How can you speak with such certainty?

Because I’ve experienced otherwise. As certainly as you experience that chair.

Others can experience this chair.

She stands.

I am not alone, Dr Logan. The non-physical world is perfectly real. Just because you don’t have access to something, or equipment sensitive enough to measure it, doesn’t mean it’s non-existent. Someone who couldn’t bend their legs or hips could never sit in that chair and experience it as you do. It wouldn’t mean it wasn’t real.

They could see it with their eyes.

Not if they were blind. In equivalent terms, Dr Logan, you are blind and cannot bend. You deny the existence of the subtler senses despite a plethora of phenomena that cannot be explained with the more obvious five. You think the rationalist/materialist viewpoint the only sane perspective and all other positions the domain of kooks—

Hold on, hold on! He is glad to have rattled her. It reassures him she is human. I’m not saying you’re a kook. I’m just trying to understand.

This is not something you’ll get your head around. You have to experience it to know it.

Do the process, you mean.

Do the process.

And if I did, you think I would be able to speak to Flora myself?

Maybe, she says. No guarantees.

He follows her to the hall closet.

No guarantees?

It’s experimental. You know this.

He helps her thread her arms into the sleeves.

Of course, of course. In her strong advocacy, he had almost forgotten the nature of it. But it might be possible. For me to communicate with Flora.

She tugs his front door open.

Possible, yes.

When he has watched her pull out of his drive, he sends a text to Jules.

Okay?

Eventually she responds.

In Tescos. Want green beans?

‌Song

Since the pool party surfaced, April has been humming. All day, and all night for as long as she can stay awake, humming any tune that will give her refuge. She begins with hymns. ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’: strong, circular, and, for a few hours, a ring of courage no memory can cross. An image flashes into her head: she hums louder. The tune summons Archangel Michael and his sword. Snicker-snack, and another boy is decapitated. No words. The tune alone obliterates. When it wears off, she falls upon ‘Lord of the Dance’. And when that tires, ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind’.

Hymns are the world safe and simple. Primary school assembly, a whole school in grey pleated skirts and shorts, cross-legged, naked knee to knee, the smell of waxed wooden floors, the sinewy hands of Mrs Grover plonking the piano.