The first thing I recall about that day is not the image of the dress nor Bram’s phone call. It’s the man’s clothes, arranged in a neat pile halfway up the beach. A pair of shorts folded over canvas sneakers. A white shirt fluttering in the breeze. The stranger had removed his watch before he entered the water. In the gathering heat, its glass dial blazed like a second sun. Two grim-faced paramedics knelt on the sand packing up their equipment, while a uniformed cop directed curious onlookers away from the poor man’s body, partially concealed under a plastic sheet.

I imagined the fleshy contours and rich, sun-tanned hues of the victim’s face – not the blanched, sunken look he’d worn when the lifeguards dragged him out of the surf, but that earlier version of him, the living, breathing one that had escaped my notice. After arriving at Bondi Beach an hour ago, I’d run as quickly as I could towards the water, paddling hard until I felt the vertiginous pull of the current grip my legs and arms, the sandy shelf giving way to a bottomless blue. I floated, waiting for the sea to work its magic and ease the knotted tension in my neck.

I’d spent most of the previous day hunched over my laptop, attempting to finish writing my book. The past eight months had taught me that it was one thing to write a dissertation on cultural dress theory and quite another to convert it into a digestible piece of creative non-fiction people might actually want to read. Before leaving my job as a lecturer at the London Metropolitan University, I’d applied for, and been accepted into, a research fellowship program at Sydney University. I’d written most of the first draft of my textiles book in a tiny office overlooking the university quadrangle, knocking out twelve chapters within six months in a kind of frenzy. Then, for reasons I found hard to explain to the Dean and my colleagues, my progress had stalled.