A girl was walking down to the sea in a swimsuit with stripes on it. She had a nice backside, high and rounded. She dived into the waves, smooth and sure as – yes, as a seal. If there weren’t kids there wouldn’t be sweet girls like her, that was a thought. He watched her as she swam straight out, making hardly a ripple on the sea’s smooth surface.

He had never learned to swim, himself. Never had the chance. Like with so many other things. That was one of the troubles with being an orphan, you had no one to teach you stuff. You had to do it all for yourself. Well, he hadn’t managed too badly. He had got himself a profession, hadn’t he? Someone had once asked him what he did for a living and he answered: garbage disposal. He grinned now, remembering. A girl it was who had asked him, in a club in Greek Street. When he answered her she gave him a funny look, and after a minute moved away from him. He supposed she thought he was a dustbin man.

He had brought his book with him. He was nearly at the end of it. Pinkie was planning to bump off the Girl, but it wasn’t going to happen, that was plain to see. Even in books like this one the Girl didn’t get done in – writers were too squeamish. Most likely it was Pinkie himself who was for it. He still had the bottle of acid in his pocket. That detail didn’t ring true. Acid was bound to spill, if you carried it around with you.

The men in the book had these two words for women, ‘buer’ and ‘polony’. Terry had been around a lot, but he had never heard anyone referring to a woman by either of those words. Maybe the writer had made them up. A posh bloke trying to sound common. It didn’t work, mate.

The light was too strong for reading, the page glared in the sun like a sheet of white metal with ants crawling over it. He looked out to sea again. The girl in the striped swimsuit was gone. Did she turn back and come out of the water without his noticing, or had she swum out so far she couldn’t be seen? On the beach, everything looked as if it had been squeezed flat. Sounds too were different, either they were really sharp or really dull. Down to the left a little way, a dog was barking at the waves. The barks came to him as flat whacks on the air, like pistol shots.