He sat down on the end of my sunlounger, tipping it so my end went up like a see-saw. Very presumptuous, I thought, but it was the type of thing men like him did. The kind of man who would shorten your name to a nickname before asking you if you minded. I sat up so the weight could shift to the end of the see-saw and balance return. He was quite good-looking, I thought. I wasn’t sure why he was sitting on my sunlounger and asking me about drinks.

‘Wouldn’t you rather have a cocktail?’ He was squinting at me, but I detected from the slits that his eyes were aquamarine blue. I squinted back at him, aware my birthmark was only covered by factor 50; that I was unmasked.

‘OK, then,’ I said.

We walked to the bar, which had a roof like a giant straw hat. He walked with his feet splayed out, like a duck, but had the kind of Tintin hair you wanted to play with and eyes that reflected the pool. A woman in mirrored sunglasses was singing in the bar – cumbersome, jazzed-up, synthesized versions of ‘Hotel California’ and ‘Billie Jean’ – as a beautiful girl I decided was Swedish danced alone in a floor-length white crochet maxi dress so everyone could see just how beautiful she was.

His name was Jonas. He was from Belgium. He was some kind of salesman. He asked me my name and what I was doing at the hotel. After a while, I wanted to get away from him. He had rather a high opinion of himself. An equally high tolerance for banal chat. I was uninspired but I drank three Tequila Sunrises.

The woman eventually finished singing and wheeled her gear away on a luggage trolley. I made my excuses, muttered something about going back to my book. I saw him loiter at the bar for a few minutes, from behind my sunglasses, back on my sunlounger, then he wandered off in the direction of the Sunrise restaurant.

Later that afternoon they closed the pool. A man in a white uniform went from chrome steps to chrome steps and joined them up with suspended crime-scene tape. The sun had gone in anyway, so I went upstairs.

My room had the kind of door that doesn’t immediately swing shut after you, it just stays open. When I turned from putting my beach bag on a chair, Jonas was standing there, in the doorway.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked him, trying to sound nonchalant. Away from the pool I felt self-conscious in my bikini and sheer mini-dress and tugged at the hem.

‘I wanted to know if you’d join me for dinner tonight.’

‘Did you follow me up here?’

‘Yes, I did. Well, no, not really. I asked which room you were in. At reception.’

‘And they told you?’

He shrugged. ‘I said you were a friend of mine; no big deal, is it?’