I secured my YMCA towel around me and sat on the hot-tub edge dangling my legs. It’s not often I get to sit high enough for that. The chlorine smell scratched my nostrils. I know people dislike its sting but it makes me feel blanketed and undiscoverable. I liked the broken clock above the doorway claiming the time was six thirty when in fact it had to be no more than around two in the afternoon. When time is measured incorrectly I feel doom lift: if time can’t reach me then neither can the loss of George, or Eliza, or Ned, or Elwyn.

“What happened to you?” I asked the man. His yellow sweatshirt and pants were in their customary heap on the floor.

Bathers straggled in from the Chinatown apartment complex next door, bellowing to each other in Cantonese and smacking themselves all over in a kind of skin-stimulating exercise with wads of paper towel they’d pulled out of the dispensers. They ignored us. On the walls hung signs forbidding anyone to spit, which they disregarded. Members of an aqua-fit class filed out of the pool dripping wet and stood under communal hair-dryers or spin-dried their swimsuits in a centrifugal force apparatus that sounded like I imagine the industrial revolution must have done. So we had to shout.

He roared, “I was raped when I was four!”

I was glad the Cantonese chatter continued so the men had possibly not heard. I felt such revulsion that had he not screamed in my face I might’ve sidled out to the locker room pretending I’d not understood. Or I might have responded in some noncommittal way: Right then—sorry for your troubles…and floated off. Being British has its conventions.

But his volume matched the force of his words.

His shout solidified in the tiled room.

It hit me in the head and sent me into my old shock—flung me back to that first time my father ever took me from my cocoon with my mother at Westerham to the town of Portsmouth. I was thirteen, and had not until that journey apprehended anything first-hand about man’s depravities.

—

HAD NAUSEA NOT, EVEN IN THOSE DAYS, overtaken me at the sight of the ocean, I might not have seen what I saw in Portsmouth.

My father ached for me to volunteer with him against Spain at Cartagena. He’d been waiting for me to pass age twelve so I could become a soldier like him. But I turned into a pale, limp mess even as our ship waited to sail. He had to leave me there with a man he barely knew, entrusting him to see me safely home.

But the man was anxious to drag me to a coffeehouse called the Dragonfly.