Thrashing, hot and wet, something clung to her, sticking. Verity surfaced, gasping for air. There was no air. Drowning. She was drowning in her own blood. Hot blood pulsed. In, out, in and out, in her head, in her body, deep down inside. Submerged, calm under water, she could see the green seaweed and it was her mother’s hair, waving. Mother, she said, but there was no sound in the water. Bubbles formed and separated and her mother turned to face her but her eyes were creamy-white, shiny pearls. She opened her mouth to say Mother and nothing came out. No breath. Down, down, down. Dark.

White light, cold, shivering. Someone soothing. So cold. Mother? A cool hand on her hot-cold skin.

Back down in the deep. Dark red. Her blood. In front of her, a fish swimming. Pink translucent skin, fins for hands and a grey eye, a fish-foetus swimming.

3.

Tuesday, 3rd February

Verity had been asleep, on and off, for forty-eight hours. Or it could have been longer. The family doctor had been, felt her forehead and taken her temperature and said she needed to sleep it off. And so she did. She slept like a sated baby. On and on she slept, as if her body knew she needed sleep to save her energy, to feed it.

On the third day she’d recovered enough to take food. Mrs Timms fussed about her room, straightening the kicked-off bedcovers and tutting at the barely eaten breakfast on the tray. When she left, Verity drove herself further down in the covers and watched the sickly morning light play on the bedspread. In here, the flood was a distant horror. It had happened out there, beyond the known universe of her bedroom. She didn’t know what day it was but knew from what Mrs Timms had told her that she had been in bed since the flood with a fever. The doctor said pneumonia. It was gone now and she was left wrung out like a dishcloth, her limbs soft and limp, her mind cloudy and prone to gazing at flecks of dust lit up in the light from her bedroom window. They told her she had been stranded in a tree half dead from hypothermia but it seemed incredible to her, as if it had only happened in a dream. Her dreams were watery and indistinct.

She remembered snatches: a boat, a man with a moustache, Arthur. They told her Arthur, anyway. He’d come to the house, they said. A woman’s body upside down. But she wasn’t sure if any of it had really happened. Dancing. She remembered dancing with Jack. Him winking at her as she left the village hall.