SUSAN FLETCHER
The Silver Dark Sea

Table of Contents

Title Page

The Fishman of Sye

Chapter One

Chapter Two

The North Wind

Chapter Three

The Seals with Human Hearts

Chapter Four

The Giants and what became of them

Chapter Five

The Loss of the Anne-Rosa

Chapter Six

The Message in a Bottle

Chapter Seven

The Wild Sheep and the Stormy Night

Chapter Eight

The Man of Sea Shanties

Chapter Nine

Kitty and the Jellyfish

Chapter Ten

The Silvered Nights

Chapter Eleven

The Puffins and the Mother

Chapter Twelve

The Blonde and the Bounty Inn

Chapter Thirteen

The Imps at the Farm called Wind Rising

Chapter Fourteen

The Sly Tide, or the Perigean Spring Tide, or the Highest Tide of all

Chapter Fifteen

The Claw and the Prediction

Chapter Sixteen

The Nurse and the Wasted Heart

Chapter Seventeen

The Twins, the Fishman, and the Lighthouse-Keeper’s Son

Chapter Eighteen

The Widow and the Man from Sye

Chapter Nineteen

The Stranger, Celia and the Night-Time Sea

Chapter Twenty

The Woman with the Inland Life

Acknowledgements

About the Author

From the reviews of The Silver Dark Sea

By the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

The Fishman of Sye

Once, there was a man. He was bearded and kind. He lived on an island in a stone-walled house with a tap that dripped, and a small peat fire. He had no friends to speak of. All his family were gone.

In his youth, he had been strong. He’d carried hay bales in one hand and lifted bags of grain up into the highest rafters. His farm had been neat and his pigs were fat; his shoulders browned in good weather. A handsome man, also. He loved a girl with sun-coloured hair and sometimes she’d smile as she passed him, so that his heart fluttered and his mouth ached. But above all else, he was shy. He’d blush when he heard her name; he’d stumble and not speak for days. She is too pretty, he thought to himself. And in time the sun-haired girl went away. She married another and the seasons blew on. Time passed. His beard greyed.

In the evenings he’d think of her. He’d sit by the fire and say I am old, now. How did it happen? The years had gone too quickly. His life had flown by, leaf-dry.

No children, no wife.

What a small life …

One night he was so sad he could not sleep. The loss kept him wide-eyed. He lay on his back, stared at the ceiling; the sea unfolded in the dark. And the day that followed, he left his home. He walked to the north of the island where the grass was wind-bent, where the skies were fast and the sea thundered. Why was he here? He didn’t know. But the wind tugged at his coat and foam skittered across the cold sand and the gulls above him called out no! No! He found himself on a stony shore.

I am so tired, he thought. I am so tired of being me. I am tired of being alone.

He thought of all the wasted years. Why had he never spoken of love? Why didn’t I tell her? Or see the wide world? He hadn’t stepped off the island, not once. It all seemed too late, now – too late.

He cried. He wept like a child.

But then he opened his eyes.

He opened them and saw a curious thing.

There was a man in the water. Not driftwood? Or weed? No – it was certainly a man. He bobbed, on the waves. He had black hair – wet, bluish-black – and a beard, and very pale skin. His eyes were round like a seal’s were. He did not blink or turn away.

Who is …?

Who might swim, in such waters? With these waves that were crashing like glass? And with a north wind blowing as strongly as this? Yet this sleek-haired man did not struggle. He was not drowning or asking for help. He simply floated. He seemed to smile, as he floated there. And then he raised his arms – he raised them above him, pressed his palms together as if he was in prayer – and he threw those arms forwards so that his fingertips broke the water and his head and body followed in an arc. He dived into the sea, and was gone.

Briefly, there was nothing.

Then, in his wake, there was a tail – a huge, silver-flashing tail. It raised itself up, like a mirror. And it sank down where the black-haired man had been.

The pig farmer stood very still.

He blinked, shook his head. A fish? Or a man? Neither? Or both? And at that moment, at that precise moment, as the sea rushed onto the stones at Sye and as a lone gull settled on the rocks nearby, he heard a voice very clearly. It was not a human’s voice. It did not feel as if someone was standing next to him; it was a deep, soft voice that seemed to be all around him so that the farmer turned, and kept turning.

It said this: there is hope.

The voice came off the cliffs. It rose up from the stones. He looked, but there was only the foam, fizzing, and the white lace of broken water where the tail had been.

That night, the farmer sat by his peat fire with a rug wrapped around him. He knew what he had seen. He’d seen a kind, human face and then a fish’s tail. He also knew what he had heard.

In the days that followed, he spoke of it. Do you know what I saw? At the cove called Sye? Some laughed at him, of course. But others listened with shining eyes for their own hearts were tired, or partly so, and they longed for this to be true. Hadn’t there been a legend, once? In a leather-bound book? They thought so. There had been a story just like the pig farmer’s story – of kind eyes and a raised silvery tail.

Oh, how they wanted to believe it. They longed for this half-man, half-fish.

They wanted to hear there is hope for themselves as they stood by an evening sea.

The storms, in time, passed away. Winter moved into a dappled spring. And one day, as the farmer rubbed the bristled backs of his pigs, he heard a voice behind him. A woman’s voice – warm and shy. Excuse me? Hello?

Her hair was no longer sun-coloured for she was older, also. But he knew who she was.

They married. She mended the broken tap in his house so that it did not drip. She rubbed his joints with linseed oil in the evenings and he combed her long, snow-white hair. He told her about the Fishman of Sye. I saw him – with my own eyes … And she nodded, believing him. For what wasn’t possible? What could not come to be? She had spent her whole life missing him – and she was with him, now.

They lived long lives together. Happy ones, too – they would sit outside his house as the sun lowered and whisper of their happiness. My darling wife … My love. They are buried in the churchyard, side by side. They are in the furthest corner, near the blackthorn trees, and if you are ever on that island you can see them if you wish to, lay some flowers down.

* * *

There is hope.

It’s strange, as all myths are. It is a familiar story, too, for many parents have whispered the tale of the Fishman to their children at night, or at bath-time, or on car journeys to pass the hours. He is ageless, they say, and cannot die. He lives as the fish do, in the quiet, thick-green depths, but sometimes he will surface and look over to the land. Even now, there is an islander who says he’s seen the Fishman – his loving smile, his scales that catch the light as he dives. Others say, too, that if you ever feel comforted, or if you ever hear there is hope or words like it – all will be well or you are not alone – as you walk by the sea or as you lower one foot down into a boat, or as you watch the tarpaulin on the log-pile shake in the wind, or as you go to draw the curtains in the evening and pause because the last light on the water is beautiful, like gold, or as you find your boots reflected in the wet, firm, low-tide sand it means the Fishman is passing. He is offshore, watching the island. It means he knows you are hurting – and he does not wish you to be.

It was hard to have faith in that part. When I heard there is hope on a coastline, it was my own self, speaking – me, as my own comfort, trying to keep myself afloat. But what harm does it do, to believe in such stories? Mostly I think that it is better to.

One

There are stories that come from the sea and those are good stories. They are the best I have heard, by far. I know stories, but none are better than those I was told in coastal homes, with sour-smelling oilskins drying by the fire or the pale chalk of whale-bones standing on their ends. I smiled into my hands, as I listened. A brown-eyed man would ask have I told you about …? I’d reply no – tell me … And we’d lean forward towards each other so that our chairs creaked. Salt on the windowpanes.

Stories of loss, mostly. Of the love that came before that loss.

I crawled inside them, cave-like, and held my breath as I looked up.

There were too many stories to count. The sea brought them in, daily. Like the wide, glassy straps of weed that came ashore on the highest tides, they caught the light and beckoned me. A story? I’d come closer and kneel. I’d stare, as they were told. And they were always more beautiful than I thought they’d be when I first heard them, or found them in the sand.

That’s how I imagine it. It’s the best explanation I can give. There were so many stories on that island that it felt like they came in on the tide. Every day, there was something. On every pebbled cove or beach there were gifts left by the sea – plastic bottles, nylon ropes, shoes, a tyre, cottonbuds, the spokes of an umbrella, a sodden child’s toy. Worthless? To some, maybe. But they were treasures, to others. A parched curve of driftwood could be dragged home and kept; a message in a cola bottle might change a life. At the beach called Lock-and-Key, there were lone wellington boots set upside down on its fence-posts – boots that had been washed up on that beach and were useless without their other, missing halves – and I’ve heard them called unsightly, this row of coloured boots. But I came to like them. I ran my hand across them when I walked on Lock-and-Key. I felt like I was one of them – weathered, and waiting. Fading and softening and watching the sea.

That’s me, perhaps: the forager. I’d be drawn to the shards, to what life leaves behind. As if I had nothing, I gathered what other people would pass by or step over – a mussel shell, still hinged, or a length of sky-blue rope. I trod along the line of weed and plucked, bird-like, at the shinier things. And in that same way I hoarded all the stories that reflected the light and dazzled me – like the whale that answered the foghorn, or the phosphorescent night. There was a tale of grief I heard – with puffins in it, of all things – and I fell upon that tale as if it were unsalted water, water I could drink. It nourished me, somehow. A tale, too, about a single lantern that bobbed on the horizon every Christmas Night.

So yes – it was like beachcombing. It was all treasure to me. In my kitchen, I kept shells; I stuck briny feathers in vases. And in my head I laid out the stories the islanders told me – the caves, the Fishman, the flakes of silver, the seals who are wiser than humans, the girl who floated like a patchwork star.

