Today, the wetsuit was rolled into the rucksack with the travel towel on top. Brigid looked up from her book in the living room. Matty didn’t look back. Rode with the sunglasses on, even with the clouds knotting thickly together overhead, weaving out of range of the mad sheepdog. Tried to imagine cycling thirty miles to a train station with this wrist pain, these ribs. Knew it wasn’t possible.

The wetsuit had been too ambitious. Idiotically so. Even bending was difficult. Matty stood at the end of the jetty, jeans shoved up a bit, toes flexing. Just a dip. Not a real swim. Just to feel it. The mist had risen and the water now looked bitter, hard, impenetrable.

He’d come up fast, from behind.

You never regret going in, one of the old women at the Ladies’ Pond had said once, standing at the top of the steps, eyeing the thin, isolated diamonds of ice on the black water. It was true. You never did.

His grip had pinched, fingers digging in.

A step down, onto one of the chopped-out slabs of the concrete. The lough was goading, slapping against the rock.

The sluice of the cold water. Dale shouting You little cunt. Much longer and Matty would have had to gasp, take more breaths, lough water funnelling into the lungs. Fuck.

It was no good. There could be no getting in. He was in there, the memory of him. Matty stepped back up onto the jetty. Turned and walked fast to the bike, tucked in by the wall, shielded from the road. Stared at the tarmac. Kicked it.

Ting ting.

Great.

The little girl wheeled into the car park. ‘Hello.’ She wheeled around again, braked hard at the loughside and looked out at it for a moment, before pedalling back up.

‘Are you following me around or something?’ The world’s smallest garda.

She looked defensive. ‘No. I always come down here. I’m allowed to ride on the road because hardly any cars ever come and I always have to be back in fifteen minutes. I’m not really supposed to come past this line.’ She pointed to the final parking space outline. ‘Don’t tell. Aren’t you going to swim?’

A quick glance back at the water. It was hard to imagine ever going in again. ‘No.’

She made a small, oddly wise sound, a one-two shake of her shoulders. ‘Mermaids can go on land, too. If they grow legs, anyway.’

‘Yep.’

Sheanna got off her bike. ‘I’d like to be a mermaid. I can sing. You know, that’s something they do.’ The sound of her speaking morphed into the sound of her singing without Matty even realising it. ‘I’m a Barbie girl, in a Barbie wor-or-orld.’

Dale had said something about dolls. Barbie and Ken.