‘I’m glad you could make her smile,’ I said. ‘I didn’t hear her laugh much in the last few months. Although I guess I wasn’t around. Too busy diving and making a nuisance of myself at the local skate park. You must have told her a joke or something, right before that photo was taken. She loved jokes although she could never tell them properly. She’d started giggling before she reached the punchline.’

‘I didn’t take that photo,’ he said. ‘The professional photographer snapped it. I was too busy taking this.’ He handed me a loose snapshot. The film’s surface was tacky with age, but I could clearly make out the figures in the foreground. The professional photographer’s back was turned to Gerrit’s camera; he had captured my mother’s expression, but not what inspired it: me. Seated on a plastic chair opposite my mother, I held my own seal pup and my mouth was open, in either shock or delight. I was wearing the smock my mother had sewn for my fifth birthday. She’d let me pick out the fabric myself. I remembered running my hand along the cotton bolts, searching through the prints for something with rosehips and blackberries and toadstools, like the illustrations in my favourite fairy book. I’d worn that dress until it fell apart. How funny; I hadn’t thought of it for years. I could recall with almost perfect clarity the way it had made me feel when I put it on – safe and warm, like a hug. I’d given up dresses later, swapped them for denim shorts and oversized T-shirts, things that could mask my body’s confusing abundance of hair and sticky fluids. But if I could reverse time, if I could stand in a room full of all the things I’d lost or discarded over the years and be given a second chance, that dress would be the first thing I’d reach for.

The grief rose swiftly, before I could stifle it. I felt my wrist grow limp. The photograph fluttered from my hand onto the rug.

Gerrit bent and scooped it up.

Dusting it off, he propped it up next to my mother’s image, her silent laughter the only sound I longed to hear.

I hoped I wouldn’t forget the way to the divers’ headquarters after our journey through the twisted maze of service roads around Oudeschild, I needn’t have worried.