Tane could blink on command. He learned it from his cousin Mere on the seawall at Opotiki, and it took him a whole summer to get it right. Shut the right eye and keep the left one open. He could do it twenty times in a row, and on the twentieth both eyes were open again. He told Mere he could hold his eyes open under water. If he could shut them when he said so, he could leave them open when he said so.

The swimming grade was in the last week of term, at the district pool, in the twenty-five metre lane. Tane put his face in and his eyes went. The water was not even in them a tenth of a second. His hands went out in front of him and the wall came sooner than the end of the lane did. He came up with his mouth open and coughing, and Ms Reid wrote something on his card. “Your blink is quicker than you are,” she said.

He swam it a second time to be sure. It did not matter. The water went in the same and his eyes went the same and the wall came the same.

On Saturday he swam at Whakatane with Mere, and he went under to touch the sand, and the water went in. The same thing happened. He could not see the bottom and he could not open his eyes to look for it. He came up swinging. Mere got hold of his arm, and he was sick over his sandals. The sea was not much different from the pool. That was the part he could not get past. He had thought a bigger pool would be a longer way to shout. That night he told Mere his eye had gone wrong and it was going to stay gone wrong. He said he was not going in the water any more.

Mere did not argue with him. She got the swimming goggles off the shelf, the ones with the cracked strap that had come from the church raffle. “Put them on,” she said. “Then put your face in the sink and count to ten.” Tane put his face in the sink and counted to ten. His eyes stayed open the whole way.

He did it four times. On the fifth he did it with the tap running, because he had worked out by then that Mere was not going to be impressed twice. Mere said the blink was worth keeping, and that half the good things a body does, it does without being asked.

On Monday Ms Reid told him what she had written on his card in the pool. She said the surface of the eye is the most sensitive part of a person. More nerve endings than a fingertip, and more than a front tooth. She said a blink starts in about a tenth of a second, and the whole blink takes about a third of a second.

She said the eye does that by itself. It is not asking first. Water is past the corner of your eye before the lid has started to come down. She said people call it a reflex, and that a reflex has one job and no manners. It does not wait for the whole of you to agree. “Can you do that on purpose?” asked Tane. “You just did,” said Ms Reid. “You shut your eyes when you wanted to. That is a different one.”

He thought about that in the changing room for a while with one eye closed. The blink he could order was the blink for nothing. It was for the camera, and for the joke at the table, and for the times he wanted somebody to stop talking to him. The blink he could not order was the one that shut when the water came. That was the one that had a job.

He told Ms Reid that at the telling, and she said yes, that is the whole of it, and that a body keeps that job whether you are paying attention to it or not.

He passed the grade on the Thursday. Twenty-five metres. Forty-four seconds. Ms Reid wrote the time on his card in blue, and then she wrote under it: eyes shut from the 6 m mark. He stood and looked at that for a while. Twenty-five metres of water, and six of it he still went through with his eyes closed, in a pool where he could see the bottom. He put the card in his bag and walked out past the shallow end.