He couldn’t manage the Underground yet, although it was more direct, but he did love travelling to Belsize Park on the bus. As a sign that things were going his way, he got the seat he wanted at the top in the front. He was king of the world, master of all he could survey. In his imagination. They had talked a lot about his strong imagination and his talent – it turned out to be a talent – for connecting unexpected things. When he was six he had been on summer holiday to France with his fake parents and they all went to visit a very old church, and when he saw the rounded arches, he had said to his mum that he thought the church had been built by special dolphins who had leapt out of the ground and left arches hanging in the air behind them and that you could see that they had been playing and criss-crossing all through the vaulted cloisters; and he had broken into a run and thrown his arms out and spun around and shouted, ‘Dolphins!’ And his mum had hissed at him and told him to shut up and not make a spectacle of himself, and his dad said that dolphins lived in the sea and not to be so stupid. And they were both embarrassed by him and wished they had never adopted such a strange child and he was burning with shame and longing to be gone. And he’d sworn then not to think like that any more, but it went on happening in a separate part of his mind that he didn’t tell people about, except for Simon when they started smoking skunk together, and then he only mentioned the bits that sort of exploded on to the scene. He had told Dr Carr quite recently about the dolphins, and Dr Carr said, ‘What a beautiful idea!’ and Sebastian had started crying and then he had cried so much he was worried he might not be able to stop. Now they called it ‘the dolphin session’, and they both knew what they meant by it. At the end of the Friday sessions, when they weren’t going to see each other until the next Wednesday, Dr Carr often said ‘I’ll be holding you in mind’ and Sebastian hadn’t really taken it in as a kindness until a few weeks ago, and then he had said that it sounded like a cradle, and Dr Carr hadn’t batted an eyelid and had said that the work they were doing was ‘like a psychological cradle’, and so he had got on the floor and curled up and sucked his thumb, to test the theory, and Dr Carr hadn’t batted an eyelid (or battered an eyelid, like some people he could mention), just sat there and let him be in his cradle, because that’s what he needed at the time.