I was born inland. I grew up where the wildest water was a puddle, or a filmy pond in a park. Stories were harder to come by there. Trees bowed with the rain, and I found sparks of beauty in a flowerbed or a pigeon’s trembling, iridescent neck but it was not enough. I hungered for more – I sensed, always, that there was something more than this life that I was living. And then I fell in love when I thought I never would, and I came to live on an island so that the lines by my eyes deepened and my hair thickened with salt and ghostly-white crabs flitted over my feet and buried themselves in the damp sand, and every sea was different from the sea that had come before it – pummelling, or silent, or brown-coloured and flat. And the man I loved would tell me his stories. In time, others did. They poured whisky into my glass and settled beside me. They opened old books, said look … I have known people who believed absolutely that a gull could talk our language, and that the souls of their drowned friends could be found in the rattle and foam.

I heard her voice in the water. I did.

And I’ve felt his hand on my hand, on that boat. You have my word.

I do have their words – I do. I swagger with the weight of my wordy, priceless stash. And when I re-tell their stories now, I know that some people mock me or mock the island, and they shake their heads at the impossibilities – a Fishman? OK, right … I understand that – for I was, briefly, like them; I too have had my private doubts. But so much has been lost and found. So many things have come to pass that have no explanation and I half-wonder if you cannot believe in such stories unless you have lived or stayed in a house by the sea – until you have lost washing to a sea breeze or been bruised by the rain drumming on your anorak hood whilst trying to guide a dinghy in, in the blackest night. Until you have waited for a boat that does not come. Or until that boat is found but its crew is not. It is another way of living and not all can stand it. There is the word salt-bitten; it comes when hope is lost.

No, you cannot trust the sea – even now. Even with our satellites that tell us where we are. Even with our sonars, radars and computerised charts. Even with our space travel and vaccinations and our atom bombs and cloned sheep, and even though we can make a new human life in a Petri dish, we still cannot reach the furthest sea floor. We cannot breathe underwater or decode whale song. We cannot find a body, when it goes overboard. We may know that a human heart has ventricles and can be shocked into beating again, but we do not have the words for what immense and extraordinary emotions it can feel – what heights and depths, together. Love is too small a word – too small.

Abigail Coyle used to tell me, we only know the foam … A sweep of her arm, over the sea. And I’d walk home understanding her.

We do not know it all. That’s what I’d tell myself, when standing waist-deep in water. When I sat on a boat I’d think of what was beneath me – the deep, deep chasms, the secrets and the dark.

This island is small, neatly shaped. Its cliffs are high as towers and streaked with white from the roosting birds. These cliffs echo with bird calls and to look up at them from a rocking boat is to feel tiny, and cold. Feathers come down and settle by your feet. They drift on the water like dreams.

There aren’t many trees, on this island. Nor are there many houses, but there are some; they all have missing tiles, damp window frames and peeling paint. Their names are blunt: Wind Rising, or Crest. Calor gas bottles stand by back doors.

There is litter on the beaches. The wheel-arches of cars are brown with rust.

Strands of grey fleece shake on wire.

There is a lighthouse, too. It stands at the north end of the island and swings its slow, pale beam over the fields, the bedroom walls and the night-time sea.

Let us call it Parla. Names do not matter, as they never truly do in the tales I know. What matters are the people themselves – the souls who have lived on this island and how they have felt on its sand and rocks. Many generations of firm, resolute people have mended their nets here, or pressed their knees onto sheep as they’ve sheared them. The men have caught gannets for eating; women have gathered seaweed at low tide, with baskets strapped to their backs and their skirts hitched up. They have fed their children kale and sour milk, sang their sea songs, and they’ve lived in fear of God and the waves. That was years ago. But there are still photos – blurred, soft-edged.

Now, the Parlans live by other means – sheep, tourists, sponge cakes, crafts that they sell on the internet and send to the mainland in protective wrap. One woman knits teacosies and baby clothes; another paints in an attic room with skylights that close themselves suddenly in the gusty, north-westerly winds. No-one eats gannets these days. But they still have their own vegetable patches, and still reach for eggs under downy behinds. They still stand on the headland from time to time with their arms held out, and let their coats fill up with the wind. They still drink too much, or some do. They know the moon’s cycle as their forefathers did.

And the sea. They still know the sea or as much as any human can. It is part of them, in their blood; it shapes their lives as the sea shapes a stone over the months and years. Some cannot sleep inland. They cannot be where there aren’t sea sounds – for Parla is never, ever quiet. Even in calm weather there is the lap lap lap against the quayside or the clack of mussel shells as the water rises over them. At Tap Hole, when the tide is rough or at its highest, the sea sprays through the single hole in its roof – a puff and a splattering, like a whale’s breath. Near the harbour, there are cliffs which are curved to make a bowl of water so that the sea is trapped, or nearly; it says stash, stash, as it tries to get out. The water here is weedy. There is an oily shine to the sea, at The Stash – and rubbish. Once, a rubber duck – and no-one knew why. A well-travelled duck, they called it. George Moss took it back for his son and it sits by their bath, even now.

The youngest Bright daughter – in her mid-sixties – remembers the single wave that rose up against the lighthouse one winter, when she was a girl. It smacked against the lantern’s glass. It struck the tower with such a deep, thundering boom that she had felt it inside her – under her ribs. She’d held the wall, in fear. It woke something in her, that shuddering wave – a womanly knowledge that she both wanted and was scared of, but had no name for. She knows it all much better, now.

Maybe that’s the sea telling stories of its own. Like me it has a lust for them; it cannot stop saying listen to this … Listen to me … After all, think of the tales it has – the deaths, the near-deaths, the curious lives. Even now, as I am telling this, there is the handclap of a wave that falls back into itself and the gentle hiss that follows. Soon, a sprawled, moon-blue jellyfish will rise to the surface and give two slow clenches. Against the black water, it will glow.

Before he died, Tom Bundy said I have never known silence. Never. He had been born in the fields at Wind Rising. Each hour of his life had had the sea in it. His early death did, too.

* * *

Can you hear it? The water? It breathes, as you breathe.

I want you to hear the whole island – as it is now, at this very moment. There is the sea’s stirring, always. But also, there are many sounds on Parla which are more than the waves, more than stones being moved by them. The sheep bleat, throatily. A wooden gate squeaks open. There are tiny bells on a piece of string which dance, and call out sing-sing-sing. In a house with herbs on its windowsill a kettle is boiling – its metal lid is starting to rattle, and there are footsteps coming to it and a woman is saying I’m here, I’m here … to the kettle, as if the kettle understands her. She lifts it up with a tea-towel; there is the sound of a mug filling up. Elsewhere, a dog scratches its ear. On the quayside, a child crouches; she watches a crab creep in a red plastic bucket, tapping the sides with its claws. The old pig farm, empty now, creaks in the late afternoon sun. There is also washing on a clothesline – four pillowcases which snap at themselves, and a pair of striped socks. The line itself bounces in the breeze – up and down.

There is the tick-tick of computer keys.

A mobile phone lights up and thrums across a table, before dropping to the floor.

There is a man in his bathroom, cleaning his ears of sand with a flannel’s tip. He hums, as he does so – dum-di-dum …

And there is a mother telling a story. She has her child in front of her, in his dinosaur pyjamas. He sucks the end of a white cloth, holding the cloth with both hands and he listens to her with eyes like the world. Have I told you the story of the silver in the fields? She is Hester – a true Bundy, with the dark Bundy eyes – and she knows her stories. She has the voice for telling them. She is Parlan, after all.

Can you hear these things? Each of them?

A gull is calling out – ark ark ark! It stands on the chimney of a cream-walled house.

And can you hear this: the brush of legs through long grass? At this moment, a young man is walking. He wears jeans which are damp and frayed at the hem. The lace on his left boot is undone, and its plastic ends tap against rocks as he goes. There is sheep dung pressed underneath this same boot; he feels it with each footstep so when he comes to a stile he puts this boot on the step and scrapes his sole against it. He twists his leg, checks. Then he climbs over the stile and briefly, as he climbs, he looks over to the house with the washing line. He narrows his eyes to see it – the striped socks, the yellow front door. He sniffs, steps down.

Brush brush. Through the grass.

It is early evening. This young man is fair-haired, freckled. He has caught the sun today – his cheekbones are pink, and his scalp feels sore. It has been the first day of sun in a long, long time and he’d not expected it. None of them had. He knows, in time, his skin will peel.

He is Sam Lovegrove, and he is twenty-two, and when he reaches the coast path he heads west.

The sea glints. In the distance, he sees Bundy Head.

To his right, the cove called Sye appears. It starts to show itself. As he walks, the cove widens and he looks down into it. It is a fleeting glance, nothing more, for he does not expect to see anything. Nobody goes to Sye – it is a small beach, with no sand to speak of; its high cliffs make it shaded and cool. Who might go there, and so late in the day? No-one. And so he glances, that’s all. A sweep of the eyes. But there is something down there today.

He stops. He stops so sharply that his right foot slips.

Sam takes two small steps towards the edge. What is …?

Then he says oh shit. Oh God. Oh my God …

* * *

Me, the forager. Or the salvager, perhaps – crouching in the wet sand to gather what is left. Is that what stories are? The debris of a life? The remains that can be dried, passed on so that a little of that life is passed on too, in its way? I have lost so much. So much I have never had, and so much of Parla I have looked for meaning in. And I miss it – I miss the island. I miss its pebbled strands, its button-eyed voles, and the weightless bones of cuttlefish that fitted the palms of my hands. I miss the people who I called family, or tried to; I miss how magical a winter’s night sky could be for I’d never seen a falling star until I stood on that island, and I’ve not seen one since. And I miss him above all others – how I miss that one man. But at least I have my stories, sand-covered. A well-told story takes me back to Lock-and-Key.

Oh, the stories. So many.

A thousand strange things have been washed up on Parla’s shores – loo seats, dolphins, a list of dreams in a sealed plastic bag. But it has never had a story which begins with Sam Lovegrove saying oh shit, oh God on a Wednesday evening as he runs down to the beach with his sunburnt shoulders and his left bootlace slapping back and forth, back and forth.

And it’s never had this: a man, half-naked. He is lying on his front, his face against the shingle. He is dead-looking – still, white-skinned.

