‘But she’s got eyes. They’re like mirrors.’

He let quite a few seconds go by before answering. ‘Yes, but she’s not alone there. A species of fish has mirrors instead of lenses in its eyes, you know.’

(I didn’t know. Sam is going to freak right out when I tell him this. He’s going to get back to normal with me, for definite.)

‘Who knows how sensory organs survive such temperatures?’ he said, shrugging. ‘Maybe metals are involved – but that’s just a guess.’

I told him how I’d felt her reading me, as though she was building a vibration picture of me, and Mr Clemm looked seriously fascinated. We talked for ages. We decided, together, that Whizzy’s eyes might even be three or more sense organs in one, and she might see with the help of vibrations like snakes do, and everything in Ash House was so easy now that I couldn’t believe I’d ever been worried. I didn’t want this perfect day to end.

When I asked how he knew Whizzy was female, he laughed. ‘Sorry, Alfie – I don’t know that at all. It’s just a guess. I couldn’t carry on calling her an “it”, so I settled on “she”. There may or may not be such a thing as male or female where she comes from – but I feel she’s female.’

There are rivers in the sky, Mr Clemm told me! I wanted to text that to Sam straight away, but couldn’t, obviously – that would have been rude. (And now I’ve decided face to face will be best so I can watch his mind blow.) And there are tornadoes on the sun – Mr Clemm showed me pictures of them on my phone.

And I told him that on Saturn, it might rain diamonds, and I can’t be sure, but I think that’s what set Lily off. I said ‘diamonds’ pretty loudly because I was all excited, and she turned her head like she’d been slapped. Sometimes things that people say remind Lily of whatever it was that happened to her, and there’s no avoiding it because only Mum and Dad and Lily know what happened. So you say something totally innocent and she just flips. In any case, the next time I looked at her and Mum sitting back in the kitchen again, Lily had pulled a section of hair loose and was chewing the ends, and Mum was shaking her head vigorously and stroking Lily’s arm while Lysander swayed from one leg to the other on the kitchen floor, scattering papers with his wings – flick, flick, flick – like he was sorting them into piles.

Mr Clemm hadn’t noticed. ‘I thought about feeding her electricity,’ he said, ‘but at first, she did quite well on sunlight itself. Sunlight is energy. But after a few weeks, she weakened.’

My heart skittered.