At that point, I hear Dad coming downstairs, and I quickly close the window on the laptop. He comes in and looks a bit surprised to see Susan there.

She stands up – stands up! – and says, ‘Hello. I am Susan Tenzin. A friend of Malky’s.’

Wow, grown-ups are suckers for this sort of thing, aren’t they? Dad stops, gives her a tired smile and says, ‘Hello, Susan.’

‘I am very sorry to hear about Sebastian.’

‘Thank you, love.’

‘I was just leaving, wasn’t I, Malky?’

Ten minutes later, Dad and I are in the car heading back to the hospital. As she left, Susan said, ‘I’ll text you later,’ and the thought of that, and what we had half agreed to do, made me go very quiet.

Have I seriously just agreed to do this? I’m not sure, exactly. I still have half a hope that – somehow – I will get our Dreaminators back at the hospital. The whole thing plunges me into silence in the car.

Dad doesn’t really seem to mind. Perhaps he, too, thinks that silence can be full of answers.

Chapter 63

Mormor and Uncle Pete are Mam’s mam and younger brother and they are already at the hospital by the time we get there, sitting with Mam in the beige waiting room beneath Aslan the lion from Narnia. A box of tissues and empty cardboard coffee cups sit between them. Their eyes are red and puffy. Outside the room, hospital staff walk quickly everywhere, and for a moment I try to imagine I’m just there for something normal, but of course it’s never normal being in hospital, is it?

A man in a doctor’s coat comes into the room. He explains that Dr Nisha has gone home, and that he is the doctor in charge of Seb’s case. I don’t remember his name and he doesn’t look at me once. He seems nervous and doesn’t sit down.

The news is not good. Seb’s blood pressure and breathing rate have fallen and, while the doctors are still ‘optimistic’, it is still too early to say, and they still don’t know exactly what’s happening to him.

There is talk of the ICU, which I know from TV means ‘intensive care unit’, reserved for the most serious cases of everything, although Seb is not there. Not yet.

‘Can I see him?’ I ask the doctor.

I’m on my own with Seb in his room.