I know some wonderful stories – but this is the beginning of the best of all.

Two

He stumbles down to the beach. A steep path through gorse leads him there. He jumps onto the stones and the noise is sudden – the crunch of his heels, the clatter of rock against rock. He staggers, and then falls. Sam lands on all fours. The stones are powdery and the dark cracks between them are darker with old weed. He stares for a moment. Then he rights himself.

On, towards the shoreline. Over brownish wrack.

Oh God, he says. Oh …

It is not plastic, or sacking.

It is a human body. It lies at the water’s edge. Its upper half is out of the water; its legs are still being lapped at by the tide. It lies on its front and the head is turned so that the man’s right cheek (it is definitely a man) is pressed into the stones, and his right arm is raised above his head. He wears a white vest, or part of one. Sodden, dark-grey shorts.

Black hair. A black beard.

Shit …

Sam looks away. He breathes heavily through pursed lips. He tries to steady himself, puts his hand on his chest. Could he turn, go? No-one need know. No-one has seen me coming here. And wouldn’t the sea come back and take it? Carry it out? Sam shakes. His hands are shaking and he thinks, a dead body … He has not seen one before.

But he cannot turn and go. He must stay; he knows he must.

He looks back. The man’s skin is white. It is perfectly white, like fish meat. The arms are thick, muscled. His back, too, is strong-looking – there is a deep groove where his spine is.

He is tall. Was. Was tall.

Oh … His stomach clenches. He half-bends, as if he will vomit, and he expects this – he braces, locks his jaw. But nothing comes.

The body lies ahead of Sam. He tries to calm himself for he knows what he must do. He knows what needs to be done, right now, and so he lifts his left foot and steps towards it. He brings his right foot to join his left.

No smell. Would there not be a smell?

And flies, he thinks. There are no flies.

Carefully, Sam comes in. He draws level with the body and starts to lower down. He is tentative, scared of falling or getting too close. The stones shift, as his weight does, and he thinks and what about the eyes? He has found dead sheep before. They lose their eyes to gulls – the soft, jellied flesh is the first part to be eaten – and Sam feels nauseous again. His tongue tightens. But he has no choice: he has to see the face. He knows this but he does not want to and he is shaking as he crouches down. His breath is fast and his heart is thumping against his ribs so that they hurt and he does not want the eyes to have been pecked away or sucked out by fish. He does not want the mouth to be open, as if still fighting for breath.

Oh God oh God …

Sam puts his palms down on the stones. He brings his face alongside the dead man’s face. Nose to nose.

The man opens his eyes. Not fully, not wide – but his eyelids flicker and there are two black crescent moons of eye.

Sam yells. Falls.

He scrambles backwards, crab-like, shouting holy fuck oh my God, and as he tries to stand his left foot slips and the stones give way so he turns onto his front and crawls frantically on his hands and knees, and then he finally clambers up the beach and turns around.

There is the sea, and a gull’s screaming, and there is a sound which is coming from Sam – a whimpering, a half-sob. His grips his hair with both his hands. Not dead is what he thinks. Not dead not dead, oh Jesus. He looks at the skin, the beard, the mouth which is moving now as if trying to speak or trying to clear itself of salt or sand or pebbles and the eyelids still flicker, and the right hand flinches. The fingers find a stone and try to close upon it.

Shit. Listen. I’m going to get help, Sam tells him. I am. I’ll come back.

He sees a whorl in the man’s beard, as if a thumb has been pressed there – familiar, in its way. A shell, or a rose.

Sam stumbles through the grass. His feet snag on roots and old wire; the sheep lift up from their resting places and bleat at him, and move. His breathing is loud as he runs towards the lane. He knows the house with the striped socks on the line is to his left and that a woman will be inside it, but he cannot go to her. Not her, of all people. He does not look across.

Down the hill. Past the ragwort, and the rusting tractor.

Past the sheet of corrugated iron that is half-lost in grass.

He turns right at the sign that says Wind Rising. He runs up the drive and the dog barks as she sees him, and the rooster stretches up and flaps his wings. Sam bangs on the back door which swings open on its own so he hurries inside saying Ian? Ian? The kitchen smells of casserole and coffee and dog hair and Ian is standing there, very still, with the kettle in his hand.

* * *

A man?

A man.

Dead?

No. I thought he was, but he’s alive. He opened his eyes.

Washed up? Are you sure he’s not just … Ian shrugs. I don’t know … Lying there? Sunbathing, or …

No, he’s washed up. Sam’s hands grip the back of a chair.

Is he hurt?

Don’t know. Probably. He is pale, Ian – properly white. I really thought he was dead. Oh God …

Ian sighs, holds up a hand to stop the boy talking. OK. Fine. I’ll get Jonny. And Nathan’s in the barn. He’s big, you say?

Looks it. And heavy. Arms like … He holds his hands apart, showing him.

Ian takes a sip of coffee. He holds it in his mouth for a moment before swallowing. He takes a second sip, puts the mug down. Then he pulls on a jumper and walks towards the door, talking under his breath, but as he reaches it he turns to see Sam’s still standing there, holding the chair. Coming?

Ian, listen …

The older man pauses.

He’s dark-haired. There’s a mark in his beard – like a whorl. I didn’t look too closely –

Ian’s eyes are hard. Let’s just get there. OK?

* * *

Four men make their way across the fields as the sun starts to dip. They move quickly, without talking. The sheep move away from them, find a safe place and then glance back.

The Lovegrove boy leads the way. His shirt is darker under the arms; his forehead is lined for his age. He looks over his shoulder once or twice to check he is still being followed. The farmer from Wind Rising is next – greying at the temples, breathing through his mouth. He is Ian Bundy and he has the family build – stocky, short-legged. His son, too, has it. And they both have the family colouring – brown eyes, sallow skin, hair that is almost black. Jonny chews as he jogs – gum, which he snaps in his mouth with his tongue until his father says get rid of that. The younger man scowls, throws the gum into grass. The fourth man sees him do it. He is Nathan Bundy. He, too, is dark-eyed, but the summer has lightened his hair and it is long so that it brushes his collar and curls by his ears. He’s the tallest of them. He has marks on his arms from barbed wire; he hasn’t shaven for days. Nathan says nothing as they make their way to the cove called Sye.

Brush-brush – their legs through the grass.

They all have their thoughts, their worries.

A ewe watches them. The men crest the hill so that they are, briefly, four dark shapes against the sky, four silhouettes – and the ewe sees this. She shakes her ears, lowers her head. She tears, steadily, at the grass.

There, says Sam. He does not need to point.

Ian squints.

The man is still lying there. His right arm is still raised and his legs are parted. Christ. He’s big.

Told you.

The tide is lower now. There is a metre or more of shingle between the sea and the man’s bare feet. Ian makes his way down through the gorse, onto the stones which are dry, chalky to touch. He says, steady – talking to himself as if he were a horse or a dog. He holds his arms out for balance; his feet slip between the stones as he goes. He wonders when he was last at Sye and doesn’t know. He is never on beaches. He hates finding sand between his toes or in his mouth.

Ian sees the black hair. The beard.

He kneels, presses his thumb against the man’s cold neck. Can you hear me? Hey?

Is there a pulse? Jonny stands over him.

A moment. Then, yep.

Sure?

Yes – got one. Let’s roll him over.

All four of them crouch, put their hands on his body. After three?

Ian counts.

As they roll the man over he makes a sound – a groan, as if in pain. There is a creak, too, as if his ribs are being released or a bone which was pressed upon can return to its right place. Grit sticks to his cheek. There is weed splayed on his chest, like a hand.

Ian stares for a moment. Then he reaches, takes the weed away. We need to get him to Tabitha’s. We’ll carry him.

Can we? I mean – Sam shrugs – he’s huge.

He is, but there are four of us. We’ll manage – have to. Ian taps the man’s face twice, calls hey! Hello? As he does this he sees the twirl of hair in his beard, the rosette, and he rests back on his heels, wipes his nose with the back of his hand so that Nathan puts his hand on his brother’s arm. Ian?

Let’s get going.

They take hold of the stranger and lift him into the air.

It is as if they carry an upturned boat. The man is on his back, being moved head-first, with Ian and Sam beneath his shoulders. Their hands take care of his head, arms and neck. Behind them, his right thigh is resting on Jonny’s shoulder and his left thigh is pressed against Nathan’s ear. The men all move slowly, saying careful and easy, now.

When they reach the coastal path they move faster.

Nathan thinks, I was in the barn … An hour ago, he’d been sitting on the spare tractor wheel in the barn at Wind Rising, filling the last few sacks with fleece. He’d been on his own, thinking of his wife. The farm cat had padded by, and the beams had creaked, and he’d been inhaling the smells he had known all his life – wood-dust, hay, diesel, sweat – when his brother had marched in saying a man’s been found. Washed up. At Sye. Ian said it as if it happened all the time – like the ferry arriving or fences blowing down. An hour ago Nathan had been alone in the barn and now he is carrying a half-dead man who’s barely dressed, cold-skinned and fish-smelling.

Things change quickly. But he has known that for years. Four years, or nearly.

He can hear the man’s breath, as they carry him. His thigh is heavy, and his lower leg hangs from the knee and swings. His heel knocks gently against Nathan’s back.

* * *

In the garden at Crest, a woman stands. She is blonde, wearing denim shorts, and she has a clothes peg in her mouth. One by one she takes her washing down. She lifts off tea-towels, a bra, two striped socks. The sun is lowering, and it glints off the windows. She pauses, looks. There is still beauty, she thinks – the light on the water.

Another woman – grey-haired, not blonde – makes her way past the island’s church, poking at the weeds with her walking stick. She glances to her left. There are the Bundy men and the boy from the harbour carrying something high in the air. What? A boat? Part of a machine? The sun is in her eyes so she cannot tell.

The church glints, also. From inside, its windows are jewel-coloured – ruby, emerald, a deep royal blue. These colours lie down on the tiled floor.

