‘Captain Blip? Never,’ he said, without ceasing to calculate. ‘I refudiate that.’ ‘You what?’ Jane felt suddenly cold all over. ‘There’s no such word, Denny.’

She marvelled at how lucrative kids-as-content seemed to be. Instamums at Disneyland and on cruises, snaps showing improbably perfect houses filled with improbably perfect children.

The muster file, rotten and sound, upon my life, amounts not to fifteen thousand poll.

The water line is to that Bend or place she should swim in when she is loaded.