Ama looks up at me and smiles slightly before looking at her feet again. Le Temps says nothing. I look across the room at the other two groups. I can hear everything they’re saying. Season’s group are laughing about Martin Aston’s name. In MC2’s group, Maria’s explaining how her parents didn’t want relatives in Brazil to know her birth date in case she had The Gift and they found out, so they gave her a normal name but when she grows up she plans to change it. I hear both groups simultaneously until it starts to sound like German and I have to really focus to bring my mind back to our group. Then I feel a knot in my stomach when Le Temps turns to me. But I’ve been rehearsing whilst the others were speaking. I take a deep breath.

‘I’m Elle Bíbi-Imbelé Ifíè. Elle is a palindrome, which means it reads the same backwards or forwards, and it means she in French. Bíbi-Imbelé means mouth-sweet in Izon, which is a language from Nigeria. Ifíè means time.’

‘Thank you, Elle,’ says Le Temps. ‘That was quite a monologue in your mouth-sweet tongue. But,’ he takes his Chronophone out of his pocket and taps it on, ‘can you actually SPEAK Izon?’

I look down at my shoes. Grandma chose not to speak to me in Izon when I was little because I didn’t speak at all till my first leap birthday. She was worried if she spoke Izon to me I would get confused and speak a weird mixture of English and Izon called Englon or Izlish. I liked the idea. But I didn’t speak at all for years. I had to go to Speech and Language classes where they threw a red ball at me and made me throw it back. Grandma stopped me going because she wanted me to learn to speak English, not play ball games. That was the day she said, ‘If your tongue refuses to speak, I will teach it to dance.’ She meant I would learn how to taste things. She taught me to cook.

Le Temps looks up from his phone. ‘Thought not,’ he says. ‘Maybe one day you’ll learn to live up to your name, eh?’

He smiles like he just said something nice but he didn’t. He puts his phone away.

‘And last but by no means least, Ben.’

After a six-second delay, Big Ben says, ‘Yes.’

‘Introduce yourself.’ Le Temps is staring at Big Ben.

Big Ben is staring at Le Temps. ‘Ben,’ he says.