‘I’m going to have to pull you out, Sarge – having to make assumptions here.’

She’d stopped listening. Time had slowed and it was in a different world – on a distant planet – that Wellard was pulling frantically at the lifeline, dragging her out. She knew her limp body was jerking backwards in the water. She felt her fingers lose their grip on the torch, felt it bump lazily against her leg as it sank. She didn’t try to stop it.

In the gloom, about ten metres away, something that looked like a white jellyfish had appeared. Not the same thing she’d hallucinated earlier, but something else, something that billowed, moving up and down in eerie corkscrew shapes, like a cloud of hair. It seemed to hover, buffeted by unseen currents, as if it had been on its way somewhere – to the bottom maybe – but had stopped its descent to watch her. As if it was interested in what was happening. Interested in her struggle.

The top of the shape lifted, seemed to lengthen and slip out into long, tendril-like hair and now she knew what she was looking at.

Mum.

Mum, who had been for dead two years. The long blonde hair that she’d always kept in a knot at the back of her neck lifted and wallowed in the gloom, wafting around her face.

‘Wake up, Flea. Look after yourself.’

Flea didn’t answer. She wasn’t capable. In the real world her body had tilted on to its side and was twitching like a fish with a broken swim bladder.

‘Look after yourself.’

Mum turned in the water, her small white hands propelling her body around so her head was facing Flea’s, her hair floating in a cloud around her, her thin white legs trailing like wisps. She came forward until her sweet, pale face was close up to Flea’s, her hands on her shoulders. ‘Listen.’ Her voice was sharp. ‘Wake up. Now. Look after yourself.’

She shook her, and when Flea didn’t respond, she closed her fingers around her hand, moved her fingers across and flicked the lever on the switching block to SCUBA.