‘It’s a bit late for sunbathing.’ I laugh shakily as he lays me down on it.

They both kneel next to me as I take in the shadows in the garden – the shed at the bottom, emerging from the back like a huge ship. The flower borders. The washing line. My swing, rusting and covered in spiderwebs. It’s all still here, waiting for me.

And my whole body is quivering because I’m outside. Me in my own body. And it’s dealing with it just fine, albeit a bit unsteadily, but that’s pure excitement, I think.

‘Look,’ Mum whispers, tilting her head back.

I wrench my eyes away from my old swing and up into the sky, where the very last of the light is leaking through the clouds. Suddenly something flutter-darts over us. As I move my head to follow it, another darts out, swinging from behind the house and flapping above our heads in a way that whispers.

At first I think it’s a bird. But as one swoops down so close that I could reach out and grab it, I realize that it’s a bat. A black streak in an ink-blue sky. And, as I keep looking, I see more. Three, four, five. All swooping over the garden like they’re paper in water.

I squeeze Mum’s hand, but we don’t say anything because we’re underwater, too. The world is silent now and it’s just us, in a garden, looking up at the world as it Lives.

And I feel that Living breathing on my toes. I feel it hard under my back. I smell it as something cold and freshly cut.

For one moment, I have been pieced back together. Me and my body. And I am Alice and I am Alive.

When the final light leaks out of the sky and I stop being able to feel my toes altogether, Dad scoops me up again.

‘Just a moment longer,’ I say.

‘Another time, kiddo.’

I watch through the window as we walk away. But he doesn’t take me to bed right away. Instead, he lays me on the sofa, head in his lap and legs over Mum’s, and we watch TV with the subtitles on. It’s just some game show, and Dad shouts the answers out and more often than not he’s wrong. And Mum boils some eggs and we peel the shells off them together, dipping the eggs in salt and mayonnaise.

I look around and see Mum still has that sign up. Dance like no one is watching. And on the window sill are whole lives laid out and popped into photo frames. Of them dancing together at their wedding. Of them standing on top of the Great Wall of China and smiling like they, too, could be seen from space. Mum onstage with the Splice Girls, and Dad getting his red belt in tae kwon do.