Dan and Lachlan were already up there on the bleachers, perched on towels and gazing at me through their sunglassed eyes. Neither of their towels looked particularly beachy but instead seemed lifted from some fancy hotel, in the same thick royal green as their dressing gowns. I couldn’t imagine how warm and lovely it would be to cover myself in these towels in dead of winter, nor how awful it would be to do this after exiting the water on a too-hot, windless day, sweating and chlorined and sticky with sunscreen, squinting up at the gym complex that hulked over the pool. Like many aspects of Dan’s life under Lachlan, the towels seemed like souvenirs from a weird other world.

I nodded to them, saw a space on the tier below them, reasonably man-sized, and made my way towards it. To spread a beach towel on these bleachers was to perform an art. It required a keen eye for towel-shaped opportunity and no undue squeamishness for disadvantaging others. As I dropped my own scrappy blue-green-spotted towel and kicked at it to spread it, the shape beside my towel rolled over and revealed itself, inscrutable behind – you guessed it – its own pair of sunglasses, these ones dramatically large and bug-eyed.

I paused mid-crouch. ‘Hey,’ I said.

He paused too. ‘Hey,’ Chris L said.

I looked up at Dan and Lachlan. We had already said hi to each other, but I was getting into the groove. ‘Hey,’ I said.

‘Hey,’ Lachlan said.

My sunglasses were always cheap and the last ones I’d bought had broken several months ago. There was nothing left to say, and nothing left to do but take off my shoes and shirt so as to complete the sense of exposure. There were more gaps on the bleachers than it looked from below, but it was hard with noise and dense with sizzly bodies; I was lucky to have found a space at all.

Only when the American was halfway up the bleachers did I realise my terrible mistake. As if to reintroduce the idea of his Americanness, he was holding two burger shapes in Lord of the Fries wrappers, obviously having left the bleachers in order to pick them up, his towel draped off his shoulders in a pretence of modesty. He was flip-flopping up the bleachers in a pair of thongs.

I held my hands out, palms up: sorry.

‘Hey, no friends in the towel game,’ he said.

‘This is Vivian,’ said Dan.

‘We’ve met,’ said Vivian.

‘Yeah,’ I said, rolling over and squinting up at Dan. ‘We are friends in the towel game.’

So his name was Vivian, which I vaguely knew was one of those names that was actually old-timey masculine, like Shirley or Evelyn, and only in the present world did it sound slightly deranged.

I was trying not to think about my view of Vivian’s crotch, which was encased in smooth white trunks that somehow revealed both everything and nothing.