A few days ago, I was walking alone along Tuna Street, and there, rising towards me like a tsunami of land, was the ground. Not the ground beneath my feet, the ground about twenty steps in front of me. Tipping up on itself like the world was a piece of paper, folding away. The grey of the pavement, with lines of houses either side, the green wheelie bins, a red car on the road, all rising. It collected into this huge object in front of me, not made up of its individual parts anymore but one threatening mass. The sky bent down behind me out of view, and I was just a word on the page, smashing into another word from the other side.  

I had just then been thinking that if I were a character, if I could choose who I was, then I would just stop feeling. All the little cries inside my head would go away, and I would be in a world of my own, you know, like everyone else, not caring about stuff. If I wanted to be beautiful or brave that wouldn’t make it true. You can’t just make up who you are. But wanting to not care anymore, could that be true? Maybe I could change the way I thought if I thought about it enough. I wondered if everyone else must want to not care or if they ever even considered it.  

Of course, we could all be lying to each other in some universal conscious conspiracy. How do I know I don’t feel like everyone else if I don’t know how everyone else feels?  

I guess I just know. After the ground folded in on me, I reappeared on the other side of the page, and I was thinking, is fighting to fall asleep harder than fighting to stay awake? I decided falling to sleep is harder, I can always stay awake. But I don’t know why. Surely the dream is the desired state, where nothing matters because it’s all inside your head.  

Anyway, I walked on Tuna Street and back to my room on Capelin Field. I’m sure I heard once, somewhere, that they used to be called Morrab Road and North Parade. I don’t know when the names changed. In my mind, some tidal wave had turned all the streets into migrating fish, using some mystery of nature to find their way back to the exact spot they were hatched. I think they use taste or smell. Or they listen to the earth’s magnetic field in ways we don’t understand. When I arrived home, to Capelin Field or North Parade or whatever you call it, I realised I didn’t know how I’d got there. I’d just followed my feet without thinking.  Perhaps that’s what the fish do.   

No one was home. I had locked my door to keep the kid inside, which, as you know, is an unusual thing to do, so I made sure no one was around as I found the key to unlock it. Most rooms don’t even have keys anymore, they have been lost or forgotten about. I guess since nobody has any wealth or possessions that are not freely available to everyone else, it’s not necessary to lock things away. We earn our credits during givetime and can have whatever we want during metime. I was three days into a period of eighty-eight days of givetime. A refuse collector. I’d done it before and didn’t really mind the mess. It was kind of helpful in a way that no one’s life depended on. Since I was fourteen and it became mandatory, I have been in twenty-four periods of givetime. I’ve been a hairdresser, a carer for the elderly, a telephone operator for the national grid, a machine operative in a cider packing factory, a taxi driver, an electrician, an optician, an administrator for the distribution of accommodation. All sorts of stuff. Like everyone else. I just watch the instructional video on day one and then give time to it.  

But, anyway, I was lucky my new room still had its key, so that the kid couldn’t escape. I unlocked my door and opened it, with a big smile and friendly hello, all exaggerated like you do for kids. He was sitting in the far corner, didn’t look up or acknowledge my entrance or anything, which was not unusual.  

‘What you got there?’ I said as I crossed the room. He had unthreaded the carpet at its edge and was running his fingers along the separated fibres.  

‘Wow look at that.’  

I knelt beside him and he turned. He didn’t look at me but back towards the bed. I waved a hand before his eyes which stayed perfectly still, like he didn’t see the world at all.  In this slow, almost mechanical movement which he has, he picked up his arms and squeezed them around my neck. My heart whispered something to me, and I wrapped him up tightly, forgetting what amount of time passed, holding onto him. And that’s what people just don’t do anymore. Whether they don’t hear those whispers or they don’t have them, I don’t know. But I read about it once and it used to be a thing. It was called love.  

Later that evening, when I walked into the communal kitchen, I thought I saw a sort of black fuzz across the window and the table. The kind that appears when the signal is failing. Like something wasn’t quite connecting properly.  

Jake was stirring his tea in slow little movements, staring into the whirlpool with blank eyes.

‘Hey,’ I crossed the kitchen and opened the fridge.

‘Oh hey,’ he looked up at me from the dream in his cup, ‘how’s your givetime going?’ 

I knew that by asking me, what he really wanted was to tell me about his own givetime. He has no interest outside his own head. So, I gave him some mandatory response that allowed him to just keep talking.
‘Did I tell you I’m a doctor now? It’s pretty unbelievable. Like, last time I was a cashier! Can you believe that?’

He didn’t wait for my response. ‘So, I’m a gastro surgeon and yesterday I actually cut out a gut! Well, just a section of it, you know, the part that was infected. But can you imagine how that felt for me? Seeing all that mass so intense and so red and just cutting it. I was thinking as I was doing it “this is going to be really weird for me,” but I just did it anyway. Can you believe that!’

‘Is the person ok?’

His face was alive with his own sense of excitement, his projection of himself. He was watching a movie inside his head where he was the star, and he was thinking what a great movie it was.

‘I always back myself. Like, he was just this thing, just body parts, but you can’t really see the face, the eyes are all taped up and there’s a tube down the throat. It was just me and the gut.’ He held out his hands in front of him, to demonstrate where the gut was.

‘Did he survive? The guy?’

‘What? Oh, the guy. I have no idea.’ He removed the teabag from his cup and tossed it into the bin. 

‘I’m doing waste removal.’

‘What? Oh yeah, this is a big one for me. Like, I knew someone who was a doctor before, but until you actually see it- I feel like- it’s going to change me, you know, give me a greater perspective on the human body, like I’ve seen the inside of it.’

‘Oh yeah, no, I’m sure you’ll do a great job.’

‘What?’ He searched my face for something, like he was looking for a word in a wordsearch, lines of letters that made no sense to him, so he gave up and said, ‘bet you’re glad to be rid of that kid now you’re in givetime.’ 

‘Yeah. Well. He was OK.’  

‘Yeah, he was quiet at least, a bit odd though.’  

‘Yeah.’ I thought all the kids were getting quieter.  

‘Do you want to hook up? I’ve got to be in the hospital for six, but we could do an hour or so if you put some lipstick on?’ He was stupidly good looking.  

‘No thanks.’  

‘Ok, see you later.’ He left the kitchen with his tea and a little smirk on his face like he was really impressed with his tea making. I mean, I was glad he didn’t suspect I had kept the kid. I guess he didn’t have enough interest in it to suspect anything. But all I could think about was the guy with his gut cut away. Where was he now? This slab of a man was just a story for Jake to tell, he was nothing but fiction. Sometimes I think we are all just stories to each other. And that’s why I couldn’t give up the kid, even though you’re not supposed to keep them in givetime. Because I didn’t want him to be a story from the past, I wanted to have him with me and watch the things he was doing and make him laugh and stuff. I know it’s stupid.  

That night, the kid and I had eaten bread and butter and giggled at the tiny pictures we made from the crumbs. He was sleeping in that innocent way kids do, by my side on our single bed. His mouth was open, and I could hear his breath collapse on itself in the dim light of the night lamp. His ears stuck out and I stroked his hair behind them. I thought about how there was something sweet about his little ears, especially from behind. It made him look real. Like he was this real little person with sticky out ears or something. He didn’t look like Malcolm, not at all really. Malcolm had the kid when I met him, but I don’t know where he got him from.  

Whenever I thought about Malcolm I got a cold chill, like the air of a silent night was running right through me, and I was just a passage to nowhere. I wasn’t angry. How could I be? When he met Trisha, who was more beautiful and experienced than me, they’d asked if I wanted to stay on. Lots of people have multiple partners, using each to satisfy different aspects of themselves. Its healthy during metime to prioritise mental health through the achievement of pleasure. And coupling up was never about being exclusive. I wished I could have stayed. But when I saw her touching him, exciting him, it made me feel sick. My stomach would just roll over and over, a lost ball bounding down a never-ending hill. I didn’t even know why at first. I’d go on long walks with the kid along the promenade. Watching the cold ocean churn on the sand, holding the grains in its mass then throwing them away again. Birds dotted about like confetti thrown over it, in some sort of tiny celebration of the oceans continued ambiguity.  I’d think ‘why can’t I be normal?’. 

 One day, after a long walk where I’d tried to let the wind blow away my thoughts and carry them over the sea, me and the kid went back to our rooms, all red faced and fresh. We entered the lounge and were hit by the thick air of desire, heavy in the room like it had its own crushing presence. Trisha and Malcolm were curled together on the sofa, limbs mingling with one another.  

‘Join us.’ A long, reaching arm. Stomach-bile in my mouth.  

‘Erk. She’s still got that kid. I thought we were getting rid of it?’ Trisha stroked Malcolm’s mouth; his lips reached for her finger.  

‘We could.’ His eyebrows raised and he looked at me from inside his own anticipation of pleasure. I had a little picture in my head of when it was just me, Malcolm and the kid, and the kid was laughing, and I was smiling at Malcolm, and he seemed to know everything there was.  

‘I feel like we’ve had him long enough, let’s just enjoy each other a while.’ The long arm outstretched towards me again.  

