Dan was in one of his unimpressible moods. ‘What’s the towel game?’ he said, when it was entirely clear what we were talking about. It was interesting how that idiom, no friends in the x game, was something they must have had in America too, which only made it seem particularly pointless that Dan was pretending not to know what it meant.

‘It’s this,’ I said, and said, ‘Chris L, would you mind moving your towel?’

Chris L swooped his lenses over the bleachers, over the day. ‘I don’t mind at all,’ he said.

I smiled at Dan. ‘Thank you, Chris L,’ and when he’d done so I moved my towel, which made it kind of bunchy, but the towel and I were both still dry, so bunchiness was fine. ‘There,’ I said, and Vivian set his own towel down next to me, stretched it out as far as possible, and sat down where he could.

I was very impressed with Vivian and Chris L for going along with me, although I was unsure what I had been trying to demonstrate.

‘And that’s the towel game,’ I said, and refolded my legs.

Vivian passed a burger to Chris L over my body, causing just a drop of mayo to fall beside my chest.

We teetered on a verge made up of chlorine and the sun, now revved up, now satiated, now tired, now flushed. We were parched and oily. We were sun-drunk. I was very happy to have found my new friends, but I wondered if I liked them mainly because they were not really talking and because all I had to do in order to be their friend was sit between them and also not talk.

‘So,’ said Vivian. ‘How do you know Chris L?’

Chris L looped into a little pretzel of social watchfulness, unknowable behind the bright-black surface of his shades but projecting a freaky total awareness.

‘We’re friends,’ said Chris L simply.

I widened my eyes in complete surprise; then narrowed them in calculation. Maybe Chris L was trying to establish that he was available to Vivian, and unencumbered by me. Maybe he was just being a friendly easy guy. I needed a kind of middle state, attentive and normal. I tried to relax my eyes a little and nodded with Chris L.

‘What are you doing with your face,’ laughed Dan.

Chris L whipped his neck dramatically towards him. ‘Vivian’s from New York,’ he said, as if Dan hadn’t spoken.

‘Well, I live in New York,’ said Vivian.

Of course. So this was interesting. And it explained something, whatever there was to explain about Vivian, which was not a lot. He wasn’t an American in Australia, saying ‘mate’ to be sexy and fun. He was an Australian in America and coming home for Christmas, saying ‘mate’ for the reasonable reason that he’d been saying it his whole life. Well, he lived in New York. He probably lived in Brooklyn, one of those Australian guys who come home when their visas expire and their cash runs out. They were reliable fixtures of this pool in summer months, which gave them the air of the animal and dumb, mindlessly moving in the direction of the sun.