His companion on the deck tilted her head to light a cigarette. Eram watched her as subtly as he could manage. She was older—Eram guessed somewhere in her early forties—but to his mind she was striking. Bitter chocolate skin, black hair that fell in a single tight braid down to her hips. Narrow slits for eyes which, in the light of the moon, glowed topaz. She was tall, taller than him, and her body was made entirely of angular planes and hard edges, as if all the spare flesh had been boiled away.

The woman turned and looked directly at Eram. She didn’t say a word, just coolly ran her eyes over him from top to toe. He could feel the heat rise to his face.

Whoa. Any second now she’ll poke bits of me for freshness. Now I know what those fish lying on slabs of ice in supermarkets feel like. Or, like, every girl who’s walked down the street anywhere in India.

‘Hi,’ he said. ‘I’m Eram.’

Instead of her name, the woman offered him a smoke. He took a couple of drags to be polite. Maybe there was something dodgy in his drink, or something wacko in that tobacco, because the rest of the night had a hallucinatory warp to it. He remembered being led by the hand down to the shore. The sea sucked at his toes as he watched the woman undo her wrap-around skirt and wade into the water. She dove cleanly into the first breaker, her exaggerated shoulder blades looking like the fins on some predatory fish. When she swam back towards Eram, smoothing her wet hair back, he thought of Ursula Andress rising from the sea in a white bikini in Dr No. He’d seen it as part of a James Bond special feature on TV when he was eight or nine. It was the first time he remembered forming a link between his own erection and the female body. Une femme fatale.

The woman seemed to know what she wanted. She pushed him back on to the beach and sat astride him. The stars were in her hair and her nipples were darker than the night. He reached up tentatively to stroke them, but she pinned his wrists to the cool mud above his head. Eram was a little shocked at how strong her grip was. She pressed herself against him and slowly, deliciously, rubbed her way up until she was standing on her knees, her inner thighs clamped to either side of his face. Then she reached down to pull the crotch of her coral pink panties aside and Eram breathed in a powerful scent of sea salt and vinegar. The laughter that bubbled at the thought of this being his favourite flavour in Kettle chips was smothered by a mouthful of moist vagina. He felt both nauseated and aroused. On the tip of his tongue he tasted not just the woman, it seemed to Eram, but everything. He tasted the riches of the sea—the bitter seaweed and anemones, shellfish guarding their sweet gelatinous meat, grainy silt off the ocean bed. He tasted blood, detergent, cold concrete, the colour purple, the allure of drowning.