‘I’ll take him.’ I couldn’t look them in the eyes. I left the room with the kid, put everything I owned in a backpack and never went back. As we left the house, I heard the shrieks of Trisha’s pleasure. And I knew. I knew I was different. He would never think about me other than as a story. But I thought about him as a place. A place inside me.  

I watched the kid sleeping and thought about Malcolm. Then I scrubbed the thought away as if it were a stain, which I knew would never come out. I kissed the kid on his sticky out ears and fought to fall asleep.  

The next morning the kid wanted to come with me. He kept grabbing onto my arms and trying to force himself out of the door beside me.  

‘I’ve told you, you can’t. You have to stay, or they will take you away forever and I’ll never be able to find you.’ He let out this wailing sound. I slipped and fell into it until his cry was all around me. The sound had a million colours, like a rainbow in water, pressing against my eyes. I looked hard into them and saw myself as a kid. Alone. I didn’t know what I wanted when I was a kid. But I knew I wanted something. Some unspeakable thing that had lost its place in language.  

I used to think that I had never been hugged. The thought bothered me. I’d never had someone’s arms around me to hold me in place, so sometimes I felt kind of ungrounded, you know, like one of those balloons filled with helium that just go up and up. I mean, people hugged. I saw them on the street. Rapid little motions that drew apart quickly, as if each other were a virus. Just mandatory, meaningless embraces. I used to think ‘why don’t people hold onto each other’, but I never asked anyone. Everyone seemed like they were happier than me, so I guessed it was my problem. 

Anyway, I kept falling into the kid’s cry until I saw Sean. He had coupled up with the woman who watched me for a while when I was a kid. He had a large head and this sort of nervous energy, like he was a balloon too. ‘You’re like me,’ he had told me. ‘You’ll never be happy because you care too much.’ I just looked at his huge head and the sorrow in his eyes. Eyes that looked real against a world that was painted. He told me he’d found out about stuff that no one talked about. He said people didn’t always prioritise themselves, people weren’t always disposable to each other. He said people felt things all the time, and at one point they were encouraged to, but it drove them crazy. So they needed more and more metime to deal with all the feelings. But then nothing got done and a lot of people got sick. So givetime became mandatory for society to carry on.  Kids became separated from their biological parents because everyone had to do givetime. And he said people used to need each other to look after their kids, but now they didn’t. Anyone could pick up a kid when it suited them and give them away when it didn’t. You could cut out a guy’s gut and it didn’t mean a thing to anyone. And you could have a partner and have another, and it was only about your own pleasure, your own journey. You could give away a kid. No one missed anyone. No one was lonely. Everyone’s world was only themselves; other people were just characters in their story. Years later, I came across the woman that watched me and asked if she still knew Sean.  

‘What? Oh no, he’s dead.’  

I cried for a week, and everyone thought there was something wrong with me and tried to give me tablets and stuff. I told them I was fine and decided never to think about Sean, or his lack of being. I put it all in a box and moved to new a room. But that box was there, inside the kid’s cry. 

When I fell out the other side of the cry, I bent down and took hold of the kid’s shoulders. I looked into his eyes. ‘You’re like me,’ I told him. He looked back at me for the briefest of moments before his eyes did this crazy flicking thing they do, like he’s in a fast car trying to focus on something out of the window and it keeps moving away. Maybe he was trying to make sense of the world, but it’s just a stream of colours with nothing to focus on. I tried to follow the flicker, but it moved too fast. ‘You are like me, aren’t you?’. He moved away from me and started to touch the wall at the end of the bed where the paint was peeling away. He picked at it, revealing the plaster underneath. I kissed him on the top of the head before leaving the room and locking the door. I’m sure I locked the door. 

Then, after twelve hours at work, I was walking alone along Tuna Street on my way home, and everything was quiet; the end of the world quiet. I looked at the rows of houses and tried to imagine the people inside. Beating hearts and inflating lungs, sending impulses down their spinal cords to cook their evening meals. Touching things. Looking at other people and processing what they saw. I wondered if red was red for everyone. Like, how would we know if when someone else saw red, they really saw blue. And all the things that were red in the world, in their head were blue, but that was normal. How could I ask them if their red was really blue? I could try to describe the colour, like its hot and intense. But to them blue would be hot and intense, because all the things that were red to me had always been blue to them. And all the things I think about red, they thought about blue.  

The quietness seemed to break, and I could hear my feet on the ground and my breath hitting the air, like I had just woken up. A door on the left-hand side of the street, about three doors ahead of me, opened.  I had this feeling of anticipation; some demon was going to come out of that door, and I would have to run.  

I looked up and down Tuna Street and I felt there were eyes watching me and watching the door. Some huge invisible eyes that were curious as to what was going to happen. They were pushing me. I listened and thought I could hear a ticking sound. A tick that’s trying to track time but has lost count. You know that phrase, ‘lose track of time’, I always wondered what that meant. Like time was a track you could fall off, and where would you be? I looked back at the open door and the tick became my heartbeat.  

 And then I thought about these curtains I used to have with flowers on them. And how sometimes, late at night, they didn’t look like flowers, they looked like heads. They were all just crammed together on stalks, fighting each other for space. And I used to think if I opened the curtains, there would be a face in the window too. Behind all these struggles in the curtains, it would just be there, like the other side of the veil. Lonely.  

But it wasn’t a demon who came out the door. Or a face behind the curtains. It was Malcolm. He was smiling and touching a woman that was not Trisha.  

‘Hiya,’ he flicked his eyebrows towards me as they walked past. He had no idea that I was thinking about red and blue and the end of the world and some curtains I used to have. I don’t think he even recognised me at all.  

I thought my feet were stuck to the ground, but I managed to free them by running. I just started running as if there was some imaginary finish line that I had to make it to. If I stayed where I was nothing would happen, and the story would never be over. And I thought I must get back to the kid and tell him what love is. And I didn’t care about my givetime, I would break the rules because I didn’t want to lock him away. I turned onto Capenlin Field and that’s when I saw all the police cars and people standing around.  

‘What’s happened?’ I asked someone in the crowd.  

‘A kid’s been run over, I think. They say no one was watching him.’ 

I wasn’t different after all. I had only thought about myself. And the ground started to fold up again, like the page. This time it was from behind me so I couldn’t see it, but I knew it would close and what would be.

‘The Council have given us notice. I tried, but… ’ She couldn’t continue, and anyway, she had nothing material to add. C remained exactly where he was, staring out of the metal framed window towards the sea. He didn’t ask – so what now, or how long have we got, or even why. He couldn’t ask. It would have been so much easier for her if they could have had a discussion or made a plan. But C no longer had the ability to synthesise speech. A bead of condensation settled on the aluminium ridge above his cheekbone, and she wiped it away before it had a chance to fall. 

Dusk settled slowly over the rusty garden furniture scattered across the lawns. A tractor crawled along their boundary, headlights on, hard-flailing the hedges and throwing shredded sycamore and hawthorn up into the air. It was early spring, too close to the nesting season really for winter cutting, and she wondered about the beetles and the ladybirds, and how much progress the swallows had made on their journey from Africa. 

 

She’d driven back from the Council office in town too fast, disorientated by patches of fog on the coast road and the sick emptiness that replaced the adrenalin of the meeting. She’d almost missed the iron gates and had to turn in sharply, her wheels spitting gravel. The building, an unlisted Edwardian villa, was unlit. It wore its history on its sleeve; block-built extensions, fire doors, and metal fire escapes revealed its progression from merchant-built family home, through wartime hospital, to old people’s home, to hospice, its most recent use. A flimsy lean-to ran the width of the building, still lined with wipe-down wing chairs from the days when patients nodded in the sunshine while their visitors enjoyed the view. As she pulled up in front of the building, she looked up, knowing that C would be waiting where she’d left him, in front of the window, lined up with his brothers. 

The Chairman had said, ‘Our agreement was for temporary use only. Until due diligence was done and dusted, and finance in place  – so next week, no later.’  She’d negotiated two weeks, exaggerating how much stuff there was to move. She was shown a 3D model of the new development. The words swirled: luxury apartments, penthouse suites, underground garaging, prime location, aspirational, lock-up-and-leave, swimming pool, restaurant, 24-hour concierge. She was given little time to speak. ‘Place gives me the creeps,’ the Chairman said, walking his fingers through the 3-D model’s high security gates and along the artist’s impression of a herringbone brick driveway.  ‘The sooner it’s brought back into proper use, the better.’ 

 

More water had beaded on C’s face, something he’d been prone to since she’d cleaned away the remains of his velvety skin with sugar soap to reveal the sculpted metal beneath. With the perished beige fabric and glue removed, his face held the soft silver glow of moonlight. Stripped of tell-tale skin, a hint of oxidisation beneath the small emergency solar array across his forehead was visible.

 

‘You mustn’t be scared,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll be with you, I promise. I’ll hold your hand. We’ll sing.’ She knew the reality of it; they couldn’t carry on like this. She knew that C was existing on stand-by power only. All the main batteries had been removed from the brothers when the hospice closed. But still, there was that final shutdown to face –  the recovery of wiring, the sorting, the stripping, the picking over of C’s frame. Those final, irreversible steps. He had served. They all had. They deserved more than being dismembered and dumped into a furnace without ceremony or thanks.

