I grip her hand as tightly as I can before letting her float away, wishing on her like she’s a shooting star. I don’t ever want to come back.

I’m wheeled down long corridors with art on the walls so colourful I can’t look at it. But the colours stay with me as I’m led outside and into the car. As the silent headphones go back round my ears. And I take my last look at the world – at Mum and Dad swirling with colours – as I know the car will take the spoons that I’ve slowly built up enough for them to let me go home. But I’ll get them back again. Slowly – they’ll come back.

The car roars.

Colour stretches.

Then the smell of home.

A whirlwind fish spinning in his tank.

The sigh of a duvet in a puff of chalk.

Lights off. World dulls. But the colours stay with me.

I close my eyes and swim.

78

Alice

I’m dreaming and I’m swimming.

The water is warm and clear, like a bath. At the bottom, coral twists out from the jagged seabed and reaches its fingers towards me. But I’m too far away for it to touch me.

And I barrel-roll on to my back and look up, to where the sunlight is shattering into beams and where, up on the surface, there are legs paddling.

Cecelia. Mum. Dad.

Rowan.

I’m too far down to reach them. But I don’t spin or kick to get to them this time, because I’m clinging to every spoon I have. And I wait for my last breath to gutter, and my lungs scream at me to kick kick kick, but I don’t. I steady myself. And I take a lungful of water instead.

And the water doesn’t taste like drowning. My lungs stop screaming and my body sighs and I feel the oxygen flowing through me as if my bones are breathing, too.

I reach up to my neck and there, cut into the sides, are gills. Gills to breathe the in-between.

And now – here – it’s peaceful. It’s warm. I can hear the chattering of surface sounds above and the tapping of hidden things below. And I don’t belong in either place.

But I get the feeling that here – in the middle – I’m not alone.

‘Alice?’

I open my eyes and it’s Dad. He’s swum down to see me.

‘Hi,’ I say, and I duck and dive, because I said a word. Even after the car took them from me again, I said a word out loud.

Dad’s smile twinkles. ‘Welcome back, kiddo.’

He swims away again and leaves a curious sight behind him. It almost seems like grains of my dream have been kicked up into reality, and my bedroom has been swept away into an ocean of blues.