‘What’s wrong, girl? Too fat to stand up? There there,’ I say, picking her up and placing her directly on one of Bagheera’s teats.

The sight of all those puppies jostling and feeding is startling.

Bagheera suddenly stands and shakes the pups off her, scratches violently at a halo of fleas and walks in the direction of the house.

‘She doesn’t want her,’ Mallika says.

‘What do you mean?’

‘You saw the puppy’s back legs? She can’t stand up. I think the mother left her there to die.’

‘Take the puppy back to the house with Lucia. Try giving it some water. I’m going to the beach.’

*

There’s a scattering of geckos when I lift the latch of the gate. Ten a.m. The beach is a desert. I sit in the sand burning my backside, feeling the hot wind lash at my ankles. Everything gleams and blurs in this harsh light. The dogs have found their way through the holes in the brick wall. It isn’t beach time, but they’re happy to be out. Raja, Hunter, Thompson, Flopsy – skidding their bums across the sand.

To my right is the village of Paramankeni. From this distance you cannot see the rivers of plastic clogging up the sewers. Only coconut trees that arch gracefully towards the sea, a clutter of brightly coloured fishing boats, a jumble of nets. There’s something in all this stillness that expands time, pulls it up and around you. It’s terrifying to be alone in it.

I’ve been thinking of Blake. Wondering whether it has all been a mistake. If life isn’t about what’s raw or necessary, but merely what you can endure. Perhaps it was not so difficult, the things I found monotonous, the facile conversations, the dead-dead sex. Perhaps I should have seen it as a comfort rather than a danger.

I roll up my pyjama bottoms and walk into the sea. The water is cooler than I expected, refreshing. I wish I could take everything off and swim out to where the waves are breaking. But I just stand there, holding my hitched-up pants, peering at the horizon through my glasses.

Two figures are walking towards me from the village. Boys. Men. Seventeen, eighteen, hard to say. They’re in short-sleeved shirts and lungis. Spry, wiry, walnut-coloured. They park themselves on a ridge of sand a little away from where my slippers are. They smoke and stare. The dogs have emerged from the shade of bushes and are making soft snarly noises, just to say, ‘We’re here.’ I feel afraid and I’m not even sure why. But there’s something about these boys. The way they’re leering at me. I’ve seen it in some of the migrant men, who always seem to be playing in the movie version of their lives – but this is not that. This is real and unsettling. It’s desire and hate, and I feel stripped away.

I walk towards them and slide my feet into my slippers. They are still staring at me. ‘What?’ I bark. ‘What are you looking at? What do you want? Not enough beach for you, you have to come and sit right here?’