Once more the rains come for three days with no morning sun. She can’t get used to it, these sudden brutal downpours. She sprinkles lemon juice on the pillows to mask the smell of damp, tries to roll with Storm, straddling his hips, peeling her shirt off. He is strangely unwilling, though, indifferent beneath her, and spends the days watching his own breath on the slatted window, swearing quietly at the constant chop of the sea.

She’d expected the wet to bring relief from the heat, some opening from the cloying feeling of the air pressing down. She remembers the cold and the wet in Brussels, ice on her shoes in winter, the welcome warmth of indoors. There are photos, and snippets of videos. Sarah and Grace, wrapped in scarves and waterproofs, her father always behind the camera, an absent gaze. Wet was part of being cold; part of being lonely. Now, the rains create a suffocating blanket of heat, so that she can barely breathe.

On the fourth day, the pattern returns: morning sun, afternoon deluge, the night with stars falling down the sky. Storm stops breathing on the window, his eyes seeming to snap open, to be returned to himself. He unpeels her slowly, then says, ‘Come. A treat. Let’s go play in the deep. No sled, no record, just you, me and the turtles.’ He pulls her into the small blue tender and they fly across the reef. Closer in, the water is still murky from the rains, but the sun is glorious again, calming everything, even Storm. They soar across the water, birdlike, planing on the settling ocean, right out to the broad blue of Dazzling Deep. Storm has packed a picnic in a plastic box and when he cuts the engine he says, ‘You are the most important thing in my life, Grace. I want you to know how much you mean to me.’

Leaning against him while the tender bobs and he slips mango beneath her tongue, she boils with pleasure. He wipes mango from her lips, watching her carefully. He says, ‘I wish I’d known you when you were a schoolgirl. What were you like?’

‘Shy. A little bit lonely.’

‘Beautiful?’

‘God, I don’t know.’ She has a box of photos, left in Sydney. A pang twangs at her, out of nowhere, a longing for the square paper holding the image of her on Sarah’s lap, her father lurking in the distance. ‘I’d like, maybe, to go back to Sydney. To pick up some things.’

‘What things?’

‘Old photos. Ones my dad took. Papers. Clothes. And—’ She can’t think; what could be important enough for her to go back for? ‘I don’t know. Mainly clothes.’

He pings at the strap of her bikini. ‘You don’t need clothes here. You wear too many clothes.’ His hand slips under the string, and she twists her head around uncomfortably, though there is no-one there: who could be watching? A bird? Still, she wriggles away, her leg sliding in the black water pooled in the bottom of the tender.

‘What?’ He grips her. ‘Where are you going? Into the sea? To turn into a seal?’

‘Don’t be silly, Storm. I just – not here.’

‘We might make the fish blush? Is that what you think?’

‘It doesn’t feel safe.’

‘Since when has safe been what you wanted?’ He unties the string at the back of the bikini top, his hands hot on her skin. ‘If you wanted safe, you should have stayed in Sydney. Cold, boring, safe Sydney.’

‘It’s not – I don’t trust the boat.’ It makes no sense, she knows it. Her hands hang over the side of the tender, and it’s all she wants, to tip in, but Storm is running his finger beneath the string. The water is calling to her, she can feel the cool blue of it, lapping against her fingers. Storm has pulled aside the triangle of bikini top, begins kneading her breasts. She twists away. ‘I’ll burn, Storm.’

‘Then here.’ He squirts the white sunscreen into his hand, wipes it down the ridge between her breasts, to the navel, pressing hard. ‘You are the sexiest woman in the sea.’

It pleases her, usually. But now, with the sun aching overhead, and the feeling of the whole sky watching, she is resistant. He has untied the bikini top and she resists the instinct to cross her arms over herself. He won’t like that. He likes her to be wide open, waiting for him. He says it again, ‘You are a siren. You are the mistress of the sea.’ He’s fumbling with the string of her bikini bottom, and when Grace says, ‘It doesn’t untie,’ he pulls his dive knife out, cuts the string on either side, a single sharp shred.

‘There,’ he says. ‘String can’t stop us.’

There’s a nick on the side of her leg from the knife, blood spreading across her skin, but she has promised him, has made a deal, she is his. And so she is, looking up at the sky, letting herself be open to him, for him. The metal of the tender bench presses against her back and her head bangs against the hull, a rhythmic muffled beat keeping time with Storm’s heart while the sky keeps watch. Clouds scud above while seabirds dive, screeching. Grace watches the rise and fall of the water behind the line of the gunwale.

Afterwards, half burned and half sunscreened, she dives in, dips below the surface and watches her legs kicking, her hands open in front of her. She is suspended there, silent. A trail of blood swirls out behind her.

She stares up at the hills as they head back in. Storm’s sarong, tied around her waist, has a spot of blood blurring into the red mark of the bird pattern. It will turn to brown later, will look like the bird’s beak.