Harry had wondered about her body. He couldn’t help it. He’d supposed that she’d have a child’s figure and that had made him feel weird about finding her so attractive. That suspicion had been confirmed, or so he’d thought, when he’d glimpsed her by the rockpool just now. But seeing her out of her usual baggy jumper, seeing her silhouette, front-on, as she skims from rock to rock: she looks like a woman. She has the curves. That they’re slight, gentle curves doesn’t change the fact that they’re there. But as she gets closer, Harry realises the reality of her lack of breasts. He can see the snaking arms of her octopuses curling out from behind the fabric of her skimpy top, where the bulge of her breasts should have been. She’d mentioned the tattoo to him, but he hadn’t expected it to look so … animated. He can see that she’s cold—she’s shivering and her skin has turned to plucked goose flesh—but of course, he can’t see nipples, raised by the cold, and he can’t shake the feeling that they’re what he should have been seeing. That somehow they’re what would have given substance to his budding attraction to her and, despite Jem, that somehow they’re what would have made it okay. As she emerges from her silhouette, it would have felt right to glimpse them, erect through her wet top; it would be so erotic that it would have felt right to fall in love with her then and there. But seeing her like this—red, blotchy and goose-fleshed in the cold, with her strange octopus skin—confuses him. He doesn’t know if he was expecting to find her more or less beautiful than he does in this moment.

‘Harry, give her your jumper,’ his mother hisses and he realises he’s been gawking.

‘Have my jumper,’ he mumbles automatically.

‘Nah, you’re right, Harry.’

‘It’ll be like a dress on you. You can take off your jeans. They’re sopping. You’ll freeze with windchill.’

‘But won’t you be cold?’

‘Nah, I’ve got my flanny and my Stormy.’ He gestures to his fleece-lined life jacket. ‘I’ll be right.’

‘If you say so.’

He tosses his jumper to her, then tries not to watch as she pulls it on and shimmies her jeans off from beneath it.

‘Gawd, you still reek!’ Flo says when Lucy climbs down into the boat.

‘I know! I can’t get the smell off my hands. I kept rubbing and rubbing, but it was all greasy and the water couldn’t cut it. I’m going to scald myself in the shower when I get home and give these’—she nudges the lump of sodden clothes with her toe—‘like, twenty cycles in the washing machine.’

‘You don’t have much luck with all of this, do you?’ Flo says, shaking her head.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, you got inked well and proper by the octopus, didn’t you?’

‘Oh yeah, I forgot about that.’