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the many images that flowed through his head during those four years of attacks, he clearly remembered a beach. Sometimes, in the distance, he could glimpse a little girl, always the same little girl.
    Over the last year, new details had emerged. The image remained misty, the face blurred, but the eyes stood out and fixed themselves in his memory. They were dark and so intense that they burrowed into his mind. They came back every night. He couldn’t remember how many times he had encountered them and remembered them when he woke up in the morning, but it must have happened every night for at least a month.
    Then he started hearing the voices.
    The fainting was preceded by a shiver that ran down his back and by a numbness in all his limbs. But one day, Alex had sensed a voice trying to make its way through the myriad noises and cries that he’d grown used to by now.
    The first few times it had been almost impossible to make out the words. It was a girl’s voice, but he couldn’t make out what she was saying. Then Alex had started jotting down in a notebook the words that he thought he’d understood. The first word had been ‘help’. He’d tried to answer her, but despite his best efforts to speak, he’d been unsuccessful. According to his parents, Alex would sometimes mumble while he was unconscious. Questions like ‘Who are you?’ or ‘Where are you?’
    He had decided to tell no one, not even his mother and father, about what he was seeing or hearing during his attacks. He couldn’t say exactly why, but he sensed that what he experienced was something he needed to protect, to guard. It was his only secret.
    The most significant episode had occurred three months earlier.
    Alex had just come home from basketball practice. He expected his parents to be back from work at any minute. He fainted in his bedroom and, in the few seconds of shivering that were a sign of the impending attack, Alex had managed to lie down on the bed just in the nick of time. The usual fog of pictures and sounds swirled across the screen of his mind, triggering a kaleidoscope of emotions and sensations.
    After the initial confusion, Alex had glimpsed the girl’s face in the distance. As always, the eyes were the only distinguishable detail that emerged from the vision.
    But the voice came through much more clearly this time.
    Do you really exist?
    For a moment he had hesitated, wondering if he’d really heard that question, so clear and so precise. Nothing like this had ever happened, and he was deeply moved and deeply frightened at the same time.
    Yes.
    What’s your name?
    Those few words reverberated in his mind and transported him into a strange head-space, filling him at once with a sense of pleasure and fulfilment.
    Alex. What’s yours?
    A chorus of blood-curdling screams echoed in the distance.
    Jenny.
    Then the girl was gone, sucked away in a spiral of blurred images. In Alex’s diary, that date was underlined and highlighted. It was 27 July 2014. He had felt the presence of the other person. He had perceived something that was terribly real . This was no dream, he was sure of it. It wasn’t a hallucination or a vision.
    Alex had communicated with a girl who was out there somewhere, in some distant corner of the world. He had no idea how it was even possible, but he was convinced of this: Jenny was real.
    And in all likelihood, she was wrestling with the same thoughts as he was.

4
    I told him , thought Jenny as she sat at the dinner table, doing her best to conceal her excitement. Her father shot her an enquiring glance, trying to tell if his daughter was all right after yet another of her countless fainting spells. On the wall next to the refrigerator, the cuckoo clock — which the Graver family had bought last Christmas from a vendor whose stand was just outside the entrance to Altona Coastal Park — said it was 8.40 p.m.
    â€˜It seems to me you’re all