He hadn’t found Emilio, nor his boat, the colour of Rifian honey, but as he reached the surface he had seen a green turtle swimming out of the oil towards him. The shape of her mouth was very, very sad, as if she had lost someone and her shell had been eaten away. As she swam, the bio-luminescence in the water made her shine. She sparkled with angel dust. She was looking for somewhere to lay her eggs.

“She was gorgeous.”

He twisted his glass. The shadows slurred over the counter. He rolled his tongue round his mouth. Abruptly he sat back so that his feet slipped off the bottom rung of the stool, startling the dog.

“Mohamed!” he called. “I shall have another.” He patted Emilio’s dog and a tail slapped his leg. “Take Toribio,” he said. “Take nature.” The image returned to Silkleigh of Emilio’s mother three hours before, her face above him on the quay. Madness had leaped into her eyes as she called for the sea to give back her son, rocking still in the lap of the deep. “If a woman can go mad, why can’t the world? No, Mohamed. That’s whisky. He’s so bloody useless. He’s been here five years and he hasn’t learned a thing. When Periclito’s not here the place goes to pieces. Hear that? There’ll be fog again tonight. Poor Emilio. At least his boat will make a beautiful coral reef.”

He looked into the mirror, but he didn’t see himself. He saw a golden turtle swimming in at high tide, under a full moon. He saw the unscarred sand and the waves lifting her onto the shore. They drain away and return, lifting her higher. She lies with moonlight on her wet shield. She sculls herself up the beach. She scrapes a hole. She lays her eggs, straining and sighing. Afterwards, she covers her eggs with sand. The sand cakes her face, except where the sea-tears gutter it. She begins her slide towards the waves, flippering out the tracks as she moves backwards.

“Some bastards wait for her. They wait and then, when she’s laid her eggs, they run towards her. They turn her over. Onto her back. Like that. One hundred and fifty million years turned on her back. So she can’t move . . . ” said Silkleigh in an awful voice into the television voices, the sounds of dominoes scraping wood, the sounds of the guitarist’s three chords.

“I’m writing about it, old soul,” said Silkleigh. There was a splinter of determination in his voice. His life as a diver, the turtles, the fish, the things he’d seen. It was quite a life. He was only fifty-four, but a lot of interesting people were dead by fifty-four. Byron, Keats, a poet he’d met in La Linea called Danny Huckin. He’d been wanting to write his life story for years. He wanted to write it so badly, Mr Wavery had no idea. When he wasn’t diving he thought about it all day long. But to write. It was hard. It was like walking up La Mujer Muerta backwards. Not that he wasn’t prepared for the climb. He’d had a short story published. In the Gibraltar Chronicle. Quite a prestigious little publication actually. That’s when he first had the idea he might embark on something bigger. A more important book, to show people the terrible things we were doing to the world. Something for all men and women to read. A book to cross all frontiers. Which was the reason, speaking frankly, he had once thought of writing it in Esperanto.