‘I’m all right now,’ I say, and it’s the truth. I do feel okay, but I don’t want to speak for a moment. I look across at Susan and Mola and they are both sitting with their eyes half closed, as though they are enjoying the silence as much as I am. I sip my tea and close my eyes as well.

I can hear seagulls and the soft hum of traffic on the seafront, and the gentle rustling of a tree outside, and a bicycle bell pinging, and away in the distance – so far away that I might be imagining it – a child shouts something.

There’s something else as well, and it’s a moment before I work out that it’s the fluttering of the little flags that form a large cone around the flagpole in the garden, and I’m reminded of the evening – only a few weeks ago, but it feels like a lifetime – when I first heard them, and saw them, and met Mola too.

I feel like, if I could just detach myself further from today, I might hear the sound of the clouds moving, or the high-pitched buzz of a sunbeam, or the soothing hum of the blue sky, and everything will be back to normal.

I can’t do it. I open my eyes and find, to my embarrassment, that Susan and Mola are both looking at me. Mola smiles and nods. ‘Welcome back.’

‘I was … daydreaming.’

‘Good,’ she says. ‘More people should try it! Silence is not empty, Malky: it is full of answers.’

‘I was thinking,’ says Susan, replacing her cup in the saucer precisely. ‘Malky. You think that Seb is somehow “trapped” in a dream of your … your making?’

I sigh. ‘I guess so. I mean … that’s as good a way of putting it as any. No wonder people don’t believe me.’

‘Can’t he control the dream he is having?’

‘I don’t really know. A bit, I think. But not enough to wake up, obviously. Something’s gone wrong.’

Susan looks over at her grandmother. ‘Have you heard about this, Mola? This dream-sharing?’

Mola doesn’t look at us, but gazes at a point in the distance so intensely that I turn my head to see what she’s looking at, but there’s nothing.

She nods slowly. ‘I have heard of it. I had a lama – a teacher – who talked about it. He definitely believed it was possible. Maybe belief is all that is required.’

There’s a long pause before Susan speaks next, and I hear the seagulls cawing again.

‘So … Malky … could you go back to the same dream?’

I think about this. ‘And … and do what?’

‘Well, you say your powers of control seem to diminish the longer you are in the dream?’

‘That’s what’s been happening, yes.’