I told Charon when the ferry ride turned out to be longer than I expected, I told him – it’s not the voices that make the Sirens attractive. None of us appreciate good singing that much. And it’s not just because we’re sailors. Men might be closer to beasts than the rest, but we’re not dogs. We don’t just spend some time on a boat and then throw our pants off and lunge into the sea the moment we hear a high voice. There’s more to it than that, I told him. He had a skull for a head; he just looked at me for a second while his fingers silently rotated the coin I’d given him.

See I dived in before I’d heard their voices. I saw them there on the rock. And I won’t pretend I hadn’t seen their long hair. Good hair. And after a few strokes it became obvious that they were naked, and after a few strokes more they were swaying. I was doing the front crawl; apart from those few glances, I had nothing to go on. All I was sensing was salt, cold, seaweed.

I jammed my fingers in my ears, right, breathed, opened the eyes and shook my head. Took one look at the tits, the hips, then I dived underwater to see the horrorshow underneath. I wanted to know what was there, didn’t I?

People who go to sea say ‘indescribable’ a lot when they don’t want to describe something. It was mostly black, lots of parts to it, a lot of thickness, a lot of tendrils, something round and flat that it was all trailing away from at the surface. Something like wide muscles. No sound. No faces on it.

Their faces were up top. I went up, don’t know if I breathed even, just went back up. Their faces were up there. Just women’s faces, is all they were. Like the Cyclops is just a big ugly man. Just women matted together here, at the tails, like rat kings.

One of them saw me emerging: the brunette. I caught her eye.