Paul Dalgarno’s novel A Country of Eternal Light opens with his narrator, Margaret Bryce, in a bathtub. This is no ordinary bathtub, but one that exists between the world of the living and the dead. Margaret has (it seems) very recently died:
I drop further under, breathing out – no bubbles – the oblong light of the bathtub way up above, a meconium murk all around. Sirens singing … there are none. Mermaids … there are none. A heartbeat marking time in the gloom – no heart.