C had cared for her husband John in a way that she could not. When she had nothing but left-over love for the man he’d been, when she had nothing to offer but anger and frustration and guilt, C had sat with John. In the early days, he helped John identify birds and record them in has log. Later, C had read to him, picked up the things he dropped, found his glasses, held the beaker to his lips, patiently, gently, lovingly. When she visited, she often found them singing in the sunroom. C provided the soundtrack, identifying tunes based on John’s tentative humming. Simon and Garfunkel had been their favourite. She had been so relieved to be so excluded. 

For John’s final two days, she had sat on one side of the bed, while C sat on the other. She dozed. C stayed alert. C was able to mould his hand to fit exactly over John’s, cold steel against burning skin. She would love him for ever for that. 

 

Now C was lined up with his brothers, twenty-six of them in total, like tin soldiers, looking out towards the horizon. Would it have been easier if they hadn’t been given kind eyes that flashed with joy, or skin that was soft to the touch, or voices that could sing? When the hospice closed, she had moved in to care for them. Twenty-six figures standing in the window to bear witness, to stand as testament, to ask a question about debt and gratitude. None of them had enough power left to move themselves, or to respond to her commands. And now the vigil was over. The Council’s contractors would arrive in two weeks. 

In one of the outbuildings, she found an old sack trolley. There were steps and the terraces to negotiate, but she managed to wheel the first of the brothers out onto the lawn, his head resting over her shoulder. She positioned him, her practice piece, amongst the reeds by the choked-up pond.  Over the next days, she placed the rest of the brothers around the gardens amongst the nettles and bramble, the bracken and the gorse. She sat them in rusty metal chairs as if they were about to take tea, on a swing-seat, in the middle of what had been the croquet lawn. Playing its part in the installation, the weather veered between torrential rain and dismal, settled fog. She photographed everything. 

She left C until last, arranging and rearranging the brothers and documenting her process until she could put it off no longer. She wheeled him down the drive, her trolley sinking lopsidedly into the uneven gravel, then out of the gates and across to the cliff edge. She wedged him against an outcrop of lichen-covered granite, with tiny shiverings of last season’s thrift beside him and the full spread of the sea at his feet. 

She sat with him for two days, as he had sat with John at the end, her hand moulded over his, cold skin against cold metal. She hummed hymns from her childhood, and Simon and Garfunkel’s greatest hits, and recited shards of poems she’d learned by heart at school.  She let the mist and rain settle on him and run in rivulets down his face. She watched gannets dive-bombing, and cormorants slicing like arrows above the waves, and she wondered how much progress the swallows had made on their journey from Africa. 

The weather cleared and delivered a faint sunrise with enough energy for a final power down. While she slept, the emergency solar array across C’s forehead caught the cool sunlight, and he opened his mouth as if to sing.

‘They says I’ve lost my nerve,’ Mal told me that evening when I met him coming up the path from Treen. ‘“Gone soft he has,” I heard your old man tellin’ Jess Jewill, the one they’re callin’ gaffer now. 

‘Wouldn’t think to say a bad word about your Da but sneerin’, he were. And him as I thought were my partner in anythin’ after that time two year ago, you remember? When we brought them boats in after the big October storm.’ Mal paused, then added: ‘But how could you forget?’

Weren’t a cold day, wind had dropped briefly, but Mal was shrugged up in his jacket set for heading into a squall when I stopped to greet him. He didn’t look over keen to see me, though I was never sorry for the times we met. But he talked, and once he’d begun, I could see there was something in him winched up that tight he could scarcely hold it.

‘Soft, am I?’ He pushed his big face forward, almost into mine. I didn’t flinch. ‘Well, an’ maybe they’re right,’ he added, withdrawing again, dropping his voice like he’d had second thoughts about me.

So I asked Mal how come he’d heard them say that, was he sure? Knowing it weren’t like my Da to call no man a coward that’d ride a trawler in the big swells, nor one that ever had.

‘Was comin’ down-along the harbour front at Newlyn this mornin’ after checkin’ the gear on the boats. That’s when I came across ’em. Your father haulin’ the hawsers up off the trawl beam onto the walkway, talkin’ all the while to Jess stackin’ the creels beside him.

‘Reckon they didn’t hear me comin’. The wind took their words like scraps of bait chewed off a line an’ spat ’em out at me in gobbets. “Weren’t none of his what got injured, that night, were it?” they says.’

Mal turned and looked out to the headland where the big slabs of granite are shuffled up right on the edge of balance, then on out over the swollen Atlantic, dull as a pewter pot in the fading light. It was like he found it hard to keep his gaze on me while he was talking.

I tried to stop him. I started to say it couldn’t be like that, it was Mal pulled me out of the water. Da know’d it weren’t about having no bottle; must be some other feller, or something else. No-one’d hold it against him for what happened, or for not going back in the sea. 

Don’t know if he heard me proper, with the wind against me. He was well ahead on the path when he looked back, standing above the cliff where the steps go down to the beach. Mal cut them steps himself, must be ten, twelve year back when I was a child. 

‘I still knows my way down Pedn back’ards an’ in the dark,’ he called out. ‘Even in the mud an’ the weather.’ The wind brought his words to me as if he was still by my side. His eyes were narrowed in the breeze, his face set broad. I thought he was smiling, then, before he walked off where I couldn’t follow.

***

I know my way down that cliff, too – the way Mal climbed down the vounder that evening to the beach. Know every footstep between the sharp boulders and the hebe scrub, on that path so narrow at places that one trip on a root could send you pitching over the cliff edge to the rocks below. And I know how at night, after a fair day, you can feel the heat of the earth coming up like the cliff’s a living body breathing quietly under you in the dark. 

We used to go down there before dawn at low tide to look for jetsam – anything really – that might have got stranded on the shore between the headlands, or in the lagoon between the sandbar and the beach.

Don’t know what Mal was heading down there for that evening, though. Maybe nothing in particular. Maybe same as we used to. Or maybe because it’s a good place to walk off your trouble if you can. Wind whips it out of you with salty slaps if you set your face to the ocean. Even just to see the sea glitter under the smallest sliver of moon – the way it burnishes the water in a streak like a polished blade –will turn your spirits. That’s how I try to remember it.

I like to think that’d be how it was for Mal, too. On the way down the cliff he’d have stopped to look out over the bay to the taut curve of the horizon: a thin, bright line where the sun left its dying trail. He’d have picked his way down through the furze and the glossy leaves of the hebe, with the green and cobalt colours bleaching out to greys in the half-light. And the sound of the sea would have washed out his sour spirits, filling him with its energy. 

And I can’t help thinking about what must’ve happened next, even though I don’t want to. Don’t know when he’d have seen the dark shape in the water, cliff’s too high to see it from the top, that’s for sure. Maybe twenty yards from the sand, and him knowing it’d be too late to go back for help by then. He’d have gone the last scramble down the rocks, feet slipping out of the footholds in his speed, in the spray and the oncoming dark, and jumped down onto the small patch of sand. 

Tide was rising so it would’ve been coming up the beach fast, swallowing the sandbar in the bay, out where the boat was. Currents are wicked right then, spinning off the edges of the bar in all directions; boat could have been pulled out any ways, or sent smashing into the rocks. But still shallow enough for a grown man to wade out there, if you were wise to stay clear of the fast water.

And Mal would’ve known every minute counted. He knew the currents and the risk – must’ve known – and still he waded out there. Found the boy and the girl bundled up together, both nigh on drownded and washed up on the spit of sand, waves tugging at their legs like they was only a bit o’ weed. I can just hear the way the lad might have been saying, hoarse-like from the water: ‘Take the child, take her first, Mister, go on.’ 

Can’t think too much about what must’ve gone through Mal’s mind that minute he walked into the sea, and him not set foot in water this two-and-a-half year gone. Da said that time, back then, he saw Mal tip up his head as he went through the waves and his mouth was wide open like he was roaring at the sea. But no sound came out that Da could hear, and if there was any it was slammed back down Mal’s throat, stifled by the wind on the water. 

So I can just hear the boy calling out to him as he hesitated, ‘Mister, what you doin’? Take hold of the child and I can help myself then.’ And the girl close to finished, cold and clammy in his hands. Their boat was smashed up on the rocks, splintered at the bow when it hit the cliff where land spits out stone into the water, roughing it up into foam. Little skiff it were, blue-painted. Kids like that, they should never have been out in such weather.

Mal would’ve shipped the girl over his shoulder, just a bundle of clothes in his big hands. Taken her up to the rocks out of the surge, leaving the boy marooned on the sandbar as the tide came in. Waves would’ve been cutting off the path back up the rocks, then sucking out again in a deep gurgle, churning the tiny shells and stones that shred your skin like a grater when the sea drags the sand over you. And the currents were crashing the waves across the cove so they boiled round the base of the rock.

He came back in the water for a second time, did Mal, his fists clenched, his eyes like a ranting preacher all hellfire and damnation, near sparks flying from him, cutting his big body through the waves. He got to the boy, and he took him by the collar and began to drag and drag, all the time staring into his eyes like a savage beast, dragging him through the plunging water – just like he did with me. Losing his footing, going under in the boil and surge of the breakers and coming up again spitting like a whale. 

