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at the last photograph where she had been joined by her family. No wonder Charlie obeyed Mr Shipping Magnate’s every command: he had the face of a boxer and the eyes of a killer. He was twice the size of his wife – which was saying something – and his banana-sized fingers, dripping in gold, looked as if they might very easily squeeze the life out of living things. In front of the happy couple were three fat-faced, metal-braced girls who would one day clearly have an issue with hair removal.
    ‘Clemmie?’ Johnny called again. She was probably snooping around like him. He opened a door to his left and the décor hit him right between the eyes. He found himself in some kind of safari theme park. A zebra skin complete with head gaped up at him from the floor; a leopard-skin throw had been tossed with careless precision over a leather sofa stretching across the beam of the boat. To his side a galloping wooden giraffe chased by skinny wooden men with spears was glued to the floor and above the fake log fire hung a large oil painting of a herd of elephants traversing the African plains.
    He found her in a room marked ‘Emperor Suite’. He opened the door and would have whistled had whistling not been bad luck on a boat – his lips made the movement without the sound. The cabin was enormous, acres of fluffy white carpet leading to an emperor-sized bed covered in an army of red satin pillows. Clem was lying spread-eagled on the satin covers. The only reminder that they were actually on a boat and not in a hotel room was the swaying view of the harbour through the porthole above the bed.
    He walked across the room, leaping to her side, landing face down on the pillows
    ‘Oh! Yes!’ he sighed, his voice muffled. ‘A proper bed!’ It had been a long time since they’d slept on a bed. The grass underneath their sleeping bags in the tent had long since been squashed flat and the sweltering canvas had lost its cosy romance a while ago.
    Johnny kicked off his trainers and rolled on to his back. For a minute or two it seemed as if they both might fall asleep there and then, but he could never resist her for long. He ran his hand along the curve of her hip and up her arm, the hairs bleached bright white by the sun, her skin a honey tan that he was convinced no other human being possessed.
    ‘One of the boxes…’ she said, lifting her legs up into the air and pulling off her jeans and her knickers in one swift movement, ‘… had a dress in it with a price tag on for three thousand dollars. How can someone spend three thousand dollars on a dress?’
    Johnny helped her with her shirt, gently brushing his lips against the softness of her nipples. ‘Think of what we could get with that money,’ he said. ‘We’d get our boat… the gorgeous, double-ended, teak-decked, sixty-foot ketch. We’d cross the Pacific, go wherever we fancied… whenever we fancied…’
    She looked down at him and smiled. Sometimes her heart ached with all the love she bore him; she’d had no idea that it was possible to love another person this much. Sometimes their love felt so infinite, so boundless, she felt like an astronaut floating in it. She gently kissed the top of his head and ran a hand through his hair, which was standing up in tufts from all the salt water.
    ‘I’d catch fish for you,’ he said, pulling himself up and kissing her lips. ‘I’d dive for you. I’d get pearls or sponges…’
    She was used to being adored by him; it was just the way things were. Life before they got together now seemed vague and unimportant. Ever since that night they’d spent kissing in the police cell in Barnes after Johnny got arrested, they had been inseparable. To her mother’s dismay she’d moved in to his squat in Roehampton on her sixteenth birthday. Her mother had never approved of Johnny; she thought he was a waster, that he’d never get a proper job and earn a decent living, which meant that she was missing the point entirely: those