She’d taken off her shirt to eat a kebab over the sink. Her bra had sweat stains in the middle, dried with salt like a tide line.

‘No, don’t.’

‘You sure?’

‘I’m sure.’

She went anyway.

I finished school without distinction, and spent the following summer doing nothing, looking forward to nothing. Diving was over, or so I thought, and I felt no urgency to study, to work, to make a name or a future for myself. It seemed to me that everyone I knew had such small ambitions, enrolling in courses in accounting, or web design, or osteopathy.

Meanwhile, I ate ice cream and dreamed of an amorphous kind of glory. Most of this dreaming occurred at the local swimming pool, a great swarming expanse where people’s towels marked their territory.

I was spending most summer days there with girls I called my friends. Sometimes we swam, but we spent most of our time coolly assessing each day’s assortment of boys. We surveyed boys we’d seen around our neighbourhood, boys we knew from parties and formals, boys who had taken the bus from shabbier suburbs than ours. We could see who had a spray of violent acne across the shoulder blades, who had an unattractive, chimpish gathering of dark hair at the base of his spine, who was so thin that the back of his navel popped through the front like a prolapse.

Behind the main pool there was a ten-metre diving platform. It loomed above its own separate pool, the water of which was weirdly green. It was rare to see someone dive from that tower. When it happened, it was usually those same boys, some squeamish and cringing, some only too happy to go sprinting down the platform and fling themselves off the end, their limbs wheeling in helpless fury before they hit the water and sent waves slopping over the sides of the pool.

One day a pudgy boy in hibiscus-print boardshorts sauntered over to us, dripping.

‘Did you see that, ladies?’ he said, the giddiness from his first act of bravery goading him into another.

A friend, a girl whose most memorable attribute was her ability to open bottles with her eye socket, inclined her head in my direction. ‘She’s a diver,’ she said. ‘A real one. Dipshit.’

He looked at me, unimpressed. ‘Prove it,’ he said.