'Wayne, lying down there, can you see?' Wayne felt Anne Summers seize his arm. 'There's a sleeping mermaid!'

Wayne peered into the water. The Apollo's propeller had stopped, and the mass of churning bubbles dissolved in the water that swilled against the hull. Lying on her back, like its drowned bride, was the statue of an immense reclining woman. Almost as long as the Apollo, she rested on a bed of concrete blocks, the ruins of an underwater plinth. Her classical features were only a few feet below the surface. Washed by the waves, her gray face reminded Wayne of his dead mother's when he gazed into her open coffin in the asylum mortuary.

'Wayne, who is she?' Anne Summers stared at the impassive face. A colony of lobsters had taken up residence in the woman's nostrils. As they emerged from their domain peering up at the dripping bulk of the Apollo, Anne held her handsome nose. 'Wayne, she must be some kind of goddess...'

Paul Ricci squeezed between them. 'A local marine deity,' he suavely informed them. 'The Americans of the eastern seaboard worshipped a pantheon of underwater creatures - you'll remember Moby Dick, Hemmingway's Old Man and the Sea, even the great white shark affectionately christened "Jaws".'

Exerpt from 'Hello America' (1981) J.G.Ballard