That night I have another very vivid dream. I am standing at a window in what I think is probably my house, looking down. There is a boy by the front door with sandy hair, with a large cardboard box on a trolley. He is wearing a white short-sleeved T-shirt and I can see the fine golden hairs on his arms glinting in the sun. I am admiring his muscular forearms when he looks up at me and catches my eye.

As I dart backwards into my room I wake with a start, feeling disorientated and strangely on edge, as if there is something I want to do but I don’t quite know what.

I sit up in bed and turn the light on. The growing familiarity of the room, even in its starkness, is somehow comforting.

Was that another memory? Or a dream? God knows how I’m supposed to tell the difference.

I turn the light off and lie back down, but I am wide awake for ages.

Tomorrow I’m going to ask if I can see my house. I think it would help.

It feels strange being outside the hospital again. I’m not entirely sure how long I’ve been there. I watch the buildings whizz past and then thin out as we drive away from the hospital and out of the city. As the buildings get sparser, I find myself relaxing. It occurs to me that I have no memory of being anywhere other than my house and the hospital. But I don’t know much about amnesia – maybe that’s how it works. Maybe I just don’t remember the other places I’ve been.

‘This is it,’ Ellie says as we turn right between two old wooden fence posts. A rusty red gate is propped open and there is a large ‘No Entry’ sign tied roughly to it. I notice a scraggy end of plastic police tape still attached to one of the fence posts.

The car slows as we drive up the long, bumpy track, and I feel a jolt of familiarity as the house comes into view.

It is the farmhouse in my dream. But not the farmhouse of anyone’s dreams. It was probably once a pretty, if not exactly impressive or imposing house, but now the paint is peeling and some of the wooden shutters are rotten and hanging off. The area in front of the house was probably once covered in gravel but now most of the stones have become so worn down that it’s mainly mud. To either side there are fields which look like they could do with attention, some overgrown vegetable patches, and some pens which look like they were probably once for animals but now stand empty.

The front door is red, or at least it probably used to be, but it’s now faded to a kind of dirty rust colour and the paint is peeling.