I overslept the next day. One moment I was dreaming – not the nightmare, thank God – and the next I was bolt upright in bed, heart hammering. I glanced at my phone on the bedside table. Eight forty-five. I hopped out of bed and got dressed quickly. I mean, I knew everything must be fine. If it hadn’t been, Uncle Mike would have woken me up, but that thought wasn’t the same as seeing Gran and knowing she was okay.

Gran was okay.

She was having an animated talk with her son in the front room, the inevitable cup of tea at her side. She was even nibbling on a round of toast. She smiled when I came in.

‘Grace! I thought you were dead.’

‘Gran! I was going to say the same thing. Not that I thought I was dead . . .’

‘I’m telling your uncle here about the time I was abducted by sinister foreigners in some kind of child slavery business. I escaped by . . .’

I’d heard the story before, but I sat and listened. Turned out many of the crucial details had changed, but that was to be expected in a Gran story. She finished the tale. She finished the round of toast. Another miracle.

Dr Death and Dr Gardner came by mid-morning with Sonja. Gran cheerfully informed them that she wasn’t going to be making her final request for voluntary assisted dying on the grounds she’d never felt better in her life, that she had a spring in her step and that she wasn’t beyond thinking that her libido was making a comeback.

Everyone was happy to hear it. Well, I wasn’t too happy thinking about Gran’s imaginary sex life, but if that was the price to be paid . . .

Sonja had a quiet word to me and Uncle Mike as she left.

‘If she is to be believed, all her pain has gone. All of it. That’s crazy, but obviously in a good way. If her last days are pain-free, then we couldn’t have hoped for anything more.’ She paused. ‘I just worry she might try to convince herself that her disease has disappeared along with the pain. It hasn’t. She’s still dying.’

‘We know,’ said Uncle Mike. ‘And she knows it too. You don’t get to her age and think you’re not dying. But she’s enjoying life, so maybe if she does think the disease has magically disappeared, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. There are plenty of people who think their hearts are indestructible and then drop down dead. There’s that old Irish saying. May you be in heaven half an hour before the devil knows you’re dead. I’d be happy if my mother is dead half an hour before she realises it herself.’

Sonja smiled.

‘I’d be happy with that too,’ she said. Then she frowned. ‘That didn’t come out quite right,’ she added.

Simon picked me up at a quarter to five on the dot and we got to his sister’s place at five to. He’d dropped into Bunnings in the early afternoon – he’d had a free period at school – to get the stuff I’d ordered online. One large sandbag, a pair of bolt cutters and a few metres of heavy-duty chain. He’d rung me early in the morning to let me know he didn’t know anyone with bolt cutters, so I had to buy the lot. Luckily, Uncle Mike’s credit card had slipped from his wallet, so I could afford it. Well, he could afford it.

I offered to help Simon get the stuff out of the boot of his car, but he turned me down. Machismo. A terrible thing, but at least it saved me from pulling a muscle or two. I lugged my backpack over and stood at the side of the pool. The short diving board at the deep end was a bonus – I’d spotted that at the kids’ party – because getting into the pool weighed down was always going to be a problem otherwise. I could have ordered a crane, but Uncle Mike might have become suspicious when he checked his Mastercard account. Even so, it was probably not going to look great – someone balancing on the edge of a diving board and then sploshing in inelegantly – which is why I’d instructed Simon to start the video just as I entered the water. The pool was blue and clear, which was good. I wanted Simon’s camera to pick up an image of me at the bottom of the pool, but not so clearly that anyone could see what I did there or some of the props I would be using. Ripples, I hoped, would mask me.

I took off my clothes – I had my disgusting costume on underneath – and dropped some stuff I’d need into the water. Then Simon and I lugged the sandbag, chains and padlocks onto the diving board. After that it was simply a question of attaching me to the sandbag and wrapping the chains around my body, and we’d be good to go.

I say ‘simply’, but have you ever tried to attach a sandbag, chains and padlocks to yourself while balanced on a diving board that’s bending alarmingly close to the point of snapping? That’s a rhetorical question, by the way. Take my word for it; it was not easy. In fact, the rest of the trick would be relatively simple compared to the set-up. But we did it eventually.

Simon then beat a hasty retreat, which took some pressure off the board, and set up his phone on the tripod. We’d worked out the angles beforehand and the setting sun would reflect off the surface a little, making it harder to get a very clear view of the pool’s bottom. He stuck my stupid banner on the other side of the pool while I sat on the edge of the board, a metre or so from the water, like a trussed-up turkey, though not as appetising. I felt like an idiot. I must’ve looked like an idiot. Simon checked the time, then held up two fingers to indicate when we’d be going live. Two minutes for me to think about how stupid this whole thing was. I had time to back out. Maybe I should’ve. But suddenly I wasn’t worried about looking like a total dick in front of thousands of TikTok viewers. This was for me and no one else. I checked the hairpins lodged in my cheek. All present and correct. So I hyperventilated as Simon counted down the seconds from the edge of the pool.

