The Australian lifeguard looked down at Matty, frowning, as if no one was allowed to stand on this part of the platform except him. Today, his sunglasses were pushed up on top of his head and you could see the thin lines at the corners of his eyes. Another lifeguard, much older, was sitting on a chair, hands clasped over his stomach, gazing outwards.

No church again. Mamma mostly stayed in bed, like John Lennon and Yoko Ono when they had all the journalists and photographers in there. She had taken the plate of toast that Matty brought in without interest and put it on the bedside table. Maybe it was less like John and Yoko and more like the prisoners who went on hunger strike in Northern Ireland.

‘Do you know Joe Ronan?’ Matty said to the lifeguard, arms tightly crossed.

‘Who’s that?’

‘Joseph. Ronan.’ He hated being called Joseph. Mamma would call him Joseph Ronan when they were arguing, and Dad would close his eyes before looking at the ceiling. ‘He comes – he came swimming here.’

‘Uh-huh,’ the lifeguard said. ‘Look around you. Quite a lot of fellas swim here. That’s the idea.’

‘Yeah, but he …’ Drowned in here. You missed him. Lungs letting water in, bit by bit. ‘It was the last place he was seen.’

He glanced down. ‘Are you talking about the missing guy? Do me a favour. We’ve already had the police round here. How’d you know about that?’

Matty shrugged. ‘Did they search for him?’

‘No, they just came and asked questions. Got quite a lot of interest.’ He looked down at Matty, quite frankly. ‘Uniforms,’ he said, as if explaining something.

‘They didn’t go and look in the water?’ Sometimes the police sent divers down on searches, wetsuits and flippers and masks.

‘Bodies float, buddy boy.’

Not always. Sometimes they took ages, like Virginia Woolf, the writer in the encyclopaedia. She wasn’t found for three weeks. People had not been found for years, another book had said, and their bodies turned to candlewax because of a lack of oxygen. Adipocere. ‘Sometimes you have to dredge the bottom.’

The lifeguard looked irritable. ‘Look, we had a drowning in here. Two years ago. Davy never got over it. Never lifeguarded again. I don’t want to be reminded of it, all right?’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘And he bloody floated.’ An impatient, slightly suspicious glance. ‘What’s it all to you?’

Yesterday, Matty had pretended that the man with the balding head and bright purple trunks was Dad. ‘Just interested.’ Nose-scratch.

The lifeguard folded his arms so that you could see the veins on his biceps. ‘All right, Detective Sergeant Pipsqueak. Either get in that water or bugger off. Where’s your dad today?’

Matty put a flat hand against both eyebrows and squinted about. ‘Around.’

He sighed. ‘In you go, then. Don’t drown.’