16. Paradise: what, ever after, Eddie pictures when you say “love”

The coral is a wilderness of psychedelic fronds and luminous moss. Fish, improbably bright and many, pass under the swimmers’ bare stomachs. The fish are gorgeous and ingenious, like shoals of jewelry. Through the melee flutter huge rays, and the occasional fat eel dozes, draped in a cranny. The shadows of larger beasts speed over the bumpy coral, sometimes triggering a lightning scatter of small fry.

Eddie and Deesey chase each other up and down the phantasmagorical cliff. They catch in embraces that plummet through alarmed fish – lapse into darkening blue for a long-held breath – break in a flash of bubbles. She takes her snorkel out to kiss him, the taste of salt and sweet and beer mingled with an electrifying sense of drowning.

Staggering out again is an exile, the sun too frank and the air a loveless medium, a medium for golems, automatons, the dead