I agreed with her. How to agree with people was what travel had taught me. I looked around the bar. A girl a couple of stools along was crying. A boy who hadn’t slept for a month was rubbing his eyes and willing himself to stay awake for more. Mark had arrived, not wearing his T-shirt and therefore not obliged to remember who I was. And Taffy was there too, shining with expectation, ready for the rugby and whatever else life might throw at him.

‘Of course this is not a rave island,’ the girl with the green eyes was saying to me.

‘No,’ I said. ‘No, I’ve noticed that.’

‘Anyone seen Geoff?’ she suddenly called out across the bar.

No one wanted to answer. She rose to go and find him, whoever he was. No one could be bothered to tell her that that probably wasn’t a good idea.

I watched five minutes of the rugby, but my position as the solitary guest was becoming too conspicuous. And I felt a bit of a nuisance being there: a small carbuncle on the nose of everyone else’s fun. Mark, I noticed, was not merely not acknowledging me – he actually disliked me. And yet only an hour or two before he had put his hand on my shoulder and pointed me out an azure demoiselle. Queer. I made my way back through the slithery ferns to our ‘Tropical’ where I found Ros sitting up in bed writing messages on the back of Green Island postcards. Within a week friends back in England would receive irrefragable evidence that we’d succumbed to the mindless hedonism to which they’d always supposed us susceptible, and were now blissfully whiling away what was left of our youth in a state of nature on a sun-soaked tropical pleasure isle in the Coral Sea.

In fact we left the island at the same time our postcards did. The continguing vengeful weather had something to do with our snap decision, the refusal of the staff to serve us breakfast, having kept us waiting until the breakfast serving hour was over, had more. On the coral island which we’d had a mind to disappear to, dusky youths and maidens poured you coconut cocktails by night and rubbed musky unguents into your city-fevered brows by day. We hadn’t bargained on sulky treatment from kids who couldn’t be bothered frying you a piece of bacon, so worn out were they from propping up the bar with Taffy the night before. ‘We might as well be in Birmingham,’ Ros said. I agreed with her. We dashed out of the dining room, threw our clothes into our bags, returned our un-flapped flippers to the Dive Shop, and just made it to the jetty for the first boat back to Cairns.