On the west coast, the sinking sun catches the row of single, rubber boots that stand upside down on fence-posts. None match; none are the same size. They shine in a line, looking wistful. They cast their strange shadows on the scrubby grass behind.

And at the same time – at this exact, same moment as the stained-glass windows glow, unseen, and as the widow from Crest takes her washing inside – the men come to a stile. They stumble, hiss watch it! The man they carry hears this. His head lolls. He feels the rock of his body and the fingers pressing into him, and there is the brush of legs through the grass. He smells sweat, sheep, salty air.

He says a word. It is sea, or a word like it.

When he opens his eyes, all he can see is sky.

Tabitha looks at the clock on her kitchen wall. It is past eight. This means, to her, that she can pour herself a small glass of sweet, pink wine so she goes to her fridge and opens it. She loves the sound of a cork coming out. She likes the cool bottle, and choosing the glass from her shelf – for none of her glasses are the same. Small rituals. Everybody has them. Her mother always tapped a wooden spoon twice against a saucepan, having stirred it; her father had names for the weight that would lower itself down the stairwell, and in doing so, turn the lamp.

She sips.

Berries. Vanilla, maybe.

Her home is Lowfield. It is small, cream-walled and south-facing – and it’s a house with no logic, for the kitchen leads into the bedroom and the bath is in a room of its own, far away from the loo. Things creak. Floors slope. She says it has character, as most Parlan houses have – and why would she want a bland home? With paper lampshades and plastic chairs? She has furniture from her childhood here – a linen chest, a grandfather clock. Tabitha touches the clock as she passes it, her wine in her other hand.

There is logic in its name, at least. Lowfield – for it sits in a hollow, a nest of grassy mounds. Three sides of the house look out onto banks of gorse, bramble and grazing sheep; on those three sides, it is fully sheltered from the wind. When Tabitha moved here in her early thirties she had lain in her bed and thought where is the noise? The rumbling? The spray on the windowpanes? For these were the things she was used to. Her childhood had been in the lighthouse-keeper’s quarters and so any inland sleeping place seemed eerie to her, and still. Surely an island home should rattle in the wind? When she came to Lowfield, a storm passed overhead one night and she knew nothing of it. She only learnt of the storm the next morning: as she stood in the garden in her dressing gown and looked at the fallen fence-post – upended, with black earth at the base of it – she told herself this will make a good home. A safe place. It also makes a good place for the tired and sick to come.

That was thirty years ago. Now, her waist has thickened. She has pouches of skin beneath her eyes and when she walks in her slippers she hears herself – the padding on the wooden floors, the slow pace. I walk as if I’m old. It has happened so quickly, or seems to have done. It seems like a day or two ago that she’d worn a red bikini, jumped from the sea wall.

Briefly, Tabitha feels sad. She has her regrets – but Lowfield is not one of them. It is hers; she has spent half of her lifetime here. It feels nurturing, as a home should. Cupped by the Parlan land.

The only room with a view of the sea is what she calls the mending room. She’s always called it this. Surgery feels too grand for it: a white-painted room, linoleum floor, a small cabinet of pills and liquids that islanders have prescriptions for and others which she keeps just in case. A table and chair face the door. Behind them, she has a poster of the musculature of the human body – reddish and gruesome, which the children love. On the table, Tabitha keeps an African violet; she likes its dark, furred leaves.

This room has seen plenty, that’s for sure. It holds its secrets – small ones, and ones that have changed a life and other lives. She, Tabitha, knows all of them. Lorcan, also, must have heard some strange confessions over the years – he walks with the weight of what he’s been told, or so it looks, for he has lumbar pain that she gives him codeine for and a stern telling-off when he carries too many hymn books. They go to him for their souls; for their bodies they come to Lowfield, and so here it is that Tabitha listens to hearts and takes temperatures and tends to the wounds that come from a life of farming, or the sea – a half-severed thumb from the shearing blades, or rope-burn that has broken the skin. She knows who has high blood pressure, who does not sleep, and who is on the contraceptive pill. She knows who drinks too much, whose skin flakes under their clothes, who takes pills to thin their blood, who has athlete’s foot, cold sores, piles. She knows of Sam’s migraines, of her own sister’s painful joints. And Tabitha has brought babies into the world, in her time – all five of the Lovegrove children and three of her own family have slid like eels into her waiting hands.

Tabitha sips. She thinks all those secrets … Once, newly qualified, she’d believed that everything was curable – every human pain. But she was wrong to think it. Guilt, heartbreak – what cures them? Or simply makes them bearable? Nothing on her shelves.

Still – she views this room as safety. She wants each person who steps into it to feel cared for. With the pot-plant and the pressed bed linen, she has always tried for that.

In the far corner, there is an iron-framed single bed. Tabitha goes to it, sits down. She pushes her slippers off with her toes, swings her legs up and nestles back. From here, she can see the finger of land called Litty, the nettle patch which no-one has ever mowed or dug up because of the voles that live there. The tiny, tufty-eared Parlan vole – it is its own species, and rare, and she has seen one or two in her time or at least the nettles swaying where a vole has darted from. Beyond Litty, there is the water. The sea – scattered with light. What view was ever better than this?

She wiggles her toes in their polka-dot socks.

Tabitha drinks her pink wine.

* * *

You knock.

No, you. I can’t take my hand away, it’s under his head – see?

Ian curses. He is aching. He has carried a thousand sheep in his life, slung round his neck like a collar and he’s carried boat engines and tractor wheels and his own kids when they were young – but not this weight, and not so far. I’m too old for this, he thinks.

He kicks at Tabitha’s door. Three kicks, low down near the doorframe – all too hard.

The men shift. They are steaming like horses, sweat on their top lips and brows. The man they carry groans overhead so that Ian says, hurry up …

The kicking must have startled her for when Tabitha unlocks the door, she peers around it as if unsure of what she might find. But then she sees Ian. She sees all of them, widens her eyes. Looks like you’d better come in, she says.

She leans against the wall to let them pass.

The room smells of disinfectant and a false, lavender scent which comes from a bottle plugged into the wall. Put him on the bed.

He goes down heavily.

All four men exhale. Then they stretch, step away. Nathan straightens and his back clicks. Jonny rotates his right shoulder and says Jesus. What do you think he weighs?

Tabitha is by the bed. Foremost, she is the nurse – not the aunt, not the great-aunt or the friend – and she busies herself with what a nurse must do, lifting the man’s head and arranging the pillow beneath it. She takes his wrist, watches the wall clock as she does so. With her eyes still on the clock she asks who is he? Do we know him?

Ian says no.

What happened?

Sam found him.

Where?

At Sye.

On the stones?

Just lying there, says Sam. I thought he was dead.

She nods; the man’s pulse is good. Tabitha can feel the warm bloom of his breath against her arm. She feels the edge of the vest he wears, finds it is cold and hardening with salt – so she opens a nearby drawer, lifts scissors out. When had she last used them? For what? On whom?

She cuts away his clothing. The chest that appears is dark with hair. Has he spoken?

Jonny shrugs. He’s muttered a bit –

He tried to say something, Nathan tells her.

So he’s been conscious?

Yes.

He didn’t lose it at any point?

Not since we’ve been with him.

Any wounds?

His hands – Ian points.

She looks. Ian’s right – the fingernails are torn, and three of his knuckles are bruised. When she turns the hands over, she finds his palms are dirtied, rough and red-coloured. Pinheads of blood. Grains of sand. Grazes.

From what?

Rope, maybe? Hard to say. And here …

There is more, too. On his left hand, in the soft web of flesh between the thumb and forefinger, there is a very different wound. It is neither fresh nor old. It is reddish-brown. Perfectly round, like an eye.

Tabitha cannot know what caused such marks. But hands mend and mend quickly; hands do not worry her too much. It is his head that Tabitha turns to now: the head, which she always thought of as a world in its own right – with its seas and land and weather, its mysteries that, in fact, no human brain can fathom. She snaps on latex gloves. Slowly, she starts to feel through his hair. She searches for cuts, or swellings, or a tender part that will make him wince. His hair is so thick she must move it aside, in sections. Where there is scalp, she presses it; like this she makes her way round his head – from ear to ear, from brow to nape. His eyes half-open. His lips move, as if he dreams.

No sign of swelling, she says.

That’s good. Right? Sam is anxious.

Yes, Sam – it’s good.

She peels off the gloves. There is a woollen blanket at the foot of the bed and she pulls it up over her patient, over his long, muscular legs. It does not reach beyond his chest so she tucks it round him, brings his arms to his sides. There is, Tabitha thinks, a strong smell in the room – of sweat, from the men, and cigarette smoke, but also fish and brine and an earthiness. Sheep.

She turns to them. You needn’t stay. It’s late.

He’s OK? He’s not dying?

No, he’s not dying. A childish question from Sam. He stands there – awkward, thin, with sunburn and his unbrushed hair. Tabitha had delivered this boy. That day feels like yesterday. She remembers his mother in this room, refusing to lie down or to sit – she’d paced the room as an animal might. And then Samuel came out as she’d crouched on the floor, gripping the table legs, with Tabitha saying one more! That’s it! How long ago was that? Two decades and more. She feels sorry for him, suddenly. He is both so old and so young.

He’s dehydrated, and he’s exhausted. And I’ll give him a tetanus jab for the sake of it. But other than that, he seems alright. She shrugs. We’ll see what happens when he wakes. It’s sleep he needs, now.

They look at each other, briefly.

Ian moves first. He slaps his thighs once, rises up from the chair saying right. That’ll do me. Come on, Jonny.

Jonny follows his father, walking in the low, rhythmic way that young men seem to – nonchalant, easy. He says see you, Uncle Nathan. He does not speak to Sam as he passes him. He brushes the leaves of the African violet; his draught moves the unpinned corner of a poster on mental health.

The two men walk out into the garden and are gone.

Sam waits for a moment further. Then, will you be alright?