They were both near done for, as I see it, dragging each other. Each of them trying to get a handhold on a steady bit o’ rock to pull on where the waves would boost them upward and out. And Mal got his hand in a crevice and began to haul himself up, still grasping the boy’s jacket, and pulling him after. The boy had his body against the rock, waves washing over his head by now, but his feet on solid granite under water, buffeted against the cliff so he could scarce breathe. Mal was there beside him, gripping the same jut of stone. The boy let go of Mal and Mal let go of the boy so they could pull themselves up with both hands safely. 

Faced into the cliff, the boy would’ve just heard the crash of waves ringing in his ears. Deafening it would’ve been – I know, I’ve been there – the booming sound echoing from rock wall to rock wall and into the caves and crevasses like the deep groan of a ruined god. Wouldn’t have heard Mal’s cry in the wind and water. Wouldn’t have seen him slipping back behind him, swept off his feet by the rip. Wouldn’t have felt the empty space in the air beside him. Would’ve had his eyes on the girl, on the cliff, on the gulls wheeling above, on the path to safety. Would’ve thought they’d made it just in time.

But when he did look back – before he reached the child sprawled on the couch-grass whipped from side to side, leaves like tiny daggers, and the sea pinks swept flat and dancing up in every blast of the storm – when he did look back, Mal wasn’t there. 

***

They found the girl stiff and cold on the hillside next morning, her fingernails dug deep into the sandy soil and the grasses, she’d tried so hard to cling on to her life. They found the boy on a ledge halfway down the cliff, his head smashed, where he must have lost his footing trying to climb the rocks in the dark to get help. They found the boat, or leastways, parts of the splintered hull and the snapped oars, snagged on rocks in the lee of the cliff. They didn’t find Mal for days, not there neither, not till his body had floated out and back on the tides that washed him up down Newlyn way. He was bloated and blackened with his eyes wide open – though the fishes had one of them – and a triumphant terrible grin on his face. 

I pause, often, on the brow of the cliff. I stop, and look down at that path – the one Mal took, where I couldn’t follow to give him a hand. I remember how, two years before, it was Mal who pulled me out of the water, all broken, and carried me home. I gaze out to sea where his body had floated, the spring clouds reflected as grave green patches on calm grey water. Then I turn my chair and wheel myself away.

Vanishing Point  

After your father ran off with his student and your mum ended herself as Plath had, I called at your flat, marshalled clothes onto you and headed to places I’d slayed my own grief. God’s own landscapes, I’d heard them called, terrain the poets and lovers had colonised. Look, I said, what torment can sustain itself in the presence of this? But you just stood there, a skeleton languishing in its own skin. Beauty, I saw, would become your tormentor, so I lured you into the city’s underbelly, hinterlands where the marginalised dwelt. We loitered with junkies, the homeless, the sick and the relegated. These glimpses of squalor, however, acted not as cautionary tales, but as lures, as a potential blueprint for you. 

I gave up the tenancy on my apartment and moved my belongings into yours, the neighbour who’d smiled so effusively before, now issuing atrophying glares on realising we were a couple of queers. After cradling your body for an entire afternoon, I phoned in sick for you, told your boss you were extremely infectious, lest she send any scouts snooping around. I took control of your finances and within a week you became a marionette, incapable of autonomy, content to relinquish all of life’s decisions.  

I forked food into you, watched as you let it break down in your mouth before mustering a swallow. Sometimes I’d go heavy on salt or chilli, just to illicit a reaction, but you remained impassive, the grief manifest in your body as well as your mind now. I withheld food, sometimes for the whole day, waiting for some corporeal entreaty that never came. I bathed you, raising and lowering limbs in twice-weekly ablutions, tilting your head back to keep the shampoo from your eyes. I read to you at bedtime, texts I thought might undermine your descent, stories to rouse and tantalise.  

One Tuesday I drove us through the car wash on acid, our faces pressed to the windows of my Peugeot as mosaics of suds dissolved our egos. My fear that psychedelics could spiral you into a maze of psychosis proved unfounded, and although it never lasted, it was in these times I witnessed flickers of you returning.  

I wrote to your father, attempting a reconciliation I didn’t think he deserved. He replied with two salvos: 1) that he always suspected you were a lesbian; 2) there would be nothing left in his estate for you. 

I first noticed the colour leaching from you after we swam in the sea; not that you moved beyond the swell raising and lowering your body like a buoy. Whereas the blood returned to my own skin on the shore, yours retained its sallowness until I sat you by the radiator at home. I apologised for not feeding you properly, ordered the most vibrant food I could find, until the interior of the fridge resembled a rainbow. But each day you appeared more and more like a grainy photograph, an approximation of yourself. Washing you one night I swear I could see the surface of the bath through you.  

This has to stop! I yelled with all the volume I could assemble, and the notes of terror or love in my voice must have broken through, as you looked at me for the first time in a week and nodded. 

Lozenge 

Foraging for morels in the woods last week he’d come across a wild boar piglet, the wretched thing perhaps four or five days old, its umbilical cord still attached. He assumed the mother had been shot by a hunter, sensed the animal was hours from death. He looked around for a hunk of wood, something with length so he could distance himself a little from the act. In the end he realised he had neither the mettle to remove its misery, nor the indifference to abandon it. And so he had carried it down to the house, this honey- and caramel-striped lozenge, cradling it as one would a baby, the creature with no strength to protest. Inside he found an old crate, in which he lay some blankets and a bowl of water. He attached a cable-tie to the umbilical cord and cut just below it.  

He expected to find it dead the following morning, but there was life still there, and so he took the laptop outside and searched for what to do next. A website that rescued young boars listed a milk formula used for lambs and young goats, so he drove to the agricultural store, where he also bought a feeding bottle. An hour later he was sitting in the crate as the animal suckled frantically, one bottle then another, and he wondered how a sow’s nipples could withstand such trauma.  

He put a tray with some gravel in one corner and got on with the day’s tasks. By lunchtime the animal had perked up and seemed calm in his presence, and a day later he cut a hole in the crate so it could come and go, which it did, the clip of its trotters like dainty heels on the flagstones as it shadowed him. To his surprise it took to using the litter tray. The more he hand-fed the animal, the more he realised returning it to the wild would be unfeasible, the absence of fear for humans, for those who would aim a rifle at it. He vowed to build a pen in the field, somewhere hidden from the road as it was illegal to keep a wild creature as a pet. 

When the children returned from far-flung universities for the summer, the creature took to following them around the property, grafting itself to the family. He watched as they tried teaching it to fetch a ball, gave up protesting when they fed it from the table. He’d tell them about his diagnosis another time, before they left for their mother’s, or when they came for Christmas. For now it seemed right only to let the laughter reside. 

Nouk runs. Her calves pull tight and her trainers fill up. This is not the way it’s meant to feel, she thinks as her feet sink deeper into the pavement. And yet this is how it always is now. 

Four weeks, six days have gone by since the storm hit. Its impact is still being felt. Mounds of sand stretch across Swanpool Road. It drifts and clings. The path around the lake is flooded because sand has clogged the drains. The banks are suffocated and the emptiness it creates bows under its own weight. No ducks flapping. No seagulls fighting over breadcrumbs left for swans by walkers. No moorhens cackling or water rats shooting into the arching roots that a month ago freely tiptoed across the water’s edge. 

She cranks her music louder and tries to pick up pace, but the sand saps her energy. As the road takes her closer to the sea, the wind throws up clouds of sand. It stings her skin, makes her eyes itch. With every breath, a gritty layer coats her teeth. She sweeps her tongue around her mouth trying to force it out. It crunches and grinds. She has to stop to spit. By the time she reaches the beach, her legs buckle and her rib cage can’t keep up. She bends double and pushes her fists into her waist. Her hot breath is whipped away into the brackish air. 

Back at the house all she can see is sand. When she shuts her eyes, holds a glass under the tap, listens to the water running, it’s there. Stubborn mountains claiming everything from the café terrace to the mini golf course to the new builds that skirt the back of the lake. She pictures the plants beneath it, bare branches not yet woken up by spring, lost buds dead on the stem. All snuffed out by the choking sand.

‘Jesus Christ Nouk, you’re so bleak.’

Jonathan’s frying bacon. He’s got the heat too low. The sizzle is pathetic. 

‘But isn’t it weird though? How no one’s doing anything?’

‘Not really. What does it matter? It’s just sand.’

‘They haven’t even tried to move it.’ Nouk sips her water and lifts herself up onto the counter. She puts her phone down, Gordon Lightfoot still tinny in her earbuds.

‘How can you run to that?’ he says, shaking his head.

She shrugs and flicks it off. 

 ‘You’re reading too much into it, anyway,’ he prods the rashers in the pan. ‘It’ll sort itself out eventually. Two or three bits?’

She doesn’t answer, watches as he flips the bacon over. It slithers off his spatula with a flaccid wriggle.

‘This bloody hob.’

‘Have you turned it right up?’

