She looked at me and smiled, and I felt myself smile back. The dream was, as far as I could see, identical in every detail. The gulls cackled from on high, and the scent of the tide drifted in on the breeze. She gave me her captivating smile, and pushed the hair once more behind her ear. I was Charles, and she was Birgitta, and this was their perfect moment.

‘I love you, Charlie.’

‘I love you, Birgitta.’

The breakers boomed and then the child, with a gurgle of laughter, chased a beach ball toward shore’s edge. Again.

‘Is this really me?’ I asked, repeating myself before I’d realised it.

Birgitta blinked at me and smiled.

‘You’re Charlie now, my Charlie,’ she said with a giggle. ‘Try not to think about the facility and HiberTech Security. Just today and tomorrow, forty-eight hours. You and me. What Dreams May Come.’

‘What Dreams May Come,’ I replied.

Knowing that I might wake soon, I looked around, eager to soak in the fine detail.

Behind us was a path leading back up to the car park, where there would be a café of whitewashed clapboard that sold the best pistachio ice cream in the nation. We were close to where Birgitta’s mother lived, and would be staying in the room above the car house with its double brass bed, boxwood panelling and lace curtains. We’d leave early on Sunday and stop at Mumbles Pier to eat cockles and laver bread, while ‘Groove Me’ played on a wireless close by. I knew all these things without knowing how I knew, and odder still, I couldn’t just remember backwards, I could remember forwards. The beach was only a memory of better times, many years before. Following this, Birgitta and I had travelled separately to Sector Twelve. She’d painted and I’d worked at HiberTech as an orderly in the Sleep Sciences Division, Project Lazarus. We’d met rarely but passionately, and then we’d been parted, this time for good.

‘Happy snap?’ said a photographer who was plying his trade up and down the beach. ‘Proper tidy you’ll look and as reasonably priced as anywhere you’ll find.’

This was as far as I’d got in the dream the first time round and I expected to be awoken again, but I wasn’t. We agreed and he took the Polaroid, handed it to us and told us he would be back to pick up payment if it came out ‘to our proper satisfaction’. We watched the picture emerge, cementing the moment in time. It was the first time I got to see what I looked like. Birgitta’s Charles was ridiculously handsome, with fine features and dark curly hair that half obscured his eyes. Despite this, he looked somehow lost, hopeless and ultimately doomed—

*   *   *