Alright?

I mean, here – on your own. With this man who …

Tabitha smiles. I’ll be fine, Sam. I’ve dealt with far worse than a sleeping man, I can promise you that. Will you tell your father what happened? I’ll call him in the morning. When he was born, Sam Lovegrove had been jaundiced. His skin had the hue of iodine, or old tea, and he had been so small. Now he is – what? Six foot?

Are you sure?

Honestly. Go.

So he, too, goes. He steps into the fading light.

It means that Nathan is left. He stands against the wall by the door, hands in his pockets, one ankle crossed over the other. His head is down as if looking at the floor, but his eyes are looking through his hair at the stranger who lies asleep on the bed beneath a blue blanket. It is a gaze of intent – a hunter’s look, or a detective’s.

I thought you’d linger, the nurse says.

* * *

He can smell the latex gloves and the glass of pink wine, and Nathan can smell fish in this room. The tang of it.

His aunt moves carefully. Plump Aunt Tab, with her pearl earrings and cotton-pale hair. She clicks her tongue, as she works – half-humming – and this is a sound that is hers, entirely. She seems to half-hum all the time. When he was a boy, Nathan would hear his aunt before he saw her because of this sound or her bicycle bell. She still has that bicycle. It has a wicker basket, a slight squeak, and he feels like a boy when he sees his aunt on it – leaning forwards with the effort. Tabitha, who warms a room by entering it with her cheery only me!

What do you think? he asks her.

She has her back to him. She is standing on her tiptoes, reaching up to the top shelf of a cabinet. With her fingertips she coaxes down a plastic tub that has envelopes in. These envelopes have transparent windows through which he can see needles.

What do I think? Well … She considers it. It’s strange, that’s for sure. Where has he come from?

A swimmer, maybe. Got tired.

Maybe. I’ll call Rona – see if a guest is missing.

Tabitha places a needle in a metal dish. It chimes like a bell. Then Nathan watches as she moves to a second cabinet, takes a small key from her pocket and unlocks it. Inside, there are vials.

Tab? Don’t you think …? But he can’t say it. Nathan isn’t even sure what he is trying to say except that he is shaken, confused, and that he does not like what’s happened and does not want to be here but nor can he take his eyes off the iron-framed bed in the corner of the room, or leave. His aunt tilts her head. She is waiting for more words from him, and he has seen his mother stand like this. He has looked for his mother in a crowd and found her because of the way she has tilted her head, as a bird might listen for worms. They have the same nose, too. They aren’t close and never have been. But they are sisters in how they speak, and move.

Don’t I think … what?

Doesn’t matter.

But it does – it does. And Tabitha knows this for she puts the vial down and comes towards him. She puts her hand on the back of his hand and says I know what you’re thinking. I thought it too. When I opened the door and saw the four of you holding this man in the air, I saw his hair and his beard, and I thought … She pauses, smiles. But –

He nods.

We’ll find out who he is. When he wakes up, we’ll ask him.

Nathan knows there are many words that were never said, and must be said one day – but he cannot say them now. Not late in the evening and not in this room.

He feels tired, suddenly – bone-tired, heavy.

Go, says Tabitha. She squeezes his upper arm.

* * *

Nathan walks back through the fields. It is past nine. The sky is eerie – not light, not dark. At the north of the island the lighthouse is awake and it finds him – five half-seconds every minute of being dazzled, white. He climbs over fences, ducks under wires.

Last night there had been a northerly wind and last night he had not slept. All night, he had lain awake. I should have known, he thinks.

He thinks, too, how sore his back is from the man’s weight. He thinks of the words he’d been trying to say, as they carried him – sea? It had sounded like sea, which isn’t so odd since he must have been in it for a long time, at least. Whoever he is, he has swum – lungfuls of salt, salty-eyed. And as Nathan walks up the driveway to his home he thinks, suddenly, of the time when he and his younger brother had caught a crab off Litty’s pier with a piece of string and a chicken bone – the biggest crab they’d ever seen. It was huge, orange-mottled. They’d wanted to keep it as a pet – and so they’d charged home, put it in the bathroom sink and hidden side by side in the airing cupboard, waiting for Hester to come to clean her teeth. Two screams from their sister – one at the crab, and one as they burst out at her with a shouted boo! He hears it now – her screaming. And he can hear his brother’s laughter – bright, like piano scales. He can see that crab.

He sniffs. Nathan looks up at the house in the distance. There is a light on at Crest. It is the kitchen light, he can tell, and he pictures Maggie at that moment – cracking an egg against a glass bowl or rinsing vegetables. She holds her hair back with a pencil, sometimes. Perhaps she is doing that now.

And Nathan thinks, too, of his wife.

When was the last time a person was washed ashore? A living person? It’s not happened in his lifetime. The sea takes lives; it doesn’t give them. There are no stories of a sea-given life.

I will wake up tomorrow. I will have dreamt this.

As Nathan reaches High Haven, he slows. The wind-chimes stir. Its lights are on and the windows are open and the curtains drift in and out, in and out, like ghosts.

* * *

By the harbour wall, Sam vomits. He has both hands against the stones, his legs apart. Afterwards, he spits. He wipes his mouth with his sleeve, steps away from it. Above him, a waning moon.

At Wind Rising, Ian goes to the fridge. He finds a bottle of beer and pulls it out by the neck. He shuts the fridge with his foot, twists the cap and drinks with his eyes closed.

When it is nearly midnight, Tabitha leaves the mending room. She has given a tetanus injection, and she’s rubbed antiseptic cream on his hands. She’s filled a glass of water and in his half-sleep, the man has drunk it – spilling some so that Tabitha had to wipe his chin, mother-like. She leaves him sleeping on his side.

In her bedroom, she takes off her wristwatch and lays it on the chest of drawers. She unpins her earrings, one at a time. When she goes to draw the curtains, she sees the grass blowing and she narrows her eyes when she sees it – is the wind northerly? It seems to be. She will know by morning.

By morning everyone will know. Within hours, there will be talking. The whole island will be whispering – have you heard …? A bearded man was found at Sye. Yes, there was; he sleeps in her mending room.

Once she is in her dressing gown, Tabitha goes back there. His breathing is steady, and deep. Parla, she thinks, is known for its lighthouse. It’s known for the puffins which nest on its north coast, its tea room and its tender lamb. It’s known for the wreck of the Anne-Rosa which divers come for, or used to. And it’s known for the accident nearly four years ago which no-one has recovered from, as far as she can tell – certainly not Nathan, and not Ian and not Sam.

She settles next to the wrought-iron bed.

Her own life changed nearly four years ago. Everyone’s life changed three years, ten months, three weeks and four days ago, and we do not speak of it – we never speak of what we lost. As if the loss would be greater if it was named and talked over. But it could not be greater.

He sleeps. This man who looks like Tom but is not Tom. She knows that he is someone else.

Tabitha stays with him all night. Sometimes he whispers; sometimes his lips move soundlessly and his hands seem to take hold of the air. He is handsome – incredibly so. He is a gift. His face … She cannot stop looking at this person lying here.

She is a sensible woman. Tabitha is the woman of swabs and antiseptic washes. She has seen sights that no-one on this island has seen or ever will and she likes to think she can keep her feelings packed away – popped on ice, perhaps. She has secrets that no-one knows of, certainly. But this is different. This man is not like anyone else who has lain on this bed, and it is late, and the sea is loud, and her feelings are not packed away or kept on ice tonight.

Please, she whispers. She does not often pray.

Let this be the start of … Of what? What is she wanting? What does she hope for, as she’s sitting here? The only words that she can find are something special. Something lovely. New, and lovely, and good.

There are moments that come to matter in our lives – defining, powerful moments. Sometimes they happen so quietly that they slip by unmarked so that only later do we look back and realise that they changed everything; sometimes, they are known for exactly what they are. Tabitha knows that this matters. Tonight is a night she will not forget. It is a curious, extraordinary beginning. This will not happen twice – not in her lifetime. And it is the start of something that she knows – as a nurse knows, instinctively – will change them all. She isn’t sure how, but it will.

Let him stay, she whispers this. He is better than a bottle top, or a lone boot. He is better than any broken shell could be.

And the man stirs at the moment. He takes hold of the blanket, turns onto his back. Sea … he says, as if missing it.

Sea … as if that is where he longs to be.

The North Wind

Many years ago, there was a man with a bristled moustache who said mark the air … He’d wander the fields, calling it; he’d take hold of wrists, at the harbour. In his last years of life, it was all he ever said. Mark the air, do you hear me?

He was one of the Tans. There are stories of the Tans that I do not love too much – a taste for whale blubber and for marrying too close. It was the Tans who’d see a distant ship and wish for it to founder – so they’d swing false lights at night, to lure it onto rocks. They knew (it was said) how to break knuckles with one swift blow, or how to grip a man’s gold tooth and pull. Those were the Tans or most of them. Or so the stories go.

Lucas Tan was the last of his line. He’d lost his only son at sea. And it had not been the sea’s fault, for the waves had been calm enough that day; a strong north wind had caught the boy, blown him overboard. That north wind … Afterwards, Lucas swore. He stayed away from church. He eyed the clouds, clutched the bottle by its neck and said mark the air … You listen to me. And those are the words he’s remembered for – those, and those only. Slurred, pained, whisky-warm.

Was he right? Perhaps. For there are many winds. And there are so many stories of wind on Parla that if you ask to hear them, if you were to go to Abigail Coyle and say what do you know about the different winds? a new wind would appear, as she answered. A fast, unending rush of air would come from between her gums: the different winds? Oh! So many … Where do I start? The wind that brings in fitful sleep? The first gale of the autumn? With the east wind, her husband swears that he can smell the mainland – heat, diesel, milk, spices, perfume, human breath.

But it’s the north wind that she’ll speak of, above all other winds.

