I’ve been trying to rest all day. But it’s difficult when Cecelia is putting silly ideas in my head and telling Dad about things she most certainly shouldn’t be telling him.

‘Five or six, maybe?’ I say.

Dad and Cecelia look at Mum, who looks out of the door at something else. Then she turns back and nods.

‘Master has spoken,’ Dad says, and he scoops me up without even asking me, so one of my socks falls off and I barely have time to make sure all the buttons on my top are fully in place.

‘Dad!’ I shout, clinging on to him.

But Cecelia is racing through the door and my heart is racing through spoons, because he’s taking me outside my bedroom again. Out of the four walls and on to the landing.

‘Are we going downstairs?’ I whisper hopefully.

‘Even better.’

He takes me into the spare room.

I can’t say that this is usually better than outside, where there are bats and wind and sunsets and Living, breathing things. But the spare room has had a makeover since I was last there and it makes me want to leap down and run across to Mum and Cecelia, sitting on the floor where the washing usually dries, because –

The whole room is green.

A thick piece of bright green material hangs from new hooks in the ceiling, rolling like a grassy hill round the walls either side of it and across the floor to the window opposite, where Dad’s set up his laptop and a webcam. And in the middle are props. Feather boas, snorkel sets, an astronaut’s helmet and a whole pile of other things my eyes can’t pick out.

‘What on earth …’ I say as Dad lays me down next to Mum and Cecelia.

‘Wait and see,’ Mum says, strapping a snorkel and a mask to my face, so it pinches my nose.

‘Ouch! You’re not going to flood the room with water, are you? That sounds expensive.’

Cecelia rolls her eyes as she struggles to put on a wetsuit over her clothes. ‘Jesus, Al – impatient much?’

Dad fiddles around with his laptop until suddenly a screen propped up against the radiator flickers to life. For a moment, I see me, lying on a bright green carpet next to swearing Cecelia and Mum, who is trying to squeeze into a green Morphsuit.

A thousand questions are sitting on my lips, but they all disappear as Dad presses a button and the screen changes.

And suddenly we’re not sitting in the middle of the spare room on the screen. We’re floating in the middle of a vast, endless sea.

‘Oh – wait – what?’ I whisper, trying to crawl over to the screen to see it better.