I wasn’t surprised when Suzanne said she was going to leave me. I had expected that she’d find out about the affair one day, and perhaps even hoped that she would; I had imagined her fury, her smashing bowls and plates, screaming and demanding an explanation or excuse, and her fingernail scratches on my skin, knowing her impulsive nature and fiery temper. But I was surprised to see her so calm, and stern about the divorce. Often people just say it on the spur of the moment, or as a threat, because they feel they have to do something. As a kid, I had seen my neighbour drunk and chasing his wife around our neighbourhood with a kitchen knife, threatening to kill her. It happened many times, and he always begged her to come back when he’d sobered up the next day after she’d gone to her parents’ and said to never return, but she always came back. I knew Suzanne meant what she said, because she’d never said things such as leaving or divorce before, not even once. ‘One shouldn’t say such things so easily,’ I remember she said after I’d told her about my neighbours, ‘because each time those words are spoken, the love between two people lessens a bit.’
I don’t know if Suzanne and I really loved each other, or at least if I loved her. Before we were married and living together, we sent each other messages to say ‘I love you’ every night before sleep. She’d said it first, after we’d been going out for a few months, so I said it back, because it felt like the right thing to say. But when thinking of her I never had that feeling of my heart being squeezed or wrung, as it’s described in novels and films. I suppose it was because our story had been so unremarkable — marriage and then a kid, what were expected of us. But I would never want her to know that those three words felt to me somehow untrue, like an act we performed for each other. I don’t remember when we stopped saying it, but neither of us seemed to miss it.
She had also been the one who said ‘We will have to get married’ when she became pregnant ten years before. Now, if she hadn’t said divorce, I wouldn’t have been able to make up my mind to leave her, because I didn’t like changes or to be the one who left.
‘Are you sure?’ I felt I had to ask.
She was sure, Suzanne said, but there was something she wanted to do. A trip to the sea, just us two. ‘A farewell trip,’ she said.
*
She booked the flights, the hotel, the taxis, things she had done early on in our marriage but later became my responsibility. She was cheerful, from the airport of the departure to our arrival in Hainan Island and the taxi ride to the hotel, as if this trip had been no different from any other we had taken before. She pressed her palms on the passenger window as the taxi climbed the snaked road up the hill and cried out in amazement as the vegetation along the road grew denser and greener and when a corner of the sea came into view each time the car reached a turn. Her child-like spirit had once elated me when she’d planned our adventures together — backpacking in Yunnan, Tibet and Nepal, road-cycling from Guangdong to Fujian, rock-climbing in Jiuzhaigou — and encouraged me to take up swimming and pursue a promotion at work. I hadn’t seen her like this, receiving the world with such eagerness and openness, in a long time. In fact, I hadn’t seen her very much lately; we’d found our own ways to not see one another, despite our living under the same roof. I’d be in the living room watching TV when she was reading in the dining room; she’d be at the school three evenings a week to supervise the after-school study sessions when I lay naked in bed with Rui after dropping off our son at my parents’ for dinner. Somewhere after our taxi had passed the gate to the hotel and before reaching the lobby, in the middle of the road, a group of monkeys, grown ones and babies perched on their shoulders, sat or moved quietly on all fours, in the slanting sun, and made no gesture of getting out of the car’s way until it was very near. ‘Look, Junyan! Look, monkeys!’ she shrilled, and the driver stared at us in the rear-view mirror. ‘Stop shouting, I can see the monkeys,’ I wanted to say, surprised at how the brief tenderness I felt for her was so quickly replaced by irritation.
In the hotel room, there were red rose petals on the bed, arranged in the shape of a large heart, and encircled within, white towels folded to resemble two kissing swans. Beside them, was a card, which I didn’t need to read to know what message it contained.
‘Did you —?’ I dropped the bag onto the floor.
‘I only told them so we could get a better room,’ she said.
