Now he floats more comfortably, sprawled across the submerged torso, feet trailing. The coldness of the water strikes him for the first time since he leapt from the high ledge, hours before. He shivers slightly, but only briefly, for the air on his exposed arms and head is humidly warm. The body beneath him, its face a few inches from his, begins to resume a human identity, begins to reclaim its proper name: Tom, his friend. He log-rolls it again, face down, more to prevent the escape of air from the mouth, he tells himself, than to avoid the nearness of that face.

He remembers, suddenly, the sherry flagon. Might it still be bobbing on the surface, close at hand? Could Tom have used it as a life-support? Why hadn’t they thought of it? Too drunk? Too panicked? Of course it must have filled with water and sunk. Other, more random thoughts begin to jump in and out of his head, of the kind that visit exhausted brains late at night: weird, disconnected patterns of recent events, of school, home, his parents’ absence, Debbie and Tom on the beach, long ago now, years in the past. From this half-conscious delirium he might have drifted more deeply into sleep, but the noise of passing birds – the screech of black parrots – rouses him. He lifts his head. The square screen of sky above is fading from black to pale blue, the wispy shreds of cloud are reddening with the usual tropic abruptness. The inside walls of the great tank have already emerged from darkness, and with them the rusting ladder, bolted to the northern side, its lowest rung a good body-length above the water level.

No rain has fallen in the night, although somewhere thunder is grumbling again, and lightning is planting its stiletto heel upon the earth: a faint tremor in the air, an invisible ripple in the water. It seems to Kenny that now, at last, the Wet is no more than a few hours away: an idle thought, another day’s conversation starter.

As he clings to the cold, buoyant body, he speaks the words aloud, finding comfort in their familiar social surface, beneath which trembles only the faintest anxiety, a sensation which he can’t fully identify and is still too weary to bring into sharper focus, but which seems to settle at last on the memory of the dusty car outside: his father’s precious Mercedes, unsheltered, windows wound down, soon to be rained on, and in.

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