‘I know how to fry bacon, Nouk. Get the ketchup, would you?’

He pokes the rashers with a finger and wipes it on his chest. He’s still wearing the T-shirt he slept in. His boxers droop around his legs. Nouk taps her socked foot against the cupboard. Under her fingernails, grains have gathered. She picks up a fork and runs a tine along each of them in turn, hooking out the sand and letting it fall onto the side. The pile builds, taking her mind back to the beach. 

The storm has reshaped the tideline. Seaweed sits belligerent in fly-ridden heaps, reef newly exposed where the sand has been dragged away. She reaches out to touch the fresh rock, slides her fingers past the razor-like edges and finds purchase between the strata. Her breath rises and falls with the waves. Running the same route back down the sand road, her lungs thicken. 

Jonathan clears his throat sharply, returning her to the kitchen’s steamed up windows, the barely spitting pan. He wraps a tea towel around its handle and carries it to the table, where white bread lies buttered. He shakes the pan so some of the bacon stutters onto the thickly cut slices, then squeezes out ketchup in a wheezing gust. ‘Help yourself,’ he shouts back through to her as he walks into the lounge.

She used to love their weekend mornings. The laziness of not unfolding the day until the afternoon. Lying with her head in Jonathan’s lap, both still in their pyjamas, both smelling a little of each other and neither minding. The coffee endlessly brewing, the grease stains on the corners of the paper, his fingers idly curling through her hair. Now he makes bacon sandwiches she can’t bring herself to eat. The thought clags and sticks to the roof of her mouth. She wants to say something. To explain why she’s running so much or why the sand bothers her or why it would be better if he could just get dressed, rather than loafing around in his boxers pushing ten o’clock in the morning. She wants to tell him why she listens to Gordon Lightfoot. Or Nick Drake. How you can hear them hurting in every word and what better thing is there to run from than that? But she knows he’ll just roll his eyes again and maybe call her ‘silly girl’ then talk about putting dishwasher salt on the shopping list, or that he needs to swing by the office later, okay? He’ll pull her to him and she’ll smell his sour sleep smell and taste the sticky, sweet grease and ketchup on his breath. She picks up her trainers and goes upstairs. 

~

They’re in the car working around the sequence of roundabouts that takes traffic out of town and onto the ring road. Nouk winds down the window. The cold air feels good. Jonathan mimes a shiver, presses the button in his door handle and winds her window back up. 

The homecoming lunch had been in their calendar for nearly a month. Nouk forgot about it until Wednesday when her mother phoned to remind her.

‘Alice is going to be woozy of course,’ she’d said, her voice lifting to overpower the noisy churn of a mixer. Nouk pictured her, phone squeezed between ear and her shoulder, cake batter whipping in the bowl. ‘It’s not lunchtime for her body. I’m just saying you’ll need to take care around her, that’s all.’ 

‘Jetlag isn’t a disease, Mum. She can suck it up,’ Nouk said back.

‘I hope you’re not going to be in one of your moods, Anoushka,’ her mother sighed. ‘Please don’t ruin it for everyone.’ Then she was silent. Then she hung up.

Nouk knows her sister won’t be woozy and won’t need anyone taking care around her. Instead she’ll be puffed up and proud, telling stories about her internship buddies at the gallery in Upper East Side. How one time after work they sat on bleachers in Sheep’s Meadow eating warm pretzels while they watched a rom-com being shot. How after that they hit a dive bar in Hell’s Kitchen where she got in on a fake ID and ordered a cocktail called the Lemon Drop that popped in her mouth as she drank. Nouk has heard the stories a hundred times already, pulling on her pyjamas and nodding and smiling while Alice slicked on mascara in the webcam, drooling at the prospect of eggs-over-easy and biscuits at Bubby’s – Tribeca not Highline – where she was meeting ‘the gang’ for a late brunch.

They pick up speed on the main road as it carries them into open countryside. Jonathan taps his fingers on the wheel, switches presets on the radio, bites the edge of his thumb. She couldn’t stop him coming. She tried. The more she protested that she was fine to go alone, the more he’d rubbed his hands on her arms as if warming her up after a cold swim, lunging down so he could look under his eyebrows at her. ‘I’ll be there,’ he said in a hushed, low voice. ‘I’ll be there.’ And now he’s winding up her window and turning the radio from Four to Two because it’s hard to get into the afternoon plays and Jeremy Vine is pretty funny, actually.

Nouk sits on her hands and clenches her thighs together. She concentrates on what’s happening outside the window, searching for the edge of town, where suburbia bleeds out into countryside and the world goes fully wild again. The last of the roofs rushes past the window. The lanes drop from three to two, to one, concrete giving way to granite, bracken. Occasionally they pass a ruined engine house, collapsing walls and chimneys stark against the sky. She winds the window down again and breathes deeply. Jonathan sighs.

‘What?’ Nouk asks, though she doesn’t want to know.

‘Nothing I suppose.’ He indicates, sighs again, turns the wheel, checks the mirror, sighs louder.

‘You didn’t have to come,’ she says.

‘It’s not that.’

‘Then what?’ 

He makes a croaking noise in the back of his throat, like the words can’t find the shape to take. ‘I don’t know why we’re even going,’ he mutters eventually.

‘They’re my family.’

‘All the more reason not to go. You don’t even like them – so why waste your weekend? Just tell them the truth, tell them you’d rather not spend your Sunday with them.’

‘Because that’s what you’d do?’

‘My family is not your family.’ He clicks his tongue against his teeth, reaches over to squeeze her thigh. ‘Everyone deserves the truth, Nouk.’ 

He says it like he’s offering her the advice she’s been seeking, a soft lilt to his words. 

She punches her consonants back at him, staccato. ‘Do you deserve the truth then?’

‘What do you mean?’

Across the bay, gulls crowd the back of a fishing trawler, white flecks against a skillet sky. In the distance, strands of darkness fall from the clouds to the sea, sweeping in fast. The boat doesn’t stand a chance. He’s waiting for Nouk to speak. She stares at the horizon. She knows that to make the lunch bearable she should take it back, but she can’t because she has nothing to give him in its place.

A minute, later hail attacks. Golf ball sized chunks pummel the bonnet and roof, echoing through the hollow shell of the car.

‘Bloody brilliant,’ Jonathan shouts, as they pull up outside the house. He flips down the mirror and furiously tousles his hair. Nouk turns away from him, unclicks her seatbelt and leans her forehead against the window. She feels the vibrations of the downpour ripple through her as her breath covers then fades away from the glass.

‘It is brilliant,’ she says into the thundering hail, so only the storm can hear her. 

~

Nouk’s father smiles as he strokes her mother’s arm. Long slow brushes back and forth. He’s listening to Alice talk, absorbing it all to retell at their next dinner party, how his youngest came good and found herself in New York. He joins in occasionally too, recollecting his own youth and the times they had, every now and then throwing a conspiratorial grin towards his wife. 

‘–it’s so full of life, don’t you think?’ Alice says about a block sale she stumbled on in Caroll Gardens after visiting the soda fountain where they invented egg cream. She’s wearing a charm bracelet she picked up there for a dollar. It jangles as she talks.

‘You should have been there in the ‘90s, Ali’ Nouk’s father replies. ‘Now that was living on the wild side!’

In the past, Nouk and Jonathan might have joked about her father after a lunch like this. How he was a bit pathetic, trying to impress everyone. How the only time he went to New York was with the family and they all stayed with his brother near Larchmont and only drove into the city twice. They might have done impressions of him, making up increasingly ludicrous places and events he claimed to be a part of. Nouk might have ended up burying her face in the bedsheets to smother out the hilarity of it, noticing Jonathan’s touch getting more urgent as he massaged her side, his face suddenly serious and purposeful. She looks at Jonathan forking potatoes into his mouth, nodding and smiling at her father, at Alice. It’s like they’re in a different world now.

Alice is talking about the rom-com in Central Park again. Nouk’s father is still brushing her mother’s forearm, as if he’s charging a balloon up for a static shock. Nouk’s mother half smiles through tight lips, her eyes locked on the cutlery neatly pushed together on her plate. She doesn’t lift his hand away, or stroke his arm back, or cup her fingers over his in affection. There’s no indication she can feel it at all. 

Nouk thinks back to the car and Jonathan’s broken face when she jabbed her question at him. Each little word daring him to respond, ready to bite back if he did, so they could get it all out in the open. Although she knew he wouldn’t. She trusted in it. A safety net, baggy and worn, but with just enough tension left in it to hold. He talks about telling the truth like it’s so simple to untangle, she thinks. Like anyone can. That’s when she feels it. In the middle of one of her father’s anecdotes about a kid spitting off the Empire State Building. Jonathan’s hand, on her arm. Stroke. Stroke. Stroke. 

~

Nouk clocks off work at midnight. She weaves a path between the drunks outside the kebab shop. Someone shouts something leery at her, so she cuts down a snicket onto the waterfront, where it’s quieter. The sky is clear after another day of heavy rain and the quayside is slick with milk-white light. When she reaches the pier, she sits, taking a breather before climbing the steep high street home. Reflections on the water make the world dance. Moored boats sway, the wind spinning their masts into a song of wire against metal. With no trawlers to chase, the gulls wheel above the bins, swoop to yank out wrappers and hiss over whatever they find. 

