‘I’ll show them there’s a God. We can all go and meet Him together.’

The sound of running. The alarm turned off mid-whoop like a shot bird.

And you don’t regret it now? asks Logan.

What would be the point of regret?

For the first time, her eyes swivel from the ceiling to meet his own.

If I hadn’t done what I did I wouldn’t have met your friend Dr Salmon. I’d still be locked in a world of pain, Dr Logan. Trying not to go mad.

They drift back to the ceiling. He must have them again.

Was it not the bombing that made you a little mad?

She spikes him with a look.

You’ve read the diary.

Yes.

Then you know that’s not true. I was in a bad way. For so long, I didn’t even know I was in a bad way. I thought that was just me. My personality. But this is me.

April is matter-of-fact. He recognizes the same quality that disturbed him during his meetings with Gabrielle Salmon: the absence of emotional reactions to calamitous events. The only person being triggered is him. He feels a tide of anger rising. He wants to provoke her into reaction.

Even if it has helped you in some way, is this – he struggles to locate some neutral terminology – experience you’re having now worth the deaths of fifteen innocent people?

Still, she is conversing chiefly with the ceiling.

Apparently, that’s what it took. Could fewer people have died and I get the same treatment? Maybe. But fewer people didn’t die. Fifteen people died. That’s just how it worked out.

And to you their deaths were worth it? A boyhood memory: crouched by the back door, poking ants with a stick.

April – finally! – swings her legs off the end of the bed and sits up.

Let me ask you, Dr Logan, why you think death is such a bad thing. She stares at him. I mean you, all of us, start from the assumption that death is bad.

There is a sound in Logan’s ears like rushing air. As surreptitiously as he can, he pinches himself.

You’re telling me it isn’t? he says.

Half of him is in the London kitchen, eating cereal.

What if it isn’t? she says. What if we have it completely wrong? What if we’re in some giant illusion, some giant dream, and the people who have died have just – woken up? And when we die – that is, wake up – we’ll join them.

He imagines joining Flora. She’s ruffling his hair as though he is the child, saying, Miserable old scrote! The image of her melts away into a taped-off area of hillside. April hasn’t finished.

People say of the dead, ‘She’s here in spirit.’ Why do they say that?

They’re in denial, he says. They refuse to accept death.