The changing wind, Abigail told me. It never blows without changing the island in some way … For better, or worse? Who knows. It can do either, and that’s the truth. For the north wind has both mended hearts and broken them. It has brought both beauty and misfortune, restlessness and sleep. It has carried in babies but it has also taken lives and so the islanders worry when they hear the north wind blowing. They fear death – actual, physical, permanent death, but also the non-literal, where the heart has kept beating but its wish to keep doing so is small, very small if there at all.

* * *

It is past midnight.

In the house called Wind Rising, Leah is awake. She lies in bed and looks at the ceiling she has known all her life. The same paint on the same walls.

Leah is thinking of men. She thinks of Sam Lovegrove who ran into their kitchen five hours ago, saying Ian? Ian? She’d heard him. She’d put down her book, padded out onto the landing and looked down through the banisters. Ian? Listen – a man’s come ashore … She’d seen his blond head.

Then they had left, gone outside. And Leah had stayed on the landing. She’d listened to the sounds of a house quietening – the fading of footsteps, the slop inside the kettle, having been poured.

And she’d heard a tut-tut. A pause; then a rapid tut-tut-tut-tut-tut.

Leah had known what it was. She’d turned, walked into the bathroom where the sound was louder, looked up. Tut. The air vent – white, with the strands of cobwebs on it. It only ever rattles when the north wind blows.

A man’s come ashore …

Leah sits up now. She kneels by the window, pushes the window up so that air pours in like water. Her hair stirs; her nightdress does.

I could be nowhere else. This is a Parlan night. It is a night in her Parlan bedroom – with the pink walls of her childhood and the known, old sound of a book’s pages being turned by the breeze, one by one. It is a night like a thousand other Parlan nights in which she has listened to the sea’s constant sound – not a breathing back and forth as might be imagined but a low roar that does not change pitch or volume. Tonight could be like all the other nights.

But it isn’t quite.

She’d loved that tut-tut-tut. She’d smiled at it, in the bathroom – and she is smiling now. A change … How Leah has longed for a change. For years, she has watched the same sights, on Parla – how the lighthouse turns, how sheep kneel to graze, how the Star’s gangplank drops onto the quayside at the precise time it’s meant to. The mainland’s shape does not alter; the rising damp in the downstairs loo does not fade. And for years she has heard the same conversations – about ferries, wool, if the hens are laying, if Milton has fresh milk in stock, whether she’s had breakfast yet, so that Leah has rolled her eyes, thought it is always the same, always the same. Why is it always the same? Or at least, she used to think it. In time, the island made her heavier. It made her lie in her bedroom and think of nothing – nothing at all.

This slow, salty sameness – day in, day out.

But now? Tut-tut. And a man has come. The sea and the north wind left a man at Sye for Sam, of all people, to find. And as Leah had stood on the landing and looked down onto his red-blond hair she’d felt … what? Hope. That’s what. She’d barely recognised it. She has not been hopeful – for what good could it ever have done? How might hope have helped her? And so to have it now, in a dark bedroom, feels tender and lovely and absurd. It is a green shoot amongst the snow.

A man’s come ashore …

There will be an explanation, no doubt, and it will be plain and disappointing when it comes: he is a drunk or a lost guest or a man who fell off a passing ship or a swimmer who grew tired. It will be dull, and the green shoot will be lost, trodden on. I’ll go back to the old feelings – the old weighing down. But tonight, for now, Leah hopes that he is something better; she hopes that he is not merely a man who fell overboard, or a prankster.

Hope. It is the frailest of words.

Others are awake, too.

There is a man in the island’s Old Fish Store who lies, far from sleep. He also knows the wind is northerly. He knows this because of the sounds he can hear – the clear ting of halyards and the wire fences’ song. He can hear the sea saying stash … stash … He is Jim Coyle and he knows his winds.

In a farmhouse with rusting cars outside, Nathan sits in the dark. He has a glass in his hand; he waits for the lighthouse’s beam to whiten the curtains, lighten the room.

The widow at Crest is also awake. She squeezes a camomile tea bag against the side of a mug with a spoon, carries that tea bag to her compost bin. The kitchen light illuminates the night-time grass by her window and she watches it, spoon in hand. The grass flurries. She notes the wind’s direction – northerly? She stands in her pyjamas with her unbrushed hair.

After this, she climbs the stairs. And she sleeps; she sleeps under a white cotton sheet, and what she does not know – how could she possibly? – is that when she next sees that camomile tea bag, dried out and paler in her compost bin, everything will be different. She will look at it and think when I last saw that, I didn’t know … This is Maggie, and she knows how the smallest of things can take on new meanings, how a lifetime can change in a second or less. That used tea bag which is settling on the bottom of a plastic tub will, within a few hours, remind her of before – of a time when she knew less, felt less, and when Sye was a cove and nothing more. It will come to have a thousand meanings. In the hours ahead, Maggie will stare at that tea bag as if it can solve it all. But for now, it is only a tea bag. It sits in its own damp dark.

The lighthouse turns, as always.

Far out, a whale surfaces. Nobody sees it, but it does.

Three

The sky begins to lighten a little after four. In the east, there is a feathered grey, the softest of yellows. The daylight moves across the sea.

At nearly five, it comes to the eastern cliffs – the half-moon harbour, the towers of rock. The seabirds that roost here – fulmars, herring gulls – blink as the sunlight finds them. They bring their beaks down to their chests, and preen.

At the island’s south-eastern point is the main harbour. Slowly, its water turns from black to blue. Light moves along the old sea wall, the railings of the Morning Star and the smaller boats that are moored there – Calypso, Sea Fairy, Lady Caroline. Their ropes shine with hanging weed. The windows of the harbourmaster’s house glint, so that the child who sleeps behind them sniffs and turns onto her side, away from the light. There is a young man in this house who has not slept. He lies on his back, stares.

Above the harbour, on its south side, lies the Old Fish Store. It has a black slate roof – the sunlight strikes the nearest side of it. This is a squat, rectangular house. It is cold, too, as it needed to be in the days when the fish were kept here, laid out in a line. No fish in it now. Instead, two people lie in their bed with two blankets on. She sleeps, but he is stirring. He can hear the house creak, as it warms.

On with the sunlight.

A lane heads west, inland. It leaves the quayside and climbs past the ragwort, past the stones walls that have fallen, mostly, so that sheep step across them or nestle in their hollowed parts. These stones have lichen on them – as yellow as yolk, and lace-like – and they grow more yellow as the sunlight comes. The lane passes a picnic table and a phone box. There is a viewpoint here, with a large wooden board that names the other islands that can be seen from this spot – Utta, Cantalay, far-off Merme. By day, there are always tourists here, hands on their hips as they read it. But not now – not at this moment. It is too early. There are only sparrows and their short, burred flight.

The ground begins to flatten out. The island stretches ahead. The lane runs past more ragwort and a few small, blackened circles of earth where campfires have been, for this is the island’s wild camping ground. The isle’s airstrip is here too. It is rarely used: it exists for emergencies or when the sea is so rough that the Morning Star cannot sail and supplies on the island run low. A wooden hut says Welcome to Parla but salt has blistered its paint.

After this, there is the crossroads. It’s small – a place where four dusty tracks meet each other, where most of the island’s homes cluster like barnacles. Here, too, is the tiny primary school with its chalked snake drawn in the playground. It has hopscotch squares and a single swing; its roof is cherry-red. The school has five windows and in each one there is a letter, cut from coloured card. PARLA. The sunshine lights these letters up. It lights, also, the metal boot scraper outside the house next door. This house is the schoolteacher’s; the only Bundy daughter lives here with her husband and son. Also, it is one of the few homes with trees: there are birches and an apple tree which no longer bears fruit. Bird feeders hang from them, for George loves his birds. They are what brought him here, to this island; they are also what led him to Hester – which makes him love his birds even more. At this moment, they are both sleeping. But the birds are awake and they squabble on the feeders, spill seed onto the ground.

The church is also here. It is wooden, white-painted, with a cross on its roof. The minister’s house is wooden also but it remains wood-coloured and its wood is splintery. It has a trellis with ivy growing on it so that its door is half-hidden by its bottle-coloured leaves. They brush the minister’s bald head when he goes in or out. He – Lorcan – has counted the steps it takes him to get from his bed to the altar and it is thirty-seven. He can hear the latch on the church door being opened, as he lies in his bath.

Parla Stores sits by a rhododendron bush. The shop is cave-like, inside – its shelves brim with tins, jars, bottles. There are also picnic tables outside, and an awning. There is no pub on Parla but this is the nearest thing to it. Milton sells beer, wine and spirits and turns a blind eye to locals sitting under his awning with aluminium cans. He likes hearing their laughter, coming through the door; he feels proud, somehow, to hear it – as if they have come here to see him. And Milton is proud of his noticeboard for amongst the ferry times and useful phone numbers he has pinned a plastic folder with leaflets inside – a map of Parla, self-guided tours, a little natural history, Things to See and Do. He is proud because he wrote them. They are all his work – typed out, and folded.

The crossroads is the heart of the island. The school, the shop, the half-pub and the church, all side by side. It is where the news is, where the stories are passed on.

South of here, the lane grasses over. It winds down past the island’s graveyard and its long blackthorn hedge to Lowfield. The sun barely finds this house for it is hidden by grass and gorse. The banks of earth beside it are so high that sheep have stepped onto its roof, or so the nurse tells it. But the sun finds her bicycle and its bell. Beyond Lowfield, there is Tavey – the pig farm where no-one lives now. The pigs are gone and its people too. For years it has been empty yet its furniture stands under dust-sheets, as if expecting to be used any day now. Nettles grow freely in these parts. In the nettle patch near Litty there are voles – anxious, with eyes like polished pins. They dart into undergrowth like gunshots. The lane ends on a shingle beach.