She pulls her coat tight around her, thinks about her shift. About the pint she pulled for the lecturer whose name she doesn’t know but whose face she recognises. He drinks there a lot. Often, he smiles at her. Tonight he said something funny and she laughed. He laughed too. It made her skin prickle. It’s prickling again now and she focuses on it, lets it warm her against the chill of the midnight air. She slouches down on the bench, closes her eyes and embraces the glimmer of possibility – how a look, a movement, could fill her so entirely for a moment, making everything else slide away. And it’s not about something happening. It’s not about him, or the way his hand brushed the edge of hers as she passed him his pint. The curiosity of what if and the excitement it carries would quickly die if it went any further, replaced by guilt and confusion and the crippling normality of it all. It’s just the potential she finds herself clinging to, more powerful than reality and more hopeful than truth. It pops like she imagines a Lemon Drop might. It makes her feel alive. 

Her teeth chatter. There’s a pressure in her chest pushing the air from her body. Behind her closed eyelids she sees the moon blazing.

Nouk wakes just before six, frozen. The sun is beginning to turn everything grey. She pulls her collar up and ducks her mouth inside her coat to warm her body with her breath. Two seagulls peck at a crisp packet in front of her. Across the estuary, more gulls murmur skyward as boats silently ghost their way out to sea. 

Jonathan will want an explanation. To know where she was and why she didn’t call. She could pretend she was with someone. That all this time her distraction, her spikiness has been because she is cheating on him. He would nod, tight-lipped as he turned the last few weeks over, seeing how her behaviour slotted neatly into that reality. He would look hurt and sad and lost, but wouldn’t feel the need to say sorry, or that he’ll try harder. They wouldn’t have to hold hands or talk in circles and fail to find a way out. A simple lie, over a complicated truth. It would make things much easier, for both of them.

Swanpool Lake is in the opposite direction to home. By the time Nouk gets there the morning is bright and full. Her cheeks warm in the light. There’s no wind and where the road curves along the front she can see lazy waves licking the shore. She sits on the storm drain that joins the lake to the sea and watches the fresh water surge down the grill, through salty rocks then into the open ocean. She pictures the fish beneath the surface, swimming frantically against the suck and pull, attempting to stay where they are but up against forces far more powerful. Through the rusty grate, down the pipe, spat into the sea – what happens next? Do they celebrate the surprise of their new found freedom, a whole ocean to explore? Or do the drown in the salt water because it’s too much for their fresh water gills to take? 

Either side of the drain, the displaced storm sand rears up in heaps, covering what used to be nettles, blackberry bushes, hawthorn and birch. She digs her fingers in deep, feels the wet, dense resistance of the sand under her nails. Her hands linger for a moment in the cool, still smother of it, before she begins to dig. 

She works slowly at first then faster, harder, scooping great handfuls away and piling it at her feet. The deeper she burrows, the more difficult the sand is to move. Compacted, wet, resistant. She speeds up, gouges with her nails, leans over, reaches in. Something in her demands it, compels her to get to the bottom, to get rid. The hole she makes gapes, a dark mouth swallowing her body with every pull and claw. Her shoulders ache with the effort. Sweat beads up along her hairline, cold kisses on the back of her neck. 

Suddenly, it’s there. A survivor. The tiniest tip of a pencil-thin branch sticks out where she’s digging, then another, then another. She holds her breath, her fervour tempered by the tree’s delicacy, its dependence on what she does next. She teases her fingers under the branches to work them loose, cups her hands around each one like they are flame in a breeze, protecting them from the crumbling walls of the hole as she gently lifts and goads more of the tree free. As soon as they’re released, the branches spring up, bendy new green against the blue sky. Life, Nouk thinks. Even under the weight of all that. Even in the darkness and uncertainty, not knowing if it would ever break through. Life.

She falls back onto the sand and wipes the sweat from her forehead in a gritty sweep. The tree stands proud in the daylight. Above her, clouds drift. She hears shingle clack as the tide drags over the shore. The call of gulls. Birdsong. There’s the fast thump of a dog’s feet pounding across the beach after a ball. An early, eager family playing by the water. Nouk gets up, dusts the sand off her hands and turns towards the road that leads back home. On the very edge of her vision, the little tree dances in the breeze.

My leg never healed right after it broke in a tackle, so my friends didn’t call me much during the summer when there was sports going on somewhere. But Ricky was always calling every number he’d ever gotten at school to see if anyone wanted to go “on the water,” whatever that meant. After I’d been inside alone for a couple weeks, I finally said yes one day when the sun flooded down, maybe the first kid from our school to ever do that, to say yes to him.

Before I could cancel, his uncle’s pickup was rumbling smoke in front of my house. Ricky leapt from the cab to meet me and kept reaching for my arm like I was an old lady, but I shook him off. I wasn’t crippled, and he was the skinniest kid in our year so what help would he really be anyway. I sat crooked in the middle of the bench seat with my bad leg pressing up against Ricky’s, the stick-shift hitting my other knee every second gear, and empties rattling against my foot when we took a corner.

I wished I never answered the phone.

Ricky was freckled but the freckles were small and not defined. We used to joke he was just always dirty—when he wasn’t around to hear.

He must have noticed that his uncle’s cigarette smoke was stinging my eyes because he cranked down the window, arm pumping like a piston.

As we left paved roads behind, long thin pines rose up beside us, and he started pointing things out through ’em. But I never saw anything and I couldn’t catch his words over the wind whipping through the yawning window. The truck peeled off down a series of narrowing dirt paths.

I watched most of the drive in the rear view mirror. Somewhere back there, my friends were playing football.

His uncle left us on a trail and drove away, dust curling up behind him. Ricky’s skin already had a sheen, and he wiped his forehead with the neck of his shirt that had the sleeves ripped off. He grabbed me by the hand and pulled me down toward the water that was glinting diamond sunlight through the trees.

“What do you think?” he asked. “Don’t have the money to build yet, but this is where the cabin will be.” We stood in an empty lot with downed tree trunks dragged into a ring around a pile of half burned logs and charred cans poking out from the ash.

“He coming back, or?” I asked.

Ricky squinted and tucked his arms in tight against his narrow rib cage. “Come on,” he said and slumped down to the reedy, swampy shore, green film floating.

I limped down behind him. He whipped a crinkling blue tarp off a dented aluminum boat, just bigger than a bathtub.

I looked back to the trail. There wasn’t anybody around. His uncle’s dust had settled on the road, the engine noise had faded to nothing. All I heard was Ricky’s shallow nervous breathing and the little waves lapping at the shore.

“How do you usually fish?” he asked.

“Normal way,” I lied, never having done it at all.

“I’ve just got these cheap spincasters from the hardware store, but they’re good. Good rods. Good for the trout up here, at least.”

He pushed the boat off the pebble beach into the water and stood behind it, ankle deep, waiting for me, his expression wavering. I told myself it’d only be an afternoon. He held it steady while I climbed on. I’d barely stepped in when my leg started shifting under me and I felt myself pitching back. But Ricky’s hand wrapped around my arm, thin with no give, like wire, and he stopped me falling.

The boat was dented all over and the mesh benches that stretched across it had holes wearing through.

He shooed me to the front and ripped the cord a few times on the outboard. The engine coughed alive and then sputtered like it was to die again, but it carried us in fits and starts away from the shore, two rods sticking over the edge, cigarette butts rolling across the bottom. I wanted off, to throw myself into the murky water just there where it was still shallow and shuffle back to shore so I wasn’t stuck way out on the lake when the engine gave up the ghost.

I took a deep breath and readied myself against the edge of the boat to drop off it. The boat limped a bit to one side under my shifting weight and Ricky tutted and corrected for it. But then the engine smoothed out and suddenly we were going. Really moving. Ricky’s face turned calm, janky teeth peeking out through a slow smile. The sun stuck gold to his skin and instead of looking dirty out there, he shone.

I took my hand off the side like that and turned to face forward as the boat bounced over the lake top. The wind washed across my face, and I started to remember how free I’d felt, back when I could run.

There was nothing but sea all the way from here to America. The water just kept going and going, aggressive in its vastness. She watched the waves breaking on the shoreline. Even the small ones curled like snarling lips. One or two children still jumped and screamed happily in the shallows. Their parents were nearby and watching. She used to come here as a child too, after school or at the weekends after Dad had seen the races. They weren’t allowed in the sea though. The day would always end with Mum screaming at her or at her brother and the walk home was made longer by the stinging shape of Dad’s hand on their thighs.

Two swimmers were out in it. They bobbed around near the buoys easy as bath toys. She wished she had learned. Silly, really, to live her whole life by the sea and not be able to swim. The water was far out – the tide low – now though. She didn’t need to worry about it for a while.

 It was getting late. The beach was clear of windbreaks and deckchairs and pop-up tents, but a few blankets still held cuddling couples or families with fish and chips. Most people had already climbed the steps where exhausted-looking wetsuits hung on the railings and children had their feet rubbed raw as parents towelled the sand off. At the foot of the steps, flip-flops and plastic buckets full of mussel shells, razor clams and seaweed waited to be forgotten. A breeze ruffled the umbrellas on the picnic tables in front of the takeaway.

