I washed my hands, though they weren’t dirty. I looked at my face in the mirror, under the fluorescent lights, and then, in order to look somewhere else, I read the nearby sign about the importance of thorough handwashing. It warned about germs, about how careful you have to be to avoid them. It gave a number of helpful tips: rub your hands together for twenty seconds. Use plenty of soap. Clean beneath your fingernails. And always wash beneath your rings. Underneath a ring, it said, there are more germs than there are people in Europe.

I went back to the table and ate Grace’s lemon meringue pie. I scraped up the ice cream, which had melted all over the plate.

‘Naughty girl,’ said Grace. Her face looked as dry as ever.

As I left, they were still dancing. But if something happened that night, Lou never mentioned it. And I didn’t ask.

At the end of the first training session after the competition, Aleks asked me to come to his office. My heart was skidding when I went in, though I wasn’t sure where I should focus my apprehension – would he want to discuss my diving or my sister?

‘Joan,’ he said. ‘Have a seat.’

His office was usually tidy but now it was a mess: papers all over the desk, folders, his whistle on its fraying black nylon rope. In one corner of the room there was a bouquet of red and yellow pool noodles tied with a string. I realised that it must have been Julie who kept the place clean for him. I glanced at his hand: no ring.

I considered the possibility that he would do what Grace said he’d done with Camilla: lock the door, twist the venetian blinds closed. But no. He shut the door, then returned to his seat. I had a whiff of his marine-smelling aftershave as he passed me.

‘Last weekend,’ he said. I watched his Adam’s apple bounce in his throat. It gave me the urge to swallow. ‘What happened?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. What I understood about my terrible performance was more an impression than an explanation. Unnerved by him and by Lou, by their proximity to one another, I’d felt half in and half out of my own body, and had the sense that I would have been able to dive competently if I’d occupied one or the other space fully. Instead it felt like I was fighting to put myself on or take myself off. Of course, there was no way of communicating this to Aleks, so I said again, ‘I don’t know.’

Then I started crying. There was no build-up, no trembling lower lip. The tears came out immediately, like a sneeze. I was horrified.