‘All I know is that I dreamt I was Webster in the Gower, then went to the blue Buick from here.’

She frowned, then a flash of understanding moved across her face.

‘With a jump and a tear?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘with a jump and a tear.’

‘That’s a first,’ she said, genuinely impressed. ‘We record dreams on wax cylinder because Edison’s invention has never really been improved upon. But there is another, more practical reason. Do you want to try and guess what it is?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘It’s this: each cylinder records about eight minutes of dream. A single night’s recording can produce upwards of twenty cylinders. We kept Don Hector’s – there are about seven hundred dreams of his in storage – but we can’t keep them all, so the dreams we record from people of no consequence are—’

‘—erased,’ I said.

‘Yes indeed,’ said Aurora. ‘Whoever was on erasing duty that day didn’t do such a good job and left the remains of one of Webster’s dreams on the start of the cylinder.’

I understood, then. Everything I knew of Birgitta and Charles I’d gained from a half-inch of shiny blue grooves at the head of a single wax cylinder. Without random chance to bring me and this cylinder together, meeting Birgitta under the car would have been only intriguing, at best, and I’d likely not have intervened when Aurora was going to retire her. Without her becoming my dream-woman, she’d be dead.

‘I’ll make sure this cylinder is trashed once we’re done,’ said Aurora. ‘Now, you know why I’m here?’

‘You want to know where the cylinder is.’

‘Full marks. Are you going to tell me?’

‘I don’t know where it is.’

‘You’re a bad liar, Charlie. I’ve been working the Dreamspace since before you were squirted out of the turkey baster, and I’m good at it. When dreams are your own, you have agency over them, but right now we’re equal actors in another’s dream. I can mould it the way I want it to go, I can mould you the way I want you to go. I can pull something from your subconscious that you don’t want revealed, and I can even have your mind sweated out of you, so you end up like that dopey orderly, no better than a nightwalker. What was his name again?’

‘Webster.’

‘Thank you. So  . . . Where was I?’

‘Something about sweating my mind out of me so I ended up like Webster?’

‘Yes – good only for driving a golf cart. So, here’s the deal: tell us where the cylinder is and we’ll retrieve Birgitta and you get to go back to the land of the living. How about it?’

I looked around at the beach, the Argentinian Queen and the parasol of spectacular size and splendour.