‘Go,’ he yelled.

I went.

I kicked at the sandbag, which tipped into the pool. Because the chain wrapped round it was so short, I followed immediately. The water closed over my head and I plunged . . . straight into my nightmare.

Time is different in dreams. I read somewhere that just a few seconds of sleep can produce apparent hours of dreamtime. Some experimenters brought test subjects out of sleep a few seconds after REM began – that’s rapid eye movement, which is the indicator of when someone is dreaming – then asked the subjects for their estimates of how much time had passed in their dream, and it ranged from a few minutes to many hours.

Just saying.

Anyway, I was in my dream – or maybe my hallucination – for what seemed like many minutes, but it could only have been ten or twenty seconds, tops. I was suspended in dark water. I had no notion of what was up or down. Those familiar feelings of panic flooded me. I could feel my heart thumping in my chest and my eyes strained to make out any detail in my surroundings, any clue where light and oxygen might be. I glanced down and there was that lumpy shadow, a few metres below my dangling feet. It was clearer this time, a curve of darkness against a lighter dark. A car roof. Maybe. I kicked in that direction. It was instinctive because this was a dream, or maybe a hallucination, and my conscious mind was somewhere else. I reached out a hand and felt the metal of the roof, but it was difficult to get a grip. I kicked again, sank a little further, and there was a window and beneath it a handle recessed into a door. I pulled on the handle but nothing happened. I pulled again. Nothing happened. So I pressed my face against the glass and looked inside.

My brother’s face, eyes open, blood pooling in a cloud around him.

Beyond it, me, strapped in by a seatbelt, my father reaching back from the driver’s seat, scrabbling furiously around my waist. Bubbles were coming from his mouth. There weren’t any bubbles from Jake’s mouth. I could see my own eyes, wide with terror, my body thrashing from side to side. The rest was blurry. The window on my side smashed, though there was no noise. Had my father done that? I couldn’t tell. Then his hands were grabbing me, forcing me to the window, pushing. The last I saw was my feet slipping out of the car and then there was nothing. My fingers loosened, the handle slipped from my grasp and the dark bulk of the car was sinking, sinking, until I couldn’t see it anymore . . .

The water lightened, turned blue, and I could feel chlorine burning my eyes. Or maybe it was those images, that dream, that memory. I would work that out later because I was back in the now, lungs straining for air, panic building. I was at the bottom of the pool, my foot caught under the sandbag, a chain digging into my ankle. Already a thin stream of bubbles was escaping my mouth. I closed my eyes, counted. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi. Relax. Don’t fight the burn. It will go away. And it did. A calm came over me and for a moment I let my body still, muscles relaxing. There were things I needed to do, a sequence of movements that would bring me to the surface, but my mind needed to be clear. Panic and death were two sides of the same coin.

I opened my eyes. The water around me was still churning. Well, not exactly churning, but I thought it would keep what I was doing down here out of the camera’s view. Just to be sure, I moved my arms about, creating more of a swirl. Then I probed with my tongue, searching for one of the pins tucked into a cheek. Nothing there. I did it again, even though I knew it was useless. They were gone. And with the realisation came another surge of panic, this one a tsunami that nearly swept me away. Even then I thought how ironic, how fitting it would be that I had just seen my father and brother die and now I was going to join them. Our deaths would be the same, just separated by time. It was . . . absurd.

I didn’t know how long I had been down there. As I said, time, like a magician, plays tricks. But judging by the pressure in my chest and the way I had to fight the urge to inhale, I had probably a minute to escape. Maybe less. Think, Grace. Don’t give up. Fight. The pins had to be in the pool. In the shock of the nightmare they must have slipped from my mouth. They were down there somewhere and if I couldn’t find one I’d die. I remembered asking Simon to rescue me if I got in trouble, but how was that going to happen? I was weighted to the bottom. The chains were thick and using bolt cutters underwater would take way too long. The realisation that it had always been a stupid rescue plan hit me hard.

I grabbed hold of the chain attached to my left leg and pulled myself further to the bottom of the pool, searched the floor for a glint of metal, but the water was still moving and light was fracturing and I couldn’t see, so I felt with my right hand, brushing the floor but coming up with nothing and the burn was getting hotter and my lungs felt like they were in bands of steel and I still couldn’t find anything and suddenly . . . suddenly, I felt at peace. It was the strangest feeling. Even now, I can’t describe it. Acceptance? No, it wasn’t that. Everything just seemed . . . okay. Even though it wasn’t.