We — or rather I, had done that when we traveled together before. I’d write to the hotel and say it was a special trip, for an anniversary, even when it wasn’t. We’d sometimes be given a larger or higher-floor room with a better view or a bottle of champagne or a box of chocolate, and always rose petals and kissing swans. We had drunk champagne in a bath, kissed with chocolate in our mouths, and fallen asleep with red petals crumpled on white sheets underneath our naked bodies. And I remembered our first time, as I stepped onto the balcony and saw in front of me the blue expanse beneath the hill, had been in a room by the sea, in Phuket. I’d had so little experience then, having slept only once with one girl before her, and I’d been nervous, also because Rui had been there. I never understood, even today, why she’d asked Rui to come on that trip — our first trip together. Rui was a former student, a good friend, like a younger brother to her, she’d told me, and his fluent English would be of help since it had been the first time we traveled abroad. The three of us had been inseparable — on the beach, at meals, at the pool, in the night market — and it hadn’t happened until one afternoon when Rui said he had too much sun and needed a nap. I inhaled the sultry, seawater-infused air and that afternoon was here again: the blinding sun on the porch of the family-run hotel, the deeply tanned illegitimate half-Thai child of the German owner, the clamminess on the skin, the darkness in the room after the curtains had been drawn and shutters latched, and the whirl of the electronic fan on the rusty-green wall. She’d been equally inexperienced, but not as nervous. The room had felt like a cave, and everything outside of it melted away. But I never told her, and I’d only admitted to myself much later, that knowing Rui was sleeping next door made me more excited. Rui had come into the room afterwards and looked cross after he’d caught sight of the used condom in the bin. He was twenty-one then, surely he knew that people have sex, surely he knew that she and I were going to sleep together. After the first time, she would sneak into my room after we both told Rui that we were taking a nap, or I would sleep in her room in the night and return to my own in the morning. I’d noticed Rui’s noticing of the change of atmosphere around us. Neither she nor I said anything. Rui brooded on his mood until it erupted into a huge fight with Suzanne. He felt he’d been used, Rui had said and stormed off the tuk-tuk, gathered his things from his room, and moved to a different hotel. We’d managed to travel without Rui for the rest of that trip, and we never traveled with him again.
*
She came out to the balcony and screamed in excitement when she saw the sea. I handed her a cigarette from the packet I was smoking. Fronds of palms swayed in the breeze that came from the sea, birds flickered from treetop to treetop, and in silence we watched the waves rolling in towards the shore like the white wings of so many doves.
We went back inside to unpack and change into summer clothes, and when we came out again the tide had gone out and the sun was orange and touching the sea. I was astonished to see that what had been the smooth sandy beach earlier was now an immense dark mass of craggy rocks. Gathered on them, men, women and children stooped, holding plastic buckets, in search of something.
‘What are they doing?’
‘Searching for gifts from the sea,’ she said, ‘fish, crabs, shells, oysters, and even messages in bottles. Something you can only do after sunset or before sunrise when the tide is at its lowest.’
‘How did you know about this?’
‘I read.’ Then she asked, ‘Wanna go take a look?’
I nodded yes.
When we arrived at the beach it was already dark. The jagged reefs looked like the gnarled, bared body of a fearsome, ever-extending monster, on whose back stood people, some nearer to the beach and others so far out that they appeared to be standing in the middle of the sea. We moved very slowly so as not to trip. ‘Here?’ I suggested we stop and see what people had caught. ‘Keep going,’ she said. ‘I want to see how far out we can go.’ The further we went out, where the sky, the sea and the reefs at our feet began and ended seemed more and more blurred to me, and the searching figures with the flickering of their torchlights looked like ghosts crossing a sea. Suddenly I felt a push in the back that nearly toppled me over.
‘Why did you push me?’ I asked her after I’d regained my footing. A couple of my fingers had been scratched by the reef’s sharp edges.
‘Did what?’ she shouted in the dark.
‘Why did you push me?’
She had always been reckless, almost drawn to danger. Once, when paddle boarding on a river we ended up in a current, and just as I’d been trying to steer away, she swung her body abruptly and overturned the board. The water was shallow, but I’d scraped several toes on the rocks and lost my glasses when falling into the river. When I asked her why she did it she said she just wanted to see what would happen. Another time, when crossing a river in heavy rain with a group of hikers, despite my wish to wait, at least till the rain let up, she’d pushed me and the whole group to go forward. In the end, we made it across, but it still gave me chills when remembered the roaring muddy water so quickly rising above my waist and almost reaching my chest before someone caught my hand and pulled me up to the bank. Then, there was that time when we’d witnessed a member of our group — a young man — fall off the cliff we’d been climbing. Afterwards, we went to the funeral, where the dead man’s parents cursed us before throwing us out. It was as if she had a knack for drawing us close to danger and took pleasure in it.
‘It wasn’t a push.’ She was laughing. ‘I only tapped on your shoulder to show you this. And look what I found!’
