He took us once. I must have been twelve or thirteen. My mother spent most of her time cowering in the shade with an outsized hat and socks on her hands, complaining, ‘I’m already brown, Giacinto! Brown people don’t want to get browner.’

Around us the heave of summer. Barrel-chested men in Speedos and mamas with flaccid biceps beckoning to their beloved Giorgios and Ludovicos to come and eat their panini alla porchetta.

Day after day, the same routine. To the beach by nine – flip and roast, flip and roast – riposino, swim, walk, dinner, sleep, repeat.

I remember gawking at all the flesh – the women in bikinis, so filled out and unabashed. My mother, by contrast, swaddled in towels like a bloody Bedouin. I longed to own my body like those women did, even if their pasta paunches pushed over their waists, and their cylindrical thighs shook with cellulite.

How old was I when I had the courage to buy my first bikini? I know I didn’t have one in Myrtle Beach, because I remember watching Misrak emerge from the cabana and taking in the wonder of her quietly along with Blake and Chichi. That she could transform two bits of red nylon – some cheap thing she’d bought on sale without even trying on – two bits of triangle and string, and still look like one of those characters from Baywatch, bounding gloriously down the beach. That she had made no particular effort to look that way, unlike all the other girls with their patiently honed midriffs and manufactured thigh gaps.

It would take years before I had the courage to step out in a two-piece, always making sure to lift my thighs in photographs so they wouldn’t look like bags of cement. By then, Misrak had found Jake, a boy from the Midwest, to marry. He contained her fire, softened it, gave her three kids and a white picket fence.

‘She done found her place,’ Ms Betty would have said.

I think about that now. Misrak’s busy American life. Some of the Amharic still clinging to the throat, but the rest of the accent hammered out into something steady and recognisable. I think of the trips she must make with her family to beachside towns, and wonder if anything about the large migration of humans on holiday depresses her.

I think of my father, out in the Adriatic Sea, away from the din of the world – a small, unrecognisable blip. And I know it’s really me I’m seeing. Standing behind glass.

PART TWO

8

Mornings at the beach can arrive like a whore in a jangly, too-tight dress at the end of a long and sleepless night. Lucia and I lie with our toes pointing east under mosquito nets in second-floor bedrooms with the doors flung open and the fans whizzing over our heads like helicopters. By six, when the sun is crawling its way out of the sea’s belly and forcing its way through the blinds, I have already been up for hours, distracted by music from the temple in the village, which judders to life at 4 a.m. – Brahma Muhurta – God’s hour, although there is nothing devotional that I can ascertain about this music. Tinny, Tamil film songs that pulsate across the air with no high-rise buildings to block their trajectory.