'No one likes Pablo,' the student agreed. 'He's the sort of man who would pluck a chicken while it's still alive.'

'That's a good subject for an anthropological field study,' I said.

'What is?'

'Why no one likes Pablo.'

The student held up three fingers. I assumed that meant I had to stay in the injury hut for three more minutes.

In the morning, the male staff at the diving school give a tutorial to student divers about how to put on their diving suits. They are uneasy about the dog being chained up all the time, but they get on with the things they have to do. Their second task is to pour petrol through a funnel into plastic tanks and wheel them out on an electric device across the sand to load on to the boat. This is quite complicated technology compared to the Swedish masseur, Ingmar, who usually sets up his tent at the same time. Ingmar transports his massage bed on to the beach by attaching ping-pong balls to its legs and sliding it across the sand. He has complained to me personally about Pablo's dog, as if the accident of my living next door to the diving school means that I somehow co-own the miserable Alsatian. Ingmar's clients can never relax because the dog whines, howls, barks and tries to kill itself all through their aromatherapy massage.

The student in the injury hut asked me if I was still breathing. I'm starting to think he wants to keep me here.

He held up a finger. 'You have to stay with me for one more minute, and then I will have to ask again how are you feeling.'

I want a bigger life.

What I feel most is that I am a failure but I would rather work in the Coffee House than be hired to conduct research into why customers prefer one washing machine to another. Most of the students I studied with ended up becoming corporate ethnographers. If ethnography means the writing of culture, market research is a sort of culture (where people live, the kind of environment they inhabit, how the task of washing clothes is divided between members of the community . . .) but in the end, it is about selling washing machines. I'm not sure I even want to do original fieldwork that involves lying in a hammock watching sacred buffalo grazing in the shade.

I was not joking when I said the subject of Why Everyone Hates Pablo would be a good field study.

The dream is over for me. It began when I left my lame mother alone to pick the pears from the tree in our East London garden that autumn I packed my bags for university. I won a first-class degree. It continued while I studied for my master's. It ended when she became ill and I abandoned my Ph.D. The unfinished thesis I wrote for my doctorate still lurks in a digital file behind my shattered screen saver like an unclaimed suicide.

Yes, some things are getting bigger (the lack of direction in my life), but not the right things. Biscuits in the Coffee House are getting bigger (the size of my head), receipts are getting bigger (there is so much information on a receipt, it is almost a field study in itself), also my thighs (a diet of sandwiches, pastries . . .). My bank balance is getting smaller and so are passion fruit (though pomegranates are getting bigger and so is air pollution, as is my shame at sleeping five nights of the week in the storeroom above the Coffee House). Most nights in London I collapse on the childish single bed in a stupor. I never have an excuse for being late for work. The worst part of my job is the customers who ask me to sort out their traveller's wireless mice and charging devices. They are on their way to somewhere else while I collect their cups and write labels for the cheesecake.

I stamped my feet to distract myself from the throbbing pain in my arm. And then I noticed that the halter-neck strap of my bikini top had broken and my bare breasts were juddering up and down as I stamped about. The string must have snapped when I was swimming, which means that when I ran across the beach and into the injury hut I was topless. Perhaps that is why the student did not know where to rest his eyes through our conversation. I turned my back on him while I fiddled with the straps.

Excerpted from Hot Milk by Deborah Levy. Copyright © 2016 by Deborah Levy. Excerpted by permission of Bloomsbury USA. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.