North of the crossroads, the island rises up. It gathers height quickly. After the school, the grass becomes sharper and thistles grow by the roadside. Here, the sheep are more plentiful. They lift up from the lane with their swinging, clotted tails. The first house is High Haven – a small farmhouse down a single track. It has a wood-pile under tarpaulin and four cars in its driveway, all without tyres, or engines, or doors, but Nathan keeps them all the same. It is in his nature, perhaps – to keep, to store. He hates loss; he has lost enough things. He looks at these old cars, now. Nathan is awake – he has barely slept – and he stands in the kitchen with a mug of tea and an aspirin on his tongue. He swallows the pill with a toss of his head, and stares at the empty wheel-arches. Beyond, he can see Wind Rising. It’s the biggest farmhouse, and the oldest. Nathan grew up there. Now, his brother’s family live in it – he sees the open-sided barn, the row of Calor gas bottles, the silage in black bales. Their dog is scratching her ear with her hind leg and Nathan can hear her chain ringing, or he thinks he can. He looks at his wristwatch; not yet six.

The woman at Easterly is also awake. Her cottage is beyond High Haven, along the same track so she must pass those cars propped up on bricks whenever she leaves her home. She does not like those cars, and she’s told Nathan this. But why would he listen? At this precise moment, she stands in her dressing gown. She rubs rose-scented hand cream into her hands as she waits for the toast to pop up, and she thinks of her children, or those that are left. Emmeline lists them – Ian, Hester, Nathan. Her hands tell the story of a life on a farm – age spots, scars, papery skin on the backs of them – and she turns them over, studying.

The lane keeps rising. The north is the wildest part of the isle – the gorse is wind-bent, and the ditches are deep. In winter it is a harsh place, not made for life. But in the summer, the skylarks sing down upon it and to kneel and touch the earth is to feel its warmth. It is sunlit here, now. Here, at the island’s highest point, all the coasts can be seen. A house with a yellow door perches in the north-east corner, near the cliff edge. It has gulls on its roof and tomato plants in its porch and its name is carved into driftwood – Crest, propped by the door. The woman who lives here is brushing her teeth. She is in her early forties but looks older somehow. She bends down to the sink, spits.

After this, there is only the lighthouse. Its lantern is, now, sleeping. So, too, is the girl who lives at its base, who has turned the old lighthouse-keepers’ quarters into a tea room and a few hostel rooms. She has worked hard for it. She sleeps on her front, in a floral vest and knickers that match. As the sunlight finds the back wall of her room, her alarm clock goes off and she stretches, rubs her eyes. Six fifteen. Rona could do with more sleep but she has plenty to do – breakfast, linen, fresh scones, her accounts. She tells herself this, as she turns off the alarm: get up. A new day. In theory anything could happen but Rona is pretty sure it won’t.

* * *

Parla wakes slowly. It stretches, lowers a foot from its bed.

In Wind Rising, the top of an orange juice carton is pulled apart. Constance wears an oversized man’s pyjama shirt that reaches her knees and a pair of walking socks. Her hair was black, once – raven-black, almost blue; now she has streaks of grey in it. Like a misty night, she tells herself. It is her reassurance.

She pours the juice. A man?

At Sye.

Dead?

Nope, he’s alive. Or he was last night.

Who is he?

No idea. Without taking his eyes off the paper, Ian bites into his toast.

None?

He was barely conscious – he says this with his mouth full. We couldn’t ask him much.

She looks out of the window, drinks. Constance was almost asleep when her husband returned last night. He’d climbed in beside her, beer-smelling, and she’d thought to ask what happened tonight? Where? But he’d been snoring promptly. He’d lain on his back, slept deeply, and so Constance could only imagine.

She’d not imagined this. A man washing ashore … Incredulous. Have you spoken to Ed about it?

Sam was there. He’ll have told him.

He should be told, Ian. A fishing boat or something might have gone down. There might be others out there who need saving. Shouldn’t you phone him?

Sam, he repeats, will do it. Or Tab will. Leave it.

Constance watches him. And as always, when she watches him, she thinks he is my children’s father. She thinks, too, he’s my husband and that amazes her – that she is old enough to be married or that she was ever bold enough. But her first thoughts are of the children, always, who are not so childlike these days. Will Jonny have the same wide neck, when he’s older? Will Leah’s skin also wrinkle by her mouth, in time? They take after their father, she knows that – in their looks, and quiet ways.

She sips. Ian?

He makes a sound – annoyed. He wants to read the paper.

What does he look like? This man?

What?

This man from Sye. What does he look like?

She waits. Constance waits for the answer, and the longer she waits, the more she thinks I know what he looks like. She can guess.

Dark, he says, casually.

Skinned?

No – dark-haired. His skin’s pale.

Not old, then?

Late thirties, maybe. Early forties. Hard to tell.

Beard?

He looks up. Constance. It is his warning voice.

She meets his stare. She holds her gaze until he looks away. Perhaps what surprises her is not that she was bold enough to marry, but bold enough to marry him – Ian, whose temper was as known as the Anne-Rosa is. And like the Anne-Rosa, it was mistrusted and whispered of and could rise out of the darkness, slick with hanging weed. She’d been told of it. But Constance was never afraid. Once, just once, in their early days of marriage they had argued about the farm – what had it been? A broken machine? A sheepdog that was not learning? She cannot recall it now and perhaps it does not matter. But Ian had struck the wall. He’d given a single roar and slammed his fist against it so that the wall shook. That had silenced them both – from loud voices to a sudden, incredible hush in which Constance could hear the dust settling onto the floor. Hands on her knees, she examined the plasterwork – broken, powdering. Then she pulled on her shoes and, without a word, she walked down the lane towards the harbour – meaning, absolutely, to catch the ferry and make her way back to the mainland, to the town she grew up in and still missed sometimes. Ian followed, pleading. I’m so sorry … Stay. It never happened twice. On that quayside, Constance turned to her husband and vowed – swore with gritted teeth and her hand to her chest – that she would leave him for good if he ever struck another thing. Anything, Ian – the wall, the dog, a pillow, her. I promise. Do you understand me? Yes, he understood her; Constance always keeps her word. And he has shouted since, and he’s slammed doors, and once, having argued with Nathan, he kicked the rainwater barrel with such power that it ruptured and the rush of water sent the chickens running in the way that chickens do – as if the world is ending. Ian can curse like no-one else she knows. And it is blunt, unimaginative swearing so that she winces. But that’s all he’s done, in twenty-four years. It is all he’ll ever do.

Constance drinks her orange juice.

There is the drip of the kitchen tap.

Someone needs to tell Emmeline, she says, and pads out of the room.

It is the peonies she loves. She has always been told that the island’s weather and its salt and thin soil would not suit them, that peonies could not grow on Parla. But she has grown them. She has tended them, and hoped, and here they are now. They grow in a cluster, facing south. Their pinkness makes her heart fill up, each time. When she walks back along the lane towards Easterly she sees them, and smiles – and it is like coming home to a person, she thinks. It is like being greeted. It is like a hello.

Emmeline kneels beside them. She holds a watering can and wears her sheepskin slippers. Beautiful, she tells them. You are doing very well.

It is one of the small benefits of living on her own: she can grow the flowers she has always longed to. Thirty years ago, any flowers she tried for were crushed by footballs and children’s feet; fifteen years ago, she would have looked out of the window on a Sunday as she cooked the roast dinner for Jack and wished that she could be out in the flowerbeds with a trowel and a bag of manure, rather than sieving the gravy. She called it a woman’s lot, back then. People matter more than flowers, of course. But now she has the time – at last. Foxgloves and hydrangeas. And she loves her peonies.

Emmeline stands, looks out to sea. The unending sea. She grew up in the lighthouse. Her, her parents and Tabitha had lived in one of the three houses at the lighthouse’s base, so that the sea was so close and so loud that it felt like a fifth person – a family member who was never far away. Her earliest memory is being shown the pots of paraffin whilst licking the butter off a currant bun; her second earliest is polishing the lens. And she had loved her lighthouse life. She’d loved winding the weights back up to the top of the stairs, and learning Morse code, and she had loved the view so much that she’d dreamed of keeping the light herself one day. Emmeline Bright – with her own jacket and hat. But lighthouse-keeping was never seen as woman’s work. When she married Jack Bundy at eighteen, she left the lantern behind her. She moved south and inland, into the farm called Wind Rising. From light and high seas to a dark-roomed house; from saltwater to sheep. Only half a mile from one life to the other, but those had been such different lives. And how many years had she walked through the creaking rooms of Wind Rising, with its missing roof tiles and open fire which threw smoke into the sitting room when the wind shifted itself? Long enough. Those years of smelling of sheep, of wedging paper under the uneven legs of chairs. All four children were born in that house, or near it. All of them were late to show their faces except Tom – of course. Tom leapt out early, as if too excited to wait.

She pushes fertiliser into the earth. Easterly – like all names on Parla, its name is forthright, brusque. It is simple – as if we are all fools and need to be told plainly. She, Jack and their youngest child moved here when it became free. A man called Strutt – a mainlander, sullen, bad teeth and bad manners – had died during those wild winter storms of nearly thirty years ago, and Emmeline had carried cardboard boxes of toys, books, bed linen, clothes and kitchen utensils over to Easterly in the following spring. Ian, as the eldest son, stayed at Wind Rising. He had been twenty-three that March. He took on the farm, with Nathan to help him – as boys were meant to, back then. They had no choice in it, really, for their father had started his heart trouble in the autumn before and could no longer farm. It had changed Jack – that shock, the air ambulance and the diet that was forced upon him left him a weaker man who could no longer haul sheep onto their rumps to shear them, or change tractor tyres. And Hester had already met George Moss. So Ian and Nathan became real farmers; and Emmeline, Jack and young Tom moved over the fields to this easterly place.

She counts on her fingers. Tom had been thirteen years old.

