She put me on hold. I didn’t know it then, but the woman I was speaking to was Julie Korsak, Aleks’s wife. She was the team’s assistant coach, though I was never really sure whether this position was official. She also seemed to operate as the team manager, as Aleks’s secretary, as an ersatz nurse for the girls on the team. It would be wrong to say she was always at his side; she was more like a satellite, orbiting him, surveying him from a distance and recording everything she saw.

The hold music was strange – an echoing piano felted with static. Later, whenever I heard this music I would imagine a tiny Julie Korsak inside the telephone, or suspended between telephones, mournfully playing the same tune over and over.

‘Joan?’ Aleks’s voice cut through the music.

He invited me to observe a training session. ‘Come over,’ he said, and gave me the address. ‘Have a look. See how you like it.’

I took a train and a bus to reach the aquatic centre. It was as grimy as I had expected. The building was yellow brick, the path leading up to it cracked and uneven. The plants surrounding the building were dun-coloured and drought-resistant.

I would not be joining an elite squad, that much was plain. This was only confirmed by the tour that Julie Korsak gave me, which took in the dirty grout in the showers, and a bandaid riding the ripples on the surface of the pool.

When I first walked in and Julie came up to me, I’d had the thought that her head was an odd shape, too oblong, like a carton of milk. Nevertheless I smiled, and she smiled, clutching my hand in both of hers.

‘Hello, you must be Joan,’ she said, pumping my hand. ‘Welcome. It’s so nice to meet you!’ Then she fell silent, as though she’d used up her burst of geniality and had no idea what to say next. When she turned away, I saw that her jacket had SQUAD written in iron-on white letters on the back, to which she’d glued little pink and blue crystals.

The tour complete, I was invited to sit and watch the team train. After welcoming me once more, Julie pulled out her phone, directed it at the platform, and started to record.