at my presence.

“I just saw you walking down the street with some girl.”

She was very adamant it had been me. Same style of dress (all black), same style of walk (slouched over, headphones dug firmly in). But as I'd been sat in the exact spot for about an hour, barring trips to the bar, the only answer that came to mind was that I had an evil clone. Naturally, this weighed heavy on my mind, as did the fact that my clone was obviously something of a ladies man. There’s nothing worse than the idea that your clone is having a better time of it than you, trust me, though that train of thought probably explains why that relationship didn't go very far.

A second theory that came into my mind was the possibility that it was actually me, thrown back from the future into my present. This scared me even more, as I knew from the Jean-Claude Van Damme film Timecop that if we ever occupied the same space, we’d die a somewhat horrific death. However, I reasoned that if I ever was thrown back into the past, the first thing I’d do would be to dash to the bookies and place large sums of cash on football results that I already knew the results of.

So after making my mother swear that I had in fact been the only me born that day, the evil clone theory seems the most sound. Despite a few more sightings over the years, he’d slipped my mind until the other day, when my girlfriend spotted him not two hundred feet from the flat and now I'm worried I'm going to get blamed for his villainous doings.

But then I saw an episode of Futurama where Bender meets his own evil clone, Flexo. However, the twist is that it is Bender who is the evil one. What if this is the case for me? Perhaps I’m the one who is supposed to grow a moustache. It would certainly make sense of all those dreams where I rule the world.