I assumed he was asking about Thelma’s work, but I recalled how her suggestion had made me feel – as if I were on the wrong side of the globe, hanging by my feet towards the sky. She’d said that you didn’t need to move the symbol, unlike the log – that just concentrating on it would be enough. Perhaps I turned away too fast, however ridiculously irrational my haste was. I almost lost my balance, and the world around me seemed to capsize, dangling the forest into space. I was about to grab Roy for support if not for some greater reassurance when I managed to regain my sense of how things ought to be. “Enough of that,” I declared and waited barely long enough to make sure Roy came away as well.

The path was distinguishable only as a strip of paler grass, no longer emphasised by gravel. I felt as if the vegetation that had overwhelmed it was threatening my senses too. The sunlit greenery everywhere around us was so intensely present that I could smell and virtually taste it, leaving little room for thought. My aunt had never said how you would know if the world had been turned inside out, but the notion made the trees at the edge of my vision feel illusory, close to abandoning their substance to exhibit some kind of reversal, a hollowness eager to take on more life. Whenever I glanced aside I saw nothing my aunt would have imagined, which surely meant I needn’t. A marker post next to the path heartened me, at least until we reached it. Was it painted green, or was that moss? When I looked back for reassurance that we hadn’t wandered away from the official routes, I couldn’t see the path. “Aren’t we going further?” Roy said.

I should make the most of the time we had together. We had hours of daylight yet, and I said “Anywhere in particular?”

“Anywhere your aunt showed you stuff.”