*
The next morning, at Suzanne’s suggestion, we took a taxi to town to visit the largest fresh food market on the island. In the brand-new electric Uber car, she asked the driver how he felt about driving an electric car compared with a petrol one, but when the driver, eager to chat, replied she’d already given an answer herself and moved on to a new question. I couldn’t remember when her hearing, a condition since childhood, had begun to worsen, and if it had been the start of the deterioration of our relationship. I had to speak louder to her and learned to look her in the eye to make myself heard, but even so, I still wasn’t sure all I said was conveyed to her, judging from her often expressionless face. She wouldn’t admit that there was only so much she could hear, or make out of from the sound, if enunciated at an ordinary volume, and that she was half-guessing what was said to her. Then one day I found myself shouting at her, shocked to hear anger in my voice, even though I was only asking her what type of fish she wanted me to order from the store. I’d asked her earlier that how she liked the four volumes of David Copperfield she’d brought on the trip and been reading since the plane. The water should be warm enough for a swim, she’d replied. The driver was baffled by her incoherence, nonetheless, he and she continued to talk in their own channels, as if two monologues sounded at once, overlapping one another. She said the local dialect sounded much like Vietnamese when he’d asked where we were visiting from. How did you know I was from Dongbei? Is it my accent? The driver asked. I hear the seafood at this market is overpriced, she said, raising her voice, growing more excited, and began to shout, her pitch full of challenge. She spit out a stream of words and the driver was laughing. Outside the market, I got out of the car feeling disorientated, and the sun was making me squint. Holding the door open, I bent over to reach the passenger seat for the sunglasses she said she’d forgotten, and the driver, speaking on the phone, absent-mindedly started the car. The car’s tyre ran very slowly over my right foot. I called out in shock and the driver pulled the brake. Astounded but feeling no pain, I moved and felt my foot and was sure it functioned as usual and there was no pain at all. Having no idea how else I should react to express my disquiet, I said to the driver again and again how he should’ve paid more attention before letting him go. All this time Suzanne stood in a shaded area away from the car with a smirk on her face.
*
For three days we mostly did our own things — she went jogging around the hotel and to a local fishing village, read, and went to the pool, and I spent hours on social media and playing video games. Later in the afternoon when the sun was less strong we went to the beach together. There, we sat at separate spots, me in the sun close to the water and her in the shade not far behind under some palm trees. The fourth afternoon we were on the beach, after feeling sufficiently baked I went in the water for a swim, and as usual, Suzanne was at her spot reading and listening to music played out loud on a small portable speaker. When I swam back to shore she was gone. She left me a text message to say she’d gone back to the hotel and asked me to pick up a large bottle of mineral water and some fruits on my way back. In the shop, I bought a packet of cigarettes too, and two durian-flavoured ice creams that I’d never seen anywhere else before. It was when approaching where the monkeys gathered at dusk that I realised what a bad idea it was to walk past there with fruits, especially bananas, which Suzanne had specifically requested. The monkeys had already seen me and my shopping bag. They sat and paced slowly and noiselessly in the middle and on the side of the small tarmac road, as bandits would casually lean against a wall and wait for their victim to come close, confident that the prey was no doubt in their grip. I wondered if I should turn back, but there was no other way to the hotel. I slowed my steps, avoiding eye contact with the monkeys, not even the babies, though out of the corner of my eye, I saw more climbing down the trees and some following me on top of the wall adjoining the hill. I had no idea how I was going to get past the group already forming a small barricade ahead, and I was terrified that the ones at my side might start an attack at any moment and was more conscious than ever about the bareness of my legs and arms and feet in flip-flops and any part of my body that wasn’t covered; they could easily jump at me, rip me apart, and even a single scratch from them would be enough to send me to the hospital. My heart was racing now, I began to tremble. Then I hurled the bag forth as hard as I could, and as I saw the monkeys scurrying at the bag I turned back and ran.
Suzanne wasn’t in the room when I came back. To calm my nerves I drank a beer and then fell asleep in the bed in my still damp swimsuit. When I woke the night had already fallen. It was dark in the room except one small light was on in the living area. Suzanne was sitting on the balcony facing the sea and listening to classical music played at maximum volume from the speaker on the table in front of her. Bach’s Cello Suites, performed by Yoyo Ma, I guessed. Enveloped in the moonlight that flooded the balcony, she was engrossed in the rise and fall of the cello, accompanied by the sound of waves crashing at the reefs, completely unaware of my presence. She took a boiled egg from the plate and tapped it against the tabletop to the tempo to crack it.