My finger brushed a bump on the pool floor, just to the right of the sandbag. It moved, maybe a centimetre or two, maybe more. I felt for it again, picked it up. A hairpin. My new-found calmness helped. I had picked padlocks hundreds of times. True, I had never had to do it under this kind of time pressure, but at least I didn’t have to think. My fingers knew what to do without being told. Trust my skill. Trust my fingers. Trust my magic.

I don’t remember what happened next. When I think back it’s an emptiness, like the memory of my father’s and my brother’s deaths had been an emptiness. But I knew the steps I must have taken. I’d rehearsed it God knows how many times. Firstly the padlocks, in what must’ve been record time, then stretching out my right foot to find the perspex steps, the ones that had taken me forever to build and that I’d dumped in the pool earlier. Then getting the rest of my props out of the waterproof bag attached to the small of my back.

I remember none of that.

Time played its tricks again and I was standing on the side of the pool, chest heaving, while Simon danced around me, bursting with excitement.

‘That was awesome, Grace,’ he said. ‘Unbelievable. Watch it. Go on, watch it.’

He stuck the phone up to my face, pressed something. Images moved, sounds floated, but I didn’t see or hear them. I stood there, heart pumping, tears running down my face and I saw nothing except my father as he pushed me out of the drowning car and my brother lying still, a cloud of blood blooming around his face.

‘Are you okay, Grace?’ Simon said.

I might have nodded. I’m not sure. He might have put his arms around me. I’m not sure. I stood as if carved from stone and watched the images unfurl in my head. And I wept for a father I’d never really known, a father who had died in the act of saving me. And I cried for a brother gone forever. Even his ghost had deserted me and, when I thought back, I could see why. There were things I wished I’d said, things I should’ve said, but it was too late for that.

You’d think I’d have had enough of water, but the tears rolled on anyway. Not that Simon could tell. When your face is already dripping water then crying becomes invisible, like yet another magic trick, another sleight of hand. Later on I was grateful for that. I’m Grace McKellon. I’m all sorts of things, but vulnerable isn’t one of them.

‘Take me home, please, Simon,’ I said. It came out as a whisper.

The following day, when I was very nearly in control of myself, I watched the video through. Simon was right. It was pretty awesome.

The first minute and a half simply showed me at the bottom of the pool. The entrance into the water wasn’t as clumsy as I’d feared and the resulting ripples meant I was out of clear focus while I desperately searched for the missing pins. Then, about two minutes in, the water around me started to boil and change colour. The blue of the pool became red – I’d paid attention in chemistry class – and bubbles came to the surface, obscuring me even more. This was the dramatic moment I’d worked so hard on. The top of my head broke the surface of the pool and then I rose up, spreading my arms to the side, until it seemed like I was balancing on the water. Dynamo, the British magician, had done this kind of thing before, but I reckoned I’d added a few more dramatic details. My head tilted back and a burst of electricity played around my head. It was like my hair was alive in a thunderstorm, with arcs of blue, white and red light dancing over my scalp and shoulders. I turned to look straight into the camera, then opened my mouth wide, and five butterflies floated out before fluttering into the sky.

The video ended. Simon had done a good job. Any more, like seeing me collapse into the pool again and struggle to the side, sobbing and pulling myself out like a sack of potatoes, would have been . . . anticlimactic.

We watched the vid again.

‘There are people calling it fake,’ said Simon, reading the TikTok comments. ‘All CGI and not very good CGI at that. God, it didn’t take long for the trolls to come out in force.’

‘You know better,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘How did you do it? I mean, I know how you did that thing where you seemed to be walking on water, but what about that electricity and the butterflies?’

‘Not gonna happen, Simon,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to keep some secrets. Though you should know that no insects were hurt in the making of that film.’ I might have added that I hadn’t done a David Blaine and eaten the poor buggers or lodged them in my throat. Sleight of hand has always been my go-to.

‘That’s disappointing,’ he said.

‘That they weren’t hurt?’

‘That you won’t tell me.’

‘Oh well,’ I replied. ‘That’s show business for you.’

The show always goes on, I thought. Even when you’re dying you see the performance through to the end. Should I be proud of that? I didn’t have a clue.

I considered asking Simon how his sister reacted to finding a sandbag, a bunch of chains, a backpack, a couple of padlocks and a set of perspex steps at the bottom of her blood-red pool, but I couldn’t be bothered.