Probably in a minute or two, when she got home, someone'd tell her again, someone in the public bar or the Ladies' Lounge. She wasn't vain, but it stuck in her guts, having someone telling you that every day of your life. She was a pretty kid, but not as pretty as her mother. Rose was a slender, brown girl, with dark straight hair, cut hard across her forehead. Ted, who was a year older than her, pretended not to hear, and he came up the ladder dripping, pigeontoed, and dived off again, holding one knee, hitting the water so that he made an artillery report - ker-thump - and a great gout of water rose up at her feet. Back under the Norfolk pines gulls bickered on the grass and fought for the scraps of uneaten lunches that schoolkids had thrown there. Fishing boats were coming in along the breakwater for the night, their diesels throbbing like blood. She itched in her awful woollen bathing suit and watched her brothers and a whole mob of other kids chucking bombies off the end of the jetty in the bronze evening light. Rose Pickles knew something bad was going to happen.
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