Cassie McCullagh

And as she's having flings with younger men, she ends up going to midnight walks to the beach.

Yes, it's quite dangerous.

Well, and she describes all the homeless people who live along there, and it is a sort of edgy place to be.

But as she walks on the rocks, it's close to midnight, and this young man turns out he's a night swimmer.

Yes.

And they meet a number of times.

But I guess what I liked about it as a novel is that that's not a figment of her imagination.

That's not her neurosis.

He just is a merman.

So, you know, he looks like a beautiful young man at the top, but he has a fishy tail.

And, of course, because this is a novel that's all shaped around sex, we also do get a bit more anatomical detail about how he's not just a fish from waist down.

I haven't seen the film, but they had to be quite explicit in the novel about how they manage to have sex and where his fishtail begins and how they do it on the rocks.

But it becomes more complicated because she wants him to come and visit her house.

Yes.

So he ends up being dragged along the sand.

But also he's anxious.

He's obviously spent centuries dealing with...

people's anxiety and fear about sea creatures.

And so he is as needy and unsure of his body as she is.

And at one point she says, I was delighted.