When he removes his mouth the chest relaxes, the drowned man exhales – a dead man breathing – and the body resubmerges perceptibly. A strange thing: the body is cold to touch, water-temperature, but its breath is warmish, released from a still warm interior.

He presses his mouth to the other mouth again, and again, but the effort of keeping his friend’s head above water is exhausting. His heart pounds, his own breaths come in large gasps; he floats for a time, breathing slowly and deeply, trying to calm himself. Then realises he has released Tom without noticing; the body has drifted away into darkness – only a few feet away – and rolled face down. He thinks again of how the body rode higher in the water when its lungs were buoyed by air. The body? Its? He almost winces to find himself thinking this way – but shame now seems beyond his exhausted emotions. The words are surely necessary instruments of thinking, long-handled tongs, keeping emotion at a distance. Somehow he knows that survival might depend on such tongs. His mind grasps again at the thought: inflating the lungs buoys the body. Might he use it as a lifebuoy? He had refused to allow the drowning man to cling to him; might he now cling to the drowned?

He rolls the body over like a log, and by pressing his weight onto the torso levers the face above water. He turns the head to one side, hooks open the mouth with two fingers and drains out as much water as possible. As before, he breathes into the mouth, pinching the nostrils, and is gratified as the lungs fill and expand. A small gush of water escapes as he pulls his mouth away; he takes a quick deep breath and applies his mouth again. A sigh of air escapes after the second inflation. How many breaths can two waterlogged lungs hold? He breathes again, and again, forcefully, holding the mouth closed between breaths, until a blurt of air escaping under pressure between the squeezed lips tells him he has reached end-point. Keeping the nostrils and mouth pinched shut with his right hand, he floats now without effort, half supported by the inflated body, as if by an inner tube or life-preserver. Absurd images from a childhood spent in swimming pools clog his head: car tyres, rubber ducks, inflatable crocodiles, arm-floaties. Floatie. The child’s word sounds grotesque; he feels a sudden urge to laugh, a desire to laugh, sensing also that by laughing he might be able to cry.

Neither proves possible.

After some minutes his clenched right hand begins to cramp. A better idea: clamping its nose and mouth shut with his left hand, he peels the jocks from the body with his right, flexing the knees, tugging them down, then finally pushing them from the feet with his own feet. After a top-up inflation, he stuffs the sodden garment into the mouth, wedging it with two fingers deeply inside the throat, blocking the escape of air from both nose and mouth.