I try to think of something else to add, but I can’t think of anything, and so I run out of the nursery, against the flow of the visitors, and outside. I have three pounds eighty left, so I buy a pot of tea in the cafe, just for the comfort of it, and wait, but nothing happens. After an hour or so I walk down to the station and catch the train back to Exeter and then home.

Leo has changed. The man who came up with the concept of glitching is no longer glitching.

He’s gone.

On Friday I break with my routine. I don’t catch Lara’s train. I leave the house early, with a reassuring note for Dad, and go to the sixth-form college, where I sit on a bench by the main entrance. I’m there at seven, and at first I read my book, but when people start arriving I put on Different Class and stare at them. The line ‘you didn’t notice me at all’ comes on and is incredibly appropriate. No one pays the slightest bit of attention to me, even though I am actually not a ghost here, just a boy who should be at school. I feel that I stick out a mile for being a couple of years too young, but in fact I’m just another teenager in a place filled with teens. While they stream past I do my best to check out every single one of them. I can’t see them all, however. They come in huge waves, spilling off the buses that bring people in from the villages.

There’s a surge just before nine, then another at nine thirty, and then again at ten. From time to time I see someone I recognize from the years above me at school, and a few of them give me a little nod. I know Gus is going to turn up for his maths class at half ten, and when I see him in the distance I hold my book up like a spy in a movie. He doesn’t even glance my way.

He is, I see, walking with a girl. Holding her hand.

For God’s sake! I’ve lived this day for more than twenty years and I’ve only just discovered that my brother has a secret girlfriend. I peek at her from behind my book, just for long enough to see that she’s not Abby Fielding. If she was then I’d throw the book down and run over to meet her. This girl is taller than Gus, and she has white-blonde hair. I wonder who she is.

I don’t wonder for long, however, because about ten seconds after they’ve gone into the building, just as ‘Something Changed’ starts to play for the second time around, Ariel arrives.