I blink. But it doesn’t shift. And trying to understand feels like trying to turn over an elephant in my mind.

Working out what’s going on with the real world = 1 spoon

I let it trickle in slowly.

The swirling colour frosted over my walls.

The forest of deep-green coral gathered round Manta’s tank and housing flashing starfish, shoals of yellow-tipped fish and the dead-eyed mouth of an eel lying in wait.

And, above me, a whole tunnel of water bursting round a light bulb and rippling as a gigantic manta ray comes sweeping over my bed.

My walls. My bedroom walls. They’ve been washed away. Taken by a wave. Replaced with an entire ocean of everything.

I reach out.

Taking Dad’s hand = 1 spoon

‘I’ve got to hand it to him. He might be a teenage delinquent, but he sure can paint.’

Rowan.

His name dips and dives and pulls at a thread of something that is attached to my ribs, my ears, the very tips of my toes. And I want to grab it and push it away. And it’s painful and wonderful. And it’s real and so entirely like a dream.

He has painted my bedroom walls. Every single bit of them.

He has dissolved them into our tunnel under the sea, and I want to lie on the floor with him and look up at the world and take his hand and –

Be.

I look around for him.

‘When you’re better, kiddo. He wants to see you, too.’

He wants to see me. Even after he saw me for who I was, he wants to see me.

And I wonder if anything else could ever feel quite as much like capital-L Living.

79

Alice

My spoons are back.

Perhaps not all-the-way back yet, but enough for me to sit up between Mum, Dad and Cecelia as we watch the recording of her on the local news the other week.

A reporter in a smart suit stands outside the school gates – in the same place I stood just a short while ago – and I wonder if he can see the ghost of my footprints.

Cecelia groans when she flashes on the screen, staring straight into the camera like it’s a high-speed train hurtling towards her.

‘Oh God, this is mortifying.’

‘Shhh-shush! You’re speaking over the best bit.’ Dad turns the volume up loud.

‘I’m joined now by the young rescuer, Cecelia Adebayo. Cecelia – what was going through your mind when you climbed that bell tower?’

The on-screen Cecelia’s eyes bulge as the camera zooms in and there’s a terrifying silence for a moment, which the real Cecelia wails through and tries to snatch the remote away from Dad.

‘Turn – it – off!’

‘Um – I dunno really. Just that it was quite high.’

‘“Just that it was quite high”,’ Mum and Dad mock before falling over laughing.