She didn’t want to come with me, but I was happier alone. I was fifteen, restless. We hadn’t come all the way to Spain to lie in the sun, and now I wanted to explore.

The beach was busy. We’d been coming down here at night, giving Anna’s parents the slip, climbing out the window of our bedroom and down to the darkened shore to drink Malibu. I left her on the sand, walked into the sea, and began to swim.

I didn’t see it, but I felt it. At first I thought it was a rock or a jellyfish: something sharp through the skin of my foot. I kicked; the pain increased, a shock straight, and then the feeling of tugging, pulling me back with the swell of the wave.

I kicked again, but now it hurt more, whatever was stuck in my foot would not let go: I was stuck, and the waves were getting stronger. I calmed myself, reached down. If I was still enough, and held my breath, I could feel a thin, metal hook: its spike had gone straight through my toe, and on the end, was a thin wire. A fish-hook, still attached to its wire, and the wire, I realised now, embedded in the shore.

If there was ever any moment to panic, this would have been it. I regretted, suddenly, telling Anna she was boring, that she was too pale to tan anyway: maybe she would have come with me. I realised now how empty this part of the sea was. I was far away from the shore, and when I opened my mouth to shout, it filled with water.

Somebody had seen me, though: a little boy in swimming goggles, looking in horror over my shoulder. “Mira!” he said. “Cuidate!”

I didn’t have time to look. A wave, three times as high as before. It sucked me under, and then, with a force so strong it tore the fishing wire from the seabed, it threw me into the shore. I landed in the shallows, my swimsuit filled with wet sand.

I lifted myself up onto my elbows, looking in horror at the fish-hook that was still sticking out of my toe. A shadow fell over me: a familiar pair of feet, pale, freckled, legs. Anna was looking down at me, arms folded.

“So, are we swimming or what?”