His face was red and his hair was white and his eyes were bright blue. He’s dead now, and soon Grandma will be, 18whether or not it happens this time. The larch trees are gone too, lopped down to stumps.

She makes herself remember, instead, those Tuesday swimming lessons at Olympia. Imagines watching afterwards, through the observation window in the second-floor cafeteria, the lane ropes being dragged into place and the club swimmers powering up and down in their powder-blue caps, flipping into easy tumbleturns, length, after length, after length.

Her housemates go out. She texted him twice, then a third time. He didn’t reply. Her phone said the messages had been delivered and once she even saw the dot, dot, dot of him composing a reply but then the dots went away and the reply never came. She saw him a week later in the Clements in Botanic and he was obviously scundered, said he’d lost his phone and only just got a new one. Give us your number, sure, he said, and she did, but she knew he wouldn’t contact her and he didn’t. After that she could hardly tell him – could she? – why she’d been trying to get in touch. It should be his problem too, but it just isn’t, the world doesn’t work like that. So he’ll never know any of this. He’ll never even suspect. For a strange moment, she feels almost sorry for him. Something about that makes a sort of sense in the middle of the night. But when she wakes, the feeling is gone. 19