‘God provides the wind,’ her mother always said. ‘But man must raise the sail.’ Julie never understood what she was going on about. Her mum never let them in the sea but then kept banging on about sails.

Julie looked at the clock. She was behind schedule. She was usually mopping by now. She was late. Always lost in daydreams, her mother would say. The wooden boards advertising ice-creams, deckchairs and pasties had to be collected from the path along the top of the beach. The boards were too big for her to carry really and bashed her legs as she walked with them, but she’d gotten used to it now, bruises flowering perpetually but painlessly on her shins. She folded down the umbrellas from the picnic benches then leant up inside the door ready to go back out first thing in the morning. 

‘Alright, Jules?’

She turned to see Batesy stumble in through the side door knocking over a stack of empty boxes.

‘Blimey, is it that time already? Everything’s to pot today.’

‘Got my burger, Jules?’

‘Not yet. I’ll have to cook it.’

She gestured at where his shoes had scattered sand across the floor. ‘Bloody hell, Batesy. I’ll have to clean all that up.’

He giggled and looked around the kitchen as though trying to focus in on her. His eyes were wide and bloodshot.

‘It’s alright, Jules. I ain’t bothered. You don’t need to clean up just for me. Can I have a burger? Cheeseburger, please. I’m starving.’

‘Alright. Alright. I’m doing it.’

He giggled again. ‘I went down The Ferrets last night.’

‘I know I was there.’

‘Right, course. Good, weren’t it?’

She waited to see if he was being tender or ironic, but there was neither in his eyes. It was just said out of habit.

‘Same as every night,’ she said. ‘Surprised you can remember any of it, the state you were in.’

‘That’s how I know it was good. I was completely wasted.’

She leant on the counter, the sweet words and promises of last night lost once again in a fog of weed and hangovers.

‘Can I have a burger, Jules?’

‘I’m cooking it now. Christ, that’s three times you’ve asked me.’

Julie flipped the burger and balanced salad in a bun. Batesy picked up the serrated knife and started carving nicks out of the chopping board.

‘Leave that alone. I’ll get in trouble for that. I’m fed up with paying for your messes.’

‘Sorry, Jules. You’ll come down The Ferrets tonight, won’t you?’

‘I expect so,’ she said coquettishly like the women on TV did. ‘We’ll have to see.’ She couldn’t help smiling at the idea that they might miss her if she wasn’t there.

‘It’s bloody hot in here, Jules. I’m spinning out because of it. What the fuck are all them knives for?’

‘Chopping up vegetables and that.’

‘Right, yeah. Could you cook me a burger please, Jules?’

‘Alright. Bloody hell. Repeating all the time. You’re off your face, you are. Here, have it.’

‘Thanks. You’re an angel.’ He winked at her, and she felt her cheeks burn. ‘See you in the Ferrets tonight: usual time.’

Julie checked her watch – she was behind again – then pulled down the shutters and set the coffee machine to run through its cleaning cycle. Every day, she checked the dates of the milk and wrote Roger a list of what needed to be ordered. He ordered it when he came down to collect the takings early in the morning. Julie cashed up the till. She’d definitely done it wrong. She always did. She was no good with money. Roger would be waiting for her in the morning and have a go at her.

The coffee machine had finished its cycle, so she washed the milk frothing jug and the ice-cream scoops. She’d washed the sandwich knives and chip scoop earlier but had left them on the draining board to remind her to check the fryers were off. They were. And the coffee machine. And the till. And the display cabinets. All off. She checked the fryer again just in case. Julie knotted the bin bag and dropped it outside the back door then she sprayed and wiped down the preparation areas. She swept around then went back to check the coffee machine was off and the freezers were still on then mopped through. She liked seeing the little circles of clean water spread across the floor as she went. Julie went back again to check she had turned off the coffee machine – she had – then had to re-mop over her footprints on the wet floor. 

She felt dizzy from the smell of the disinfectant and the heat of the place with the shutters closed, but she liked the claustrophobic feel of it: how safe and cocooned she felt shut away from the roar of the sea. When she opened the back door a cool breeze rushed in. She emptied the mop bucket into the sink and watched it circle away down the plughole until just the suds and a few veg peelings were left. She pulled them out with her fingers and chucked them in the bin.

Julie set the alarm and – while it started bleeped monotonously away – she double-checked the dials on the fryer were off and went out. She locked the door and checked the handle three times, putting her weight behind her hip and pushing it to make doubly sure. She posted the keys into the little box for Roger to collect in the morning. 

She left her bag on one of the picnic benches in front of the takeaway and leant on the table for a moment. There were three metal detectorists in different places across the beach. Standing between her and the low sun, their silhouettes looked like vultures. They came every day to pick over what was left behind while the seagulls did their final check of the bins. Julie imagined finding buried treasure on the beach and wondered what she’d do with it. She could travel, go on a plane, cuddle someone on a blanket on a foreign beach. Or buy her own place. She’d probably keep working, she supposed. It was good to keep a routine. There was nothing else to do anyway.

An old man was walking slowly across the top of the beach with a stick. Children kicked a football and chased it. A group of teenagers came down the steps with disposable barbeques and bottles clinking together in carrier bags. It would be too cold in the evenings to do that soon. The seasons were changing. Everything was always changing.  The customers in the takeaway would soon change from sunburnt English tourists to the autumnal Germans and Japanese coach trippers. After that came the coughing dog walkers and old women in wetsuits. Not old at all, she corrected herself. She went to school with some of them. Middle-aged at most. There’d be them and there’d be children in wellies and Eskimo suits with little fur-lined hoods and red cheeks and runny noses that needed wiping and a nice hot chocolate to warm them up. Her working days would be shorter as it got quieter, and she’d need to spend more time at home with Mum and Dad anyway. They couldn’t afford the carers or meals on wheels in the winter with the heating, so she needed to help look after them.

The grates still needed to go up over the windows that didn’t have shutters. Julie dragged them round to the front and lifted the first one up to the window but missed the hooks they sat on and had to put it back down again.

‘Can I help?’

The old man she’d seen walking across the beach was standing behind her, though he wasn’t as old as she’d thought from a distance. No older than her father, probably younger. And the walking stick was more like a cane than an old man’s stick.

He took the opposite end of the grate from her and smiled while Julie counted to three then lifted. The man didn’t lift though and instead looked a little surprised. Eventually, he gripped his cane between his knees and then lifted his end. With the stick between his legs, he moved forwards in jerks and the grate rattled against the window’s wooden frame. Julie hooked her end into place then went down to help get his side in. She could see two places where the grate had scuffed the white paint revealing the blue it had been painted a few years before. Roger would go mad when he saw it. She’d always preferred the blue really. Still, at least he hadn’t smashed the glass or anything.

‘Can I help you with the other one?’

He had a slight accent. He sounded like someone from one of the old films.

‘Oh, it’s alright. Thank you all the same. We’re meant to do it on our own really. Insurance or something.’ It was a lie, but a pretty good one she thought. Might well be true.

She lifted the second grate into place and put the padlocks onto both. The man was still there watching her. He smiled and leaned on his cane.

‘All done for the day?’

‘Afraid so. Did you want to buy something? I’m afraid everything’s locked up now.’

‘My name’s Christopher,’ he said and held out his hand. 

‘Julie,’ Julie said. She thought of the crap from the sink and how she hadn’t even washed her hands afterwards, just wiped them on her apron. The same hand he was now holding and could probably smell.

‘I was just-,’ he pulled a bottle of wine from the canvas bag over his shoulder. ‘I was just going to sit and have a glass of wine and enjoy the evening. Would you like to join me?’

The man looked smart in his blazer and shirt. His trousers were clean and the front seam was straight and crisp. His cane and the cotton flat cap he wore looked expensive, but his shoes were tatty and his teeth were stained and crooked. She tried to think of an excuse. She usually went to The Ferrets in the evening. 

‘You’ve no idea how happy it would make me,’ he said.

‘Well, okay. One drink.’

‘Wonderful,’ the man said and started towards one of the benches. ‘Oh,’ he said and came back to her. ‘I haven’t got any glasses. Can you get some from the takeaway?’

‘No. Sorry, no I can’t.’

‘They surely won’t miss two paper cups?’

‘It isn’t that. It’s all locked now.’

‘Don’t you have a key?’

‘I’ve posted them in the box. I’ve got to put them in there and then Roger picks them up early in the morning when he collects the takings.’

‘They leave the money in there all night? That’s very trusting of them.’

‘Not really,’ she said. ‘This place is like Fort Knox.’

He rattled the grating and nodded. ‘So, no cups then.’

‘I’m happy to drink from the bottle if you are,’ she said.

His face brightened and they sat at a picnic table. Christopher made a show of opening of the bottle; flicking up the cuffs of his blazer before cracking the screw top open. He passed the bottle to her with the label against his sleeve like waiters do on TV. Julie took a drink and passed it back to him.

‘Are you here on holiday?’

He licked his lip and pushed the bottle back to her.