‘What are you doing out here?’ I said and thought we probably would have to talk at one point, though neither of us had seemed keen.
‘Thinking about how to kill you,’ she said and turned the music down.
‘Right, of course,’ I said and poured some red wine into an empty glass on the table and refilled the one she’d been drinking.
‘“As the moon rises bright from the sea,”’ she said, ‘what absolute truth in such simple words, but you really wouldn’t know it’s as if the moon actually rises from the sea unless you see it for yourself. And, as it says in the Tang-Dynasty poem, “To enjoy the moon I blow out the candle stick,” let’s turn out that light too.’ She stepped inside barefooted and flipped the switch. The moonlight brightened more.
‘You never know what it’s like to kill a man unless you’ve actually done it,’ I said.
‘Or to sleep with a man,’ she said.
She’d known about Rui, which I hadn’t expected. I fell silent.
‘I read in the news about the trial of a woman in the local ethnic Li Village who killed her husband,’ she said.
‘Why did she kill him?’ I asked.
‘Does it matter?’ she said.
‘Does it matter who I slept with?’ I said.
She didn’t answer, instead, she emptied her glass. In the pale light, her skin looked almost blue, but her cheeks were red from the wine, as if a vampire wearing rouge.
I gave her another refill and poured some more for myself.
‘She killed him in his sleep,’ she said.
‘Did you ever think of killing me in my sleep?’
‘Many times,’ she said. ‘When you snore, when the smell of that hair-growth oil you apply on your scalp to go to sleep was making me nauseous and keeping me awake all night, when you spread your arms and legs and take most space of the bed, when you shout at me because I can’t hear you, when you called his name more than once in your sleep.’
‘I didn’t know I called his name— I’m sorry.’
‘Do you want to know how I would kill you?’
‘Not really.’ Then after a pause, I said, ‘Maybe.’
‘I’d put powdered sleeping pills in your coffee,’ she said, ‘not too many, a couple would be sufficient to make you drowsy.’
Of course, her sister was a pharmacist at a hospital.
Mimicking a gesture of grinding a pill using the bottom of a glass, she said, ‘You will use the Nespresso machine of course, so the powder would need to be dissolved in the water for making ice cubes. One, two, three— you always take four.’ She did an impression of putting ice cubes into a cup. ‘Then you will take your iced coffee in the thermos cup to the beach.’
‘Will you be going with me?’
‘Oh yes, I will.’ She laughed. ‘And after baking and sweating in the sun you take a gulp of the iced coffee, maybe drink half a cup, you drink fast, and go in the water. It’s a windy day, I’ve checked the weather forecast, and at four o’clock, when the tide comes in the waves will bring jellyfish.’
I thought of the jellyfish skin we eat at home, thinly sliced and dipped in soy, vinegar and seamen oil, chewy and salty and always made me think of the smell mixed of seawater and petrol smoke on a boat.
‘This is the season when so many of them drift close to the beach. You won’t be able to see the transparent ones before they’re right in your face, and that alone will give you a heart attack, but not to worry, those aren’t venomous; it’s the blue ones you should watch out for, the box jellyfish whose tentacles are loaded with deadly poison.’ She emphasised the word ‘poison’, followed by a pause.
Then she continued. ‘They didn’t live in the area before, but more and more were discovered in the region because of warmer temperatures in recent years; I guess global warming is real. I don’t have to tell you how painful it is when you’re stung by one, and if you’re unfortunate enough to come in their way, with one sting you will have a heart failure or become unconscious.’ She smirked. ‘And then you will drown.’
‘The sea is huge.’ I said, ‘It’s not like I will be out there looking to be stung by venomous jellyfish.’
‘That’s like saying you don’t walk out of your house to the streets looking to be hit by a car. Don’t count on your luck. Wear a wet suit. And don’t forget about the common transparent jellyfish, their venom might not be deadly to humans but you will have a reaction still, at the least, it will make you drowsy. But if you’re lucky and don’t run into any jellyfish, the sleeping pill will have kicked in by now. You’re so close to shore, you think you can make it back, but drowsy as you’re treading the water, you can’t see where you’re going and you aren’t even aware that you’re surrounded by so many dead coral reefs underwater. Then you crash a foot or a leg or an arm against a reef, and by shock and pain you lose all sense of direction and you’re carried by the waves, which thrust you here and there, and “bang!”’ she shouted in a high-pitched voice, ‘against another dead reef, and another.’ She was speaking much faster now. ‘You’re bleeding, you see your own red blood rise in the water and you’re scared. What if sharks came? Then you aren’t scared anymore because you don’t know what’s going on. You are lost to the sea. Your body will eventually be washed up by the waves onto the beach, or found stuck between reefs when the tide has gone out the next day.’
