We lie on the beach and watch Maya digging. She squats in a hole right up to her shoulders and digs deeper and deeper, serious, concentrating hard. Look, that’s our child, says Fred. Yes, I say, I don’t think she’s the brightest spark. True, says Fred, but she’s turned out pretty well otherwise. We both nod. I try to smile. It’s unbearably hot. I’m sweating under the suntan oil. There should really be a breeze coming off the sea. Two tourist boats are rocking far out on the water. But there’s no wind, nothing’s moving, and the sand is sticking to my forehead. I don’t like sand. It gets stuck on your forehead and in your armpits and between your toes and it chafes the skin. I read once that there are more bacteria on the surface of a grain of sand than there are people in the average small town. Fred says that’s nonsense, but secretly he thinks the same. It’s in moments like this that we understand each other. Now Maya wants an ice cream. You’ve already had two, I say. She immediately starts crying and lets herself fall over. She just pitches forward and cries furiously into the sand. That’s it for today, then, I say. No way! says Fred. He jumps up, grabs our daughter, who’s already laughing again, drapes her across his shoulders and runs into the water with her. I put my sunhat over my face and hear them spluttering and shouting. Now that my mouth is hidden, I too make sounds. A gentle clicking of the tongue, a humming and murmuring underneath the sun-­warmed straw.

Climbing over a lump of concrete on the way back from the beach, I slip and cut my wrist on a piece of metal. The wound isn’t deep, and it’s two centimetres long at most, but for some reason I’m unusually upset by the sight of the broken skin, and I squat there staring at the blood as it drips onto the rock between my feet. It’s not so bad, says Fred cheerfully; we’ll put a bandage on it, it’ll be fine. But the stupid thing was rusty, I say. Come on, you’re a big girl now, he says, and laughs like a fifteen-­year-­old.

The days pass. A relaxation sets in that is really just increasing lethargy. It’s too hot to go for a walk, open a book, or at least have sex. Even thoughts seem to evaporate in the heat. A static blanket of cloud has been hanging over the sea for days now. It’s grey, and turns yellowish red towards evening. It’s pretty, but Maya says the sky is sick with a fever. At least she’s happy. She likes everything, can laugh at everything. At the sick sky. At the funny sea. At the clouded fish eyes on her plate. At the pink snake of strawberry ice cream crawling across the back of her hand. At Fred’s contortions in the water. Since I had my fall, Fred and Maya have been going to the beach without me. The wound has got infected; my wrist is in a bandage and I don’t want it to come into contact with sand and dirt and salt water. Fred changes the bandage every morning, and afterwards Maya draws a little face on it. It’s smiling, to comfort me. And it does. I spend the mornings on the bed with the window open. I enjoy being alone. The dog doesn’t count. He lies in the doorway, asleep mostly, his tongue hanging out of his mouth like a rag.