Our coach, Aleks, would make us drill our dives until we were through pain and into numbness. I suppose that’s why I saw my takeoffs improve under his instruction. I mean this literally. I saw it because the assistant coach – his wife, Julie – filmed all our sessions. Every week he’d make us watch them back and tell him where we could make adjustments; tell him if our knees were too bent, our spines too rigid, if our gazes weren’t focused where they should be focused. Julie said very little during these reviews. She’d stand there with her finger hovering over the rewind button, anticipating his next request.

‘I want you jumping in your dreams,’ Aleks used to say.

I don’t remember dreaming about my takeoffs. But I always woke up sore.

I was born with an ideal diver’s body. That’s not bragging. It’s a body that’s disproportionate: big-shouldered, flat-backed and flat-breasted, with no waist to speak of and short, thick legs.

‘Thank God you’ve got a pretty face,’ Lou would say when we went shopping. ‘Thank God for that blonde hair.’

It was Lou who paid for the private girls’ school where I was first spotted as a potential diver. They had a team which would funnel its best performers into elite squads, bound for national and international competition. The school had its own diving pool, in a hot and humid glass-walled room where the oak-veneer benches were always slick with condensation.

I had no interest in sports, but everyone was obligated to participate in the school’s swimming carnival. I came a lazy sixth in my year’s 200-metre freestyle event, and was peeling my swimming cap from my head, feeling the pull at the roots of my hair, when the diving coach approached me.

Her name was Miss Tyrell. She was a small woman, but not in a petite or delicate way. She was small in the manner of a shrunken head, wizened, with sunken eyes that she outlined in kohl. She wore incongruous bright scrunchies: orange, green, magenta.

The kohl eyes sized up my figure. ‘I think you should try diving,’ she said.

When I declined, she called Lou.

‘The woman was pretty adamant,’ Lou said one night, rummaging through a box of noodles with her chopsticks, looking for any bits of charred meat she’d missed. ‘She said there are people out there who get surgery to have a physique like yours. Something about their vertebrae.’

‘Why would anyone want my vertebrae?’

‘Fucked if I know.’ Lou found a piece of pork and ate it.

‘I’m not doing it,’ I said.

‘Not so fast. There’s one other thing she brought up,’ said Lou, peering at me over her glasses. ‘The incident.’