‘You don’t think the police would question about the sleeping pill left in my body?’
‘I would tell them that you take them sometimes to help you sleep, which is a fact.’
I had nothing to say. She had it all worked out, hypothetically. If she really wanted to kill me, she had plenty of chances. Some clouds obscured the moon. In the dark, I saw in her eyes the blazing lights from two fishing boats on the horizon.
‘I never told you this,’ I said, ‘what happened to my neighbours. I don’t know why but I didn’t want to tell you before.’
‘The drunken man who chased his wife with a knife?’ She seemed to be able to hear me perfectly well even though I spoke softly as I traced the memory from my childhood.
I nodded. ‘My parents said he was the jealous type and always suspicious of his wife cheating on him. They fought often, just as you and I did. Every time he got drunk they would put on such a spectacle — him running shirtless with a knife and shouting obscenities and her screaming, with her hair and shirt disheveled. Now that I think about it, there was something oddly sexual in their act, as if he couldn’t give her enough of himself so he wanted to crash his body into hers. It happened again and again, and several times, afterwards he’d bring her back from her parents’ on his motorbike decorated with red Double Happiness stickers and colour balloons as if she were his new bride and they were getting married again, and welcomed her with red firecrackers exploding outside the building. The neighbours consoled them at first, laughed after they had seen it happen so many times, and then hardly paid any more attention when they fought again. One night, he got drunk and began chasing her, shouting he was going to kill her. And that night, she killed him in his drunken sleep. Their daughter, who was the same age as my younger sister, who had been six or seven at the time, lost both parents, because after murdering her husband the wife took her own life too.’
We were both silent. Suzanne took a sip of her wine and looked out to the sea. The moon had come out of the clouds and the two fishing boats were no longer on the horizon. She was again basked in the bluish light. She murmured:
‘As the moon rises bright from the sea,
From far away you share this moment with me.’
*
The next morning Suzanne received a call from work. A colleague had fallen ill and she was requested to return early to fill in. She changed her flight to the next available one at noon and took a taxi to the airport by herself. Before leaving, she said: ‘Enjoy your last two days.’
After Suzanne left it rained all day. I stayed in the room all afternoon and ordered in food for lunch and dinner. During the night I was awoken twice by the loud bangs of thunder and saw the room flare up then within seconds go dark when flashes of lightning struck. I felt a loneliness that was different from the kind I felt when with Suzanne. In the morning, the sky was blue, the sun quickly dried what had been wetted by the storm, and the beach was busy again. My last day on the island. I went jogging for an hour, ate pineapple fried rice for lunch by the pool, and played my video game in the room until I fell asleep on the sofa. A day by the sea was as eventless as a day anywhere. At four o’clock I went to the balcony to check on the water. The tide had come in, the sea looked brimming, but more green than the usual blue. The sky had grown a little cloudy, despite the sun was shining. I debated about heading down to the beach. It could rain, but it’d be nice to go for one last swim in the sea before flying home, where it was still spring. To give myself a little more time to decide, I made a black coffee, and then went back to the balcony and saw the clouds creeping around the sun had not moved. I didn’t want to sit around waiting for it to rain when I still had time to swim, so I put on my swimsuit and headed to the beach.
On the long stretch of the sand, only a handful of bathers scattered. At my usual spot, the sea had turned a milky green, the waves large and frothy, and the water’s edge was teeming with brown seaweed washed up by the storm in the night. A young couple, Russian-looking and hand in hand, waded timidly through the tangled algae into the water and then dissuaded by the rocks, shook their heads and turned back. Perhaps not a good day for a swim after all. I was ready to gather my things and leave when I saw a caucasian man paddle-boarding towards me. ‘Going in for a swim?’ he shouted from his board.
‘I was. But the sea looks a bit rough today,’ I said.
