“Sure. I’ll drop a wet sponge on your face instead. Keep thinking.”

She kept thinking.

“The arms go really tight around me. They’re her arms, definitely.”

“Is she familiar?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

“How do you know they’re ‘her’?”

“I don’t know.”

“What happens after that?”

“Don’t know.”

A long pause. “Anything else?”

“No. It’s gone already. Sorry, Camilla.”

“Not a problem.”

Camilla Hect depressed the button with a bright and final plastic clack. This was the cue, so she exploded into action. The rule was that she had to lie still and concentrate as hard as she could from the time that the button went down to the time when the button went up. When it went up, pyjamas came off; under the pale, wavering light of the tiny torch taped to Cam’s clipboard, she undressed and dressed herself at the same time, which required a lot of contortions. She wrestled out of her nightshirt with her arms and stretched on her trousers using her ankles, in the move that Camilla called worm with problems.

Being the worm with problems did not worry her. Just being able to dress herself was charming. In the bad old days she used to have to be helped even with the nightshirt, because she couldn’t be trusted not to get stuck with it halfway over her head and get all hot and upset from claustrophobia. It was incredibly important that she not get upset like that again. She had only ever had two tantrums in her life, but it would be humiliating to have a third. Her fingers fumbled a little with the vest, but she was fine pulling on the UV sand shirt, even with arranging the cuffs, which could be complicated and if you got it wrong you had to stand in the bath to take it off again in showers of yellow dirt. The canvas jacket with the toggle closers didn’t slow her down at all. When she finished Cam said, “Good. Quick,” and she was so exhausted from the praise she collapsed back on the mattress.

“I’m doing my stretches now,” she announced hastily, before she could be told to do anything else. She swung her legs upward until her feet were pointed flat at the ceiling, and as she’d been taught, rotated her toes from that angle to circle around the water stains she could see on the plaster. The winter wet was over, but the huge patch of black damp in the corner hadn’t dried up yet. She had told everyone that she should really talk to the landlord, but it had been communicated to her that if she could even find the landlord she would get a gold medal.

Camilla had not said anything in approval or censure, so she said more emphatically, “My legs are really tight today,” in the immortal hope that Cam would take her ankles in her hands and walk them forward. Cam would do this until her knees were touching her chest and her hamstrings were stretched so taut she was convinced they were about to go ping and snap. It was the best thing in the world. If she was really lucky Camilla would rub her calves, which were always sore from walking, or even sometimes her back, though that was usually after practise. But Camilla was busy writing and did not take the bait no matter how much she wiggled her toes. She even repeated herself, and added, “Wow, very tight, goodness gracious,” in a slightly louder voice.