New words to learn. Spasms, like spazzing, like Kirsty at school who had epilepsy and went all bubble-bath at the mouth. Larynx was in the dictionary, with an ‘x’ not a ‘g’. Matty placed two fingers in the little well of the throat and swallowed, to feel the pressure there.

There was dry drowning and wet drowning. Dry meant that the person held their breath or only let in a tiny bit. Wet meant more water in the lungs. At the bottom of one glossy page, there was a diagram of something that looked like a cauliflower wearing a red belt, and a comparison of freshwater and seawater.

Victims immersed for an hour or longer may be totally salvageable, physically and intellectually, although they lack evidence of life, having no measurable vital signs—heartbeat, pulse, or breathing—at the time of rescue.

Salvageable. The act of saving a ship or its cargo from the peril of the seas, said the dictionary. Dad, as treasure. But it would be too late for that, if he was in there. No one could last eight days.

Over the page under ‘Drowning’ there was a painting of people in bonnets and wigs, arms outstretched, the sea and the boat swirling around them. Another was of a woman in a long, silver-gold dress on her back in a river, holding flowers. Her eyes and mouth were open and she looked quite peaceful, like she was bored and just thinking about something. There were weeds in her hair.

A pharaoh who drowned in the Nile, probably eaten by crocodiles. Kings and generals and explorers who drowned in the sea. The Titanic. Ra-Ra-Rasputin got poisoned with tea and cake, and they got him drunk and shot him and threw him in a hole in the ice on a river. Some say that he didn’t die until he drowned.

On a different shelf, down by a dusty window with a spider abseiling from a cobweb, there was a pamphlet. Pink paper. ‘Hampstead Heath: a Local History’. The drawings were rubbish, and it was made on a typewriter. There were drownings in there, too. In the Ponds. Four deaths a month in the nineteenth century. A clipping from a newspaper from 1897, William Chitty who slipped and fell. A man at a family picnic. A twenty-year-old doing a somersault, found lying at the bottom with his neck broken. The bank on one side of the pond, where there were willow trees, was very slippery, and the boatman had on several occasions pulled boys out of the water.

People did drown in there. They did slip and fall. Dad could have.

‘Um.’