‘Nah, it’s just this bit close to shore. Don’t let the rubbish washed up by the waves put you off. Once you’re out there in the open you’ll be all right. I swim here all the time,’ he said as he stepped off the board. He looked about fifty, with a strong build, his skin deeply tanned and his blond hair bleached platinum by the sun.
‘Have you been here long?’ I asked.
‘Three years now,’ he said.
‘Where are you from?’
‘Russia.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Sanya.’
‘Isn’t it the same name as this city, the capital of Hainan Island?’
‘Yes. Who would know, right? And you know what else? The beaches in Sanya are the closest tropical beaches from Russia. Perhaps our lives are predestined by our names.’
‘Perhaps,’ I said.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Junyan,’ I said. ‘Not as cool as Sanya.’
‘What does it mean?’ The Russian said while pulling his board out of the water in a practised manner.
‘It means good looks,’ I said, ‘but also means craggy rocks.’
‘Craggy rocks,’ he repeated. ‘We’ve got plenty of those here.’
After saying goodbye to the Russian I went in the water, even though I realised that I’d left my goggles in the hotel. I moved awkwardly in a stooped position, stepping on the small, rough yet slippery rocks, pushing away the filthy cluttered seaweed, and fighting a revolution at the white froth as I thought of all the decisions that I knew I shouldn’t have made but for reasons I couldn’t explain still stuck to. I looked back and saw no one on this part of the beach, I looked up and saw the blue-grey clouds gathering heavy and low; beams of sunlight shot through the clouds and cast on the surface of the ocean an orange glow. It looked glorious and desolate at the same time, as if I had come to the end of the world. I kicked the water and threw myself forth. Without my goggles I swam cautiously and kept my head above the water, nervous that I wasn’t able to see what was under. After a while, I arrived in the deeper area. I was startled when I felt something brush against my nape and turned around to see it was only seaweed. Then I remembered what Suzanne had said about jellyfish. They could be anywhere, next to my feet, legs, arms, chest; I made a twirl and hoped my sudden movement would scare them away, and then realised I could also crash into them if they were indeed near. I decided it was time to get back, even though I had only been in the water for ten or fifteen minutes. Then I heard someone calling my name from the shore. ‘Junyan!’ A woman’s voice. Suzanne was on the beach waving at me. ‘Hi—!’ She gave me another shout. ‘Hi!’ I shouted and raised an arm to wave back. Why had she come back? A wave came and water washed into my mouth and splattered in my eyes, salty and stinging. I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand and discovered that one of my contact lenses was gone. ‘Junyan!’ she shouted and waved again. I suddenly felt a pain in my chest, as if it was prickled by needles. I felt desperate to get back, to get to where her voice was. All would be all right if I got back. I tensed my hip muscles to add extra strength to my kick, and then I felt a pain in my left knee so acute and abrupt that I almost lost my ability to swim. I closed my eyes and I was underwater. I opened them and black reefs were all around me. Seawater burned my eyes so I closed them again. I had come down the water from an area without reefs, but I hadn’t known that the waves had taken me off my course. I came up for air. I knew I had crashed my knee into a reef, but I didn’t know if I’d broken a bone or injured any other parts of my body. Suzanne had been right, the shock was more intense than the pain. Blurry-eyed, I saw white water everywhere. Waves were pushing me towards reefs lurking where I could not see.
I don’t know how but I made it to the shore. I waded out of the water and saw it wasn’t Suzanne standing there. ‘Are you all right?’ shouted a woman in a black wet suit and with goggles pushed up her forehead. ‘Do you need any help?’
‘I’m not sure,’ I said.
‘Oh gosh!’ She put a hand over her mouth when I walked up to her.
I looked down at my leg and saw the flesh in my left knee was open, like the opened mouth of a fish caught in a net, with the rawness of a slab of meat on a butcher’s hook. Blood, not as much as I’d expected though, trickled down my shin. I felt I was going to be sick. I tried to close the wound by pressing the flesh together with my fingers, but it opened as soon as I let go of my hand.
‘You need to go to the hospital,’ the woman said.
I nodded yes and limped away. I didn’t think to ask her why she was shouting my name and what she’d wanted from me.
*
The next day, I flew home. A month later, Suzanne and I were divorced.
Later, when a man sitting next to me inside the steam room of my gym reached under my towel and took my cock in his hand he noticed the scar on my knee. ‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘A gift from the sea,’ I said, tracing a finger on my scar. ‘Wanna feel it?’