I see the picture in Dalmar’s head, then, the picture he spends his whole life trying to keep out of his head: the other men arguing, the woman crouched and whimpering in the bottom of the boat, her jilbaab dark with sea water because she had been sitting low in the middle, where it was dirty and wet, and Dalmar’s friend Abshir sitting next to him. Four of the other men are on their feet and shouting, and one of them grabs the woman by her upper arm and hauls her up – she gives a cry of pain, collapsing in his grasp, too weak to stand, and as the man shoves her towards the side of the boat she cries out and prays and Dalmar’s friend Abshir gets to his feet but before he can protest, Dalmar reaches up with one of his large hands and pulls him back down, hissing into his ear, ‘Sit down, you fool, or you will be the next to go over the side!’ There must be twenty men in the boat, the waves are bad and the small vessel sits low in the water and bounces up and down – the argument is rocking it to and fro. There is no land in sight. A young man, a boy, really, no more than fourteen, sitting opposite Dalmar, has his eyes closed and tears streaming down his face. The men either side of him are muttering prayers. Dalmar is thinking, we are all going to die. It makes no difference whether we intervene or not, this argument will tip the boat over and then we will all die.

The woman shrieks and begs for her life as the men who are on their feet manhandle her over the side.

And I realise it was not that Dalmar didn’t intervene to save the woman being thrown over the side of the boat, it is that he prevented his friend from doing so: that is what haunts him. Some of us are haunted by the things that have been done to us and some of us are haunted by the things we’ve done and for some of us unhappy people, it is both. We are tossed on the waves of our memories in a boat so small that it can scarcely contain our unhappiness.