And despite the disjointed Dreamstate I found myself in and the impossibility of the situation out in the real world, I did. Not for what I could see in front of me on this lazy weekend a decade in the past, but here and now, secure in the knowledge that I was loving her in a protective way, deep within the dreary midwinter of Sector Twelve and the shabbiness of the Sarah Siddons. Hiding her, looking after her needs, attempting to find a way forward into something that might resemble survival and justice.

I looked at my hands again and touched my symmetrical head, the rasp of stubble against my fingertips. I felt my nose: straight, aquiline, distinguished.

‘I like being Charles,’ I said.

‘You’re Charles now, my Charles,’ said Birgitta with a delightful 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.’

It was the same line. Repeated word for word.

‘What Dreams May Come,’ I replied, then, by way of experiment, added: ‘While Krugers with Lugers take potshots at hotshots.’

Birgitta frowned.

‘What?’

‘ . . . is enough to make mammoths with a gram’s worth of hammocks feel down with a clown from Manchester Town.’

I then did a cartwheel in the soft sand. I hadn’t done one for a while and saw stars for a moment, but when I looked at Birgitta again she had an expression of such abject confusion that I felt quite concerned.

‘You’re Charles now, my Charles?’ she said in an uncertain tone.

‘I am for the moment.’

‘You and me? What  . . . Dreams May Come.’

I’d changed the dream. Not just lines, but actions. And I’d changed Birgitta’s responses, too.

‘What Dreams May Come,’ I said.

‘Happy snap?’ said the photographer. ‘Proper tidy you’ll look and as—’

‘—reasonably priced as they come?’ I said. ‘Was that what you were going to say?’

‘Well, yes,’ said the photographer, looking at Birgitta, who shrugged. I knew that I was now leading the dream, and not just being a passenger within it.

‘We’ve not much time,’ I said, feeling the shadow of the blue Buick dream fast approaching our beach idyll. ‘I want to see more of you and me, away from the beach. When and where did we meet for the last time?’

The smile dropped from her face.

‘You don’t need me to tell you, Charlie, you already know.’

It was true, I did. It was in the Cambrensis, a week prior to Slumberdown, three years before. But just then, the little girl approached with the beach ball and the gurgle of laughter but she didn’t pass by this time; she stopped and stared at me.

‘Be careful, Charlie,’ she said. ‘If you look into someone else’s dreams, all you ever find are nightmares.’

And she ran off with her beach ball.