My friends, a few paces away, turned back to openly ogle this man, who was old enough to be interesting and not old enough to be disgusting. He had grey-streaked hair combed back from his face, thick-rimmed black glasses, stubble on his jaw and down his neck. His muscles were solid, not the stringy, twitchy muscles of a boy. Even his gut looked hard, like a gorilla’s. And he wore the cleanest white T-shirt I’d ever seen. I lived in a house of persistent stains: white, flaky deodorant stains, brown fake-tan stains, peach and pink makeup smears. His T-shirt was so clean it dazzled me.

‘Thanks.’

‘Are you a diver?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘But that wasn’t your first time, was it?’

‘No.’ I paused. ‘I’m… retired.’

He laughed. I narrowed my eyes against the glare of the sun.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘Here – let me know if I can talk you out of retirement.’

He gave me his card. It was thin and white with a logo, and in blocky black capitals: ALEKS KORSAK, COACH. He told me he worked at a diving club in an outer suburb, a club which, he assured me, was well respected in diving circles. He mentioned a series of names, people he’d coached who had gone on to achieve impressive things. I didn’t recognise any of them.

I slid the card into my wallet, behind the loyalty cards and the debit card Lou watched like a hawk.

‘Who was that?’ one of my friends asked when he was gone.

‘Some pervert, I guess,’ I said.

For days afterwards, I felt a burn in the centre of my back. The smack felt as though it produced its own heat, low and constant, radiating outwards from my body.

It doesn’t seem right to say that Lou is my sister. She’s almost forty. Our mother died when Lou was twenty and I had just turned one. She fought like hell to keep me, and she likes to remind me of this fact every time we fight, which is often, and furiously.

We have money now, but we didn’t for a long time. We’ve never gotten used to it. We have nice plates but eat off paper ones, the way we used to when she was in law school. We can afford to shop at the little organic grocer, but still go to the grotty supermarket two suburbs away. In the deli section, Lou pretends she can speak Italian to the unimpressed woman in a navy apron and hairnet who’s been there as long as we can remember. Once, Lou pointed to a piece of cheese. The woman picked it up and asked Lou a question in Italian. Lou, smiling, said, ‘Sì!’ and we watched as the woman fed the cheese into a machine that pulverised it into a pale powder. She slapped a barcode on it and held Lou’s gaze.

‘Grazie,’ Lou said.