She crests a rise, and there is the access road on the left. She remembers the sign. It was made of moulded fibreglass and buxom as a ship’s figurehead, some kind of watery female creature, welcoming every guest with a wink. The sign is still there, but faded now, and long seeded grasses have grown up around it. Tumbleweeds make a draught-excluder along the bottom rail of the locked gates. No climbing them, but the wall is low, and when she walks its perimeter, towards the sea, she finds a place where creepers have forced the stones apart and sent them cascading to the ground. She scrambles over. The stones knock beneath her feet.

*

She was drunk, okay, there’s no arguing with that. Sweet retsina burned in the hollow of her throat. Jane was drunk too but she looked well for it. They matched each other glass for glass, miserable Claire, brilliant Jane. Is that right? Jane in her gingham dress and canvas shoes with thick rubber heels. Beetle-crushers, they called them. The pool made flickering lights in the air, spooky green in the greenish wine, and she drank it all, till her body seemed to burn and ripple like the spotlit water did. When they poured again she drank that too.

*

Here is the half-moon terrace by the pool. She remembers a rail where long-legged women leaned, in gold-hooped earrings and cut-out costumes, their wayfarers filtering the dazzle off the sea. Blue-headed lizards basked in the light of the manager’s gold buttons. They frightened her in the bathrooms, jittering from tile to tile, like pieces in a board game that followed no obvious rules.

Now the pool is dry and full of dust. She walks its perimeter, past a few white plastic sunloungers, all of which are coated in a film of grey but otherwise unchanged. These imperishable things. She stands where she thought their table once stood, the table where they sat and drank. In the pool, the spotlights are broken. Tough little herbs have sprouted up between the blue tiles.

At the edge of the terrace, half the rail has fallen away, the metal rusted and sheared. Nobody has blocked the gap. The ground simply ends, giving out into blue. She walks closer, passing a tall yellow flower that scratches her bare calf. She can hear the sea. It is still down there, though nothing else is, asking the same questions it asked of itself eighteen years before.