I had started sleeping badly, my dreams brimming with voices speaking all at once, as if half a dozen radio frequencies had been spliced together to torture me. Some of the voices I recognised as belonging to people I knew but many of them remained stubbornly vague. They prattled on about the most mundane subjects – what they were planning to eat for dinner, what mischief their children got up to, the kind of house they hoped they could afford once the mortgage rates fell. I’d tried everything to tune them out – meditation before bed, half a Valium before dinner. I even banned caffeine from my diet, although my resolution lasted less than a fortnight (the coffee withdrawals made me so irritable that my aunt, Marieke, insisted I resume the habit). And then, just as suddenly as they had started, the bad dreams lifted. For the past few days, my head had been clear. No more voices, no more headaches. Just peace. The terms of the university fellowship stipulated that the book I was working on needed to be ready for publication within a year. Meeting the deadline would be challenging after my health issues but, if I worked hard, not impossible. I’d pushed myself yesterday to regain some momentum. Now I was paying for it.

My neck had felt poker-stiff, the tendons stretched as taut as piano wire. Every turn of my head sent a ripple of pain shooting down a labyrinth of nerve-endings into my spine. I could have arranged a massage but that would have meant putting my body in a stranger’s hands and making the dreaded small talk, an ability I’d always admired in others since it was a skill I felt I lacked. The beach had seemed a far safer bet.

Marieke insisted the cure for any ailment was salt water. She swore by the restorative benefits of a good cry, vowing she always felt better afterwards. But crying had never affected me that way. I hadn’t even cried the night two police arrived from the Dutch mainland on Texel, the small island where I lived, to tell me that my parents’ bodies had been found in an isolated swamp in Southern Holland. Too numb and shocked to accept what they were trying to say, I assumed the tears would come later. I waited for them to arrive, the way I expected my parents to walk through the door again, their voices raised in perpetual argument over some slight committed years ago. But they never did.