‘In a way. I’m just here for the day.’

‘Day trip.’

‘I suppose. Many people would say my whole life is a holiday.’

‘Retired?’

He laughed. But he didn’t seem to be laughing at her like them in the pub did. This was the kind, warm laugh that friends, fathers and lovers gave in the soaps her parents watched.

‘No, no, not retired. I’m not quite that old. Did you see the yacht that arrived in the bay this morning?’

‘A woman here earlier said it belonged to a film star.’

‘Not quite. It’s not as grand as all that, but I find it comfortable.’

‘Oh, that must be lovely.’

‘I sail up and down the coast and see some of the most beautiful places in the world,’ he said.

She tried to imagine it. Every day a different place. Staying in the best ones. Leaving the bad ones before you had time to settle.  He was watching her, his head tilted to one side and smiling quizzically, like someone pouring water into a bath and waiting to see when it will overflow the top. 

‘Have you ever been to the Biarritz?’

‘No.’ She shook her head and could feel the water brimming the top, hovering over the edges ready to pour out.

‘It’s really stunning. Amazing. Still, I’m not sure I’ve been anywhere quite like here.’

The plug had suddenly been pulled out again. The water was draining away.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘My mum always says: why travel when you got this on your doorstep.’

‘Very wise. Still, you must get bored in the winter.’

‘I suppose so. But my mum and dad are elderly and sick. They need looking after so that uses up time.’

He nodded and lifted the bottle that was still in her hand gently to her mouth.

‘I expect that the season will end soon, and the town will be lifeless. Then the autumn storms will be rolling in before long,’ he said.

She noticed raindrops hitting and soaking into the wood of the table then felt them on her bare arms and face.

‘What a shame we can’t get one of the parasols out from in there,’ Christopher said. ‘There’s no secret way in? Oh well. Come along, drink up.’

The wine didn’t seem to be going down very much at all. She felt like she’d drunk more on her own than was gone from the bottle. The old man’s hand brushed past her knee under the table and she flinched. He looked at her questioningly.

‘Are you alright, my dear?’

Maybe he had just been looking for his cane. Someone with a movie star lifestyle like this wouldn’t be interested in someone like her.

It was getting dark now; the rain had let the evening slip in early. The sand shivered under the growing breeze.

‘I suppose you’re closing for the season soon?’

‘No, we’re open all year. We get customers all the time. Older people,’ – she hesitated over the words – ‘older people start coming now on coach trips then we get busy again at half-term and Bonfire Night and around New Year.’

‘It must be pretty miserable here in the winter.’

It was, she supposed.

‘I couldn’t bear the cold,’ he said. ‘English winters are too cold for me. I always take the yacht down to the Med over winter; the Mediterranean.’

Julie shivered, the cold suddenly grasping her shoulders. She thought of Batesy and the others up at The Ferrets. She’d usually be there by now. It would be loud and stink of piss with sticky carpets and flat beer and the people in there were all scabs and druggies and drunks and she knew they took advantage of her, but they would all be wondering where she was and the place was warm. She rubbed her hands over the goose bumps on her bare arms.

Christopher took off his jacket and wrapped it around her. He left his arm across her back, his hand rubbing her arm. Every few rubs, his fingers would reach further round towards her breast, but he didn’t react when she looked at him. Perhaps he didn’t realise. She’d feel guilty having to turn him down after he’d been so nice. Batesy and the others would have a good laugh about it when she told them: an old man feeling her up.

‘Here,’ he said and pulled another bottle from his bag. ‘Another round! Drink up. It will keep you warm.’

He wasn’t so old really. Anyway, men didn’t age like women. She’d read a thing on Facebook about a man who had a baby when he was ninety-two. It was quite common really.

‘What’s the Mediterranean like?’

‘Oh, wonderful. You’d love it.’

‘I’ve never even been out the country.’

‘You’d love it, the air actually tastes metallic with all the golden light in it.’

He spoke like someone off of the TV. His hand worked down lower to hold her far hip.

She pictured herself sunbathing on the deck of a yacht with glistening, calm water around her. She would be in a white bikini with bronzed skin and her stomach would be flattened by not being surrounded by chips all day long. Her skin would be cleared by being out of the fryer grease and in the sunshine. She imagined parties with champagne and cocktails, waiters in white suits and black bow ties, guests commenting on her style and elegance.

The rain started to get heavier. It worried the surface of the incoming sea, hiding the currents and blurring the outlines of the now submerged rocks.

‘Perhaps we should shelter under the awnings,’ he said. 

He took her hand and led her to the patch of decking under the ice cream hatch that was dry. She looked at her hand in his, sheltered and warm. There were splits in her knuckles from bleach, the nails misshaped and the fingertips swollen from biting. Christopher’s hands were tough but tanned and well-kept. The backs of them weren’t wrinkled or hairy. He couldn’t be that old. You can always tell someone’s age from their hands. She’d heard that somewhere. She was a little drunk.

He held her close in the small area of shelter. He smelled of aftershave. She liked the familiarity of his pipe tobacco, the same her grandfather had smoked. He kissed her. She let him and within a few seconds opened her mouth for him, tasting his breath and feeling the stubble of his top lip on hers. She could see his eyes rolling back in his head and giggled that she was the one causing such pleasure. He laughed too, pushing that warm breath like a tropical breeze into her mouth. As they parted, his head continued the rolling movement for a second. She imagined herself stepping onto a jetty in Africa and grasping the rope railing before telling the tanned harbour master who’d rushed to help her that she just needs to shake off her sea-legs. She could see his face – foreign, handsome, confused – desiring her. Part of Africa must be in the Mediterranean.

‘Come with me.’

‘What?’

‘Come with me. Come with me tonight to the yacht and then tomorrow we’ll head off. We can be in France by tomorrow night, then work our way down to the Med.’

The tide was pushing right up now; shrinking the beach, the whole town, everything. Maybe it would come all the way up and submerge the takeaway, hiding it forever. She saw it rising over the cliffs and the harbour, sinking The Ferrets, washing away Batesy and all of them, the old school, Mum and Dad’s, the corner shop, her little bedsit, all of it gone.

‘I’ve never met anyone like you. We’ve only had these few short hours, but I can’t imagine going on without you,’ he said and kissed her neck.

‘I haven’t got a passport. All of my money and clothes and stuff is at home.’

‘We can sort all that in the morning.’

‘I can’t go to the Mediterranean in my work apron.’

‘There’ll be time for all that in the morning.’ 

In the corner of the decking was a football that had been left behind. A child somewhere, a little boy, would realise in the morning. They’d sigh or moan or cry and need a hug and a kiss on its salty, tear covered cheek.

‘We could have a life of luxury together. Eventually we can have a family.’

‘Alright.’

He kissed her again and she watched the waves coming up towards them, waltzing their way up the sand. He collected his bag and cane; it seemed like a ridiculous affectation as he clearly didn’t need it and climbed the hill away from the beach easier than she did. He walked with one arm around her hip pulling her close to him. She could feel the change moving in his pocket. The sea rolled unstoppable up the sand behind them, pushing them on their way.

On the dark pathway that looped back over the takeaway and towards the town, he stopped and kissed her. Christopher’s hand slid up her ribs and pawed at her breast. Julie smiled. It was just like she thought: he was the same as Batesy and the others. There was no yacht or Mediterranean, just like there was none of the promised tenderness and relationship the day after from Batesy. At least Christopher’s promises were better. It was a nice dream to choose for a night. She heard the sea sigh as it reached its highest point and started to roll back out.

‘Let’s go,’ she said.

She looked back over the beach, covered in footprints now; wrinkled and thrown back like a hotel bedsheet. She hadn’t taken the bags up to the bins. The seagulls would pull them apart by morning. There’d be rubbish and mess all over the decking. Roger would be livid. Well, she couldn’t do anything about it now, she’d just have to clear it up in the morning.

Christopher must have forgotten that he was supposed to be a stranger in the town: he led her, pulling her gently on through the streets. They were heading away from the harbour. She smiled to herself and wondered how he’d explain away the fact they were arriving at a B&B  or a dingy flat rather than a yacht. He was quite young, really. Probably no older than Batesy, just that his skin was worn from the sun whereas Batesy was pickled in cider.

‘This isn’t the way I would normally take to the harbour,’ she teased him.

‘Well, I don’t know the town very well,’ he said.

She wondered how long he would keep up the pretence.

He stopped them outside of some flats and kissed her again.

‘This doesn’t look like a yacht?’ she said in faux-innocence and dug him playfully in the ribs.

‘What?’ he asked and rubbed where she’d hit him. ‘Come on.’

He pulled her down an alley at the side of the flats. It was so dark and narrow that she couldn’t see anything at all, and just allowed herself to be pulled by him. They twisted around corners that she didn’t even see.

Then she heard it.

At the end of the alley in front of them was the sound of waves beating at the promenade. Ocean winds rattled rigging and boats strained on their ropes like vicious dogs. He gripped her hand tighter and lead her onwards like a sail helplessly caught in the wind. One more corner and she saw it, shimmering in the moonlight: that ever-changing, churning, rebirthing sea and the yacht bobbing on it.