We stuck it for as long as we could, but the minute the rain stopped we tried the beach again. The same thing happened. No sooner was I rubberized than down it came. And we had to dash for it once more. Given that we were intending to go into water anyway I can’t now work out why we were so frightened of the rain. But I suppose we chose to be the masters of our fate; we wanted to get wet our own way.

In this fashion, between Taffy’s sonorous swearing and these fruitless flippered forays to the beach, our afternoon in paradise was frittered away. We buried what was left of it in Marineland Melanesia, a crocodile and reptile house on the island, run by a man who wore dark glasses and kept a coloured jungle bird on his shoulder. It was a rich, intoxicating collection of tropical excesses: creatures that grew too big, like sharks and giant turtles and of course crocodiles; and artefacts associated with overheated rituals, from Papua New Guinea and the forests of Borneo.

Ros talked to the man with the bird on his shoulder; although like all people who wear dark glasses indoors he would rather not have talked to anybody. He caught his own crocodiles. Harpooned them. He wanted that to sound more brutal a method than it in fact was. It was just a small dart he used. And unlike the cullers and farmers sent by Canberra, for whom he expressed a consummate scorn, he didn’t botch his job. They tried to catch them in nets and almost invariably ended up drowning them. He used his harpoon and brought them in alive. Just talking about it made him bitter. I couldn’t see his eyes, but I stood within his field of electricity and felt the charge. He was bottled-up, pent; like the giant turtles which swam back and forth, back and forth, in their too-small pool.

‘What’ll happen if I try to touch your bird?’ Ros asked him.

‘He’ll bite,’ the man said.

Having a bird on your shoulder, I decided, was the aggressive equivalent to taking your mad brother Alfonso to a dinner party; it was another way of carrying your alter ego around with you.