Venus does not do alarms. She wakes when the light through the shutters reaches the end of the bed, which in October is a little after eight, and the first thing she reaches for is not her phone but the striped off-shoulder top hanging on the back of the chair.
"I decide the top first," she says, "and the rest of the day organises itself around it." Today that means the stripes, a pair of pleated shorts in mustard, and sunglasses that live on her brow more than her nose. Marble does not squint.
Breakfast is a green coconut at the café on the corner, straw in, no cup. She likes the place because the chairs are the right height and nobody asks why she is the colour of a bathroom floor. By ten she is on the sand; by eleven the shorts are folded on a towel and the teal one-piece is doing the work.
The getting-ready part, then, takes about nine minutes. "It is not a routine," she says. "It is a sequence. Top, bottom, shoes, out. Everything else is just standing still, and I have done enough of that."