Those were my best years. Perhaps she should say that her best years were the first few of her marriage, or when all her children were young – but that’s not the truth. She loved the days when her eldest boys were farmers, men in their twenties who were strong and well-made and living their own lives, men who’d kiss their mother’s hair when they came in to see her but who went into her fridge without asking as if they were still small boys. She’d smiled, at that. Hester was in love – blooming with it. And Tom had spent his days running through fields or on beaches, coming back in the evenings with his pockets filled with shells or feathers or mussels for eating and with a head filled with stories. Mum, guess what I heard? She loved how he smelled. She loved how her youngest boy filled the house with his own sounds – his voice as he talked to the cat, his music, his bedsprings, the scuffing of his socked feet on the kitchen’s flagstone floor.

Those were Jack’s best years too, in some ways. He had nearly died, and survived it. A quietness came to him that he had never had before – gratitude, perhaps, or an awareness for the first time that he would be gone one day. He was a better husband, after his heart attack. He became the man she’d hoped for, all along. She remembers holding his hand in this garden, on a summer’s morning like this.

Her peonies nod in the breeze.

How does a person ever speak of their loss? How do they find the right words for it? Emmeline has never really been the talking kind.

She looks down at her hands. The hand cream has served no purpose. She has soil beneath her fingernails, again – brown crescent moons. Only a farmer or his wife would have hands like this, day in and day out. She had made her wedding vows with neat, square nails, and the following evening she’d glanced down at her hands – dirtied from the chicken shed, and from picking blackberries from the patch by the back door – and had thought this is how it will be, now. These are my married hands. She nearly lost her wedding ring, once, during the lambing season. A farmer’s wife’s hands, even now.

Briefly, there is resentment. It rises a little, like a far-out wave.

Emmeline looks up. A man is coming to her. He is a man, but he is also one of her sons, and so despite his age she still sees the child who had knocked his front milk teeth out when he fell on the quayside, the boy who believed, solemnly, that he’d heard sleigh bells on the roof one Christmas Eve. Nathan wears a white shirt. He walks with his hands in his pockets and when he sees her, he frees one hand and holds it up at her. He bends his fingers in a small, boyish wave.

Hello, she says. She hugs him by the peonies, and she can smell the sea in his hair. She does not hug for long, but when Emmeline goes to pull away from him she finds that Nathan is still holding her. He holds her very tightly, too tightly. She waits. She stays as she is, being held, and it is only when his arms start, at last, to soften, that she leans back from him and looks at his face – at the straight nose, the shining eyes – and she breathes, what is it? What’s wrong?

* * *

Nathan knew it had to be him who told her. Ian wouldn’t think of it. He’d call it unimportant or nothing to do with me. He probably slept well last night, snoring in Wind Rising as if nothing had changed, as if no man had been found at Sye.

Nathan has not slept at all. He knows it shows. Kitty said as much when she crept downstairs to find him still sitting in the armchair, an empty glass tilted in his lap. She’d said, you look like crap, Mr Bundy, smiling and stroking his knee.

As he’d walked along the lane to Easterly he’d tried out the different words in his head, whispered them under his breath, and he’d hoped that perhaps his mother would be out – that he’d find a note on the doormat saying gone to shop or elsewhere. But he’d looked up and seen her. She’d been tending to those pink flowers of hers, and he’d thought she looks old. The hunched back, the iron-grey hair.

When they’d hugged, Nathan had felt small again.

Now, they stand inside. She is looking at him, waiting. She licks her lips as she always does when she is nervous, and she says is it Kitty?

No.

Hester, then? Ian? The grandchildren?

No, Mum. Everyone’s fine.

You? Are you fine?

Been better …

Are you ill?

Mum … He’s forgotten the words. He tries to think of them but cannot so he puts his hands on top of her hands and says listen. Some stuff happened last night. At Sye.

Sye? She is frowning. The cove?

Sam Lovegrove was walking up there –

What happened? Did he fall, or …?

Sam’s OK, too. Mum, listen – he found a man. Washed up on the beach.

Emmeline is still.

Sam thought he was dead, but he wasn’t. He was lying on his front … Sam ran to the farm and got us – me, Ian, Jonny. We all went to Sye, and we carried him back. Took him to Aunt Tabitha’s.

Nathan pauses, breathes. He watches his mother’s face, and waits until her eyes show what he knows she will, shortly, be thinking. He waits. He waits. And then he sees her eyes change.

She says, Oh God …

Mum, it isn’t Tom.

How do you know? It might be.

He takes her wrists. No. It’s not. That’s what I’m here to tell you. It is not Tom.

Does he look like him?

Nathan winces. In part, I guess. Yes. But he is too tall. He is too tall, and he is wider than Tom ever was. The teeth are wrong, and –

It’s been four years. People change in four years. They grow.

Mum –

He’s at Tabitha’s? She breaks frees of him, hauls her jacket off the hook behind the door. I’ve got to go there.

Mum, he’s not Tom –

She shakes her head, she can’t hear him. She is fumbling in the pocket of her jacket, finds the car keys, and she trips out of the house into the sunlight and gets into the car.

Nathan calls, Mum! But he only calls it once. He is too tired to stop her, and knows she cannot be stopped. He stands on the grass and watches her go – over the potholes, past the log-pile. Once her car is gone he shuts his eyes.

The wind pushes at him. He can feel it, buffeting.

When he looks again he sees a plastic toy windmill on a stick, beside the fence. It turns, in the breeze. It is red, or it was – years of sun have faded it. He watches it turn. A northerly breeze.

What now? He knows.

Somebody else needs to be told – about this washed-up man.

* * *

The plastic windmill turns, and catches the light.

In the mending room at Lowfield, the stranger still sleeps. Tabitha watches his chest rise and fall.

In the harbour, a gull stands on a boat’s tarpaulin cover. It drinks from a pool of rainwater that has gathered there. To swallow, the gull lifts his beak to the sky, straightens its neck and gulps twice. Afterwards, it shakes its tail.

Sam sees this gull. He is at the top of the harbourmaster’s house – a double-fronted, red-bricked building that sits on the quayside. From his attic room, he can see everything – the harbour, the sea wall, the open water beyond it. He can see the mainland too – dipped and bluish, like a sleeper’s back. It is a good room. The eaves mean that Sam must stoop in places but he likes being here at the top of the house. His bedroom is untidy, boyish – a music system, a games console, a dartboard, crumbs on the carpet, mugs of cold tea, a row of free weights that he lifts in the evenings as he looks at the view. A single bed which is never made.

He sits on this bed now. He sits with his hands underneath him, looking out to sea. Sam did not sleep last night, or barely. When he closed his eyes he was there again – standing on the coastal path and looking down at Sye. He could see the man exactly. He can see him now.

Dark hair.

The fingers that tried to close around a stone.

Last night, Sam had thrown up by the sea wall. When he’d returned home, wiping his mouth, he’d found his father watching the news and whispered Dad? Something’s happened. He’d sounded young, afraid.

Things are passed on here. Houses, jobs, names – they are handed down to the next generation because that is the island’s way. This has always been a Lovegrove house. Sam’s great-great-grandfather had been the captain of the first Morning Star and he’d built this house himself with a clear sense of the Lovegroves yet to come. He’d captained the boat for fifty-six years. When he died, his son took over; then his son did. And a century later, the captain and harbourmaster of Parla is Edward Lovegrove, with his receding hairline and chapped hands, and last night this man had been watching the television with his feet on the coffee table. He’d lowered his feet when he saw Sam’s face.

What is it, son?

Ed is the law on Parla, if there is such a thing. Ed will know – a common phrase. It’s only based on his first aid certificates, his knowledge of the water and the radio in his study which he can talk to the coastguard on. It isn’t much, but it’s enough. A man’s come ashore.

What? Dead?

Alive.

Do we know him?

No. But for a moment, I …

Sam shifts now, stretches. He can feel the weight of a sleepless night on his shoulders. A night of hearing the curtains stir, of watching the hours tick across the neon face of his clock. In the last few minutes before daybreak, he’d been nearing sleep – drifting, growing heavier. But then the phone had rung. It had bubbled up the stairs, rousing him. His father had answered it. He’d said, hello Tabitha. Yes. Yes – Sam told me …

Everyone will know by now, Sam thinks. Or most of them, at least.

This is a fact that he is sure of: it is hard to have secrets here. Something happens and the island feels it. If a cat kills a bird in the morning, the feathers will have blown into each house by nightfall; if there is a quarrel on the quayside, the account of it will be unloaded with the rest of the boat, and carried inland. Guess what I saw … And taps will be turned off by women who think they have misheard their children or their friends, and say what? Really? Elbows will be taken hold of in the lanes. When he was a boy, there was a fire at the school one night and the red-edged curls of paper floated over the island, settled on the outboard motors, roofs and bonnets of cars – and Sam thinks news is like that. It gets everywhere. Never any secrets, never any surprises and he has wondered if that’s what has buckled Leah in the past – the lack of privacy, the way that all things are known.

Phones will be ringing. Hands will reach for other hands.

Emmeline … Will she rage? Grapple? Most likely.

And Sam thinks of Maggie. Who will tell her? And how will she be, when she’s told? He imagines her face. He sees the lines by her eyes, how she holds her fingers up to her mouth as she listens. How broken she can look.

Nearly four years.

He glances down at Sea Fairy. Her green tarpaulin is streaked with gull droppings. She bobs in the corner – old, unloved.

* * *

The sun is high and white. The grass is shining. Laundry is pegged on washing lines.

All the colours seem bright, as Nathan drives. He squints at the school’s roof, at the glossy tail of the rooster at Wind Rising, at the ragwort sprouting in the lane. Even the lighthouse’s paintwork seems brighter to him so that he reaches up for the car’s visor and tilts it down. Has there been a hotter day than this, this year? He doesn’t think so. He drives slowly, with his window down. His right forearm rests on the door and he can hear the long grass brushing the underside of his car. Once he’d have loved this weather. He’d have taken beers into the fields or left them in a rock-pool to cool, as he swam. Or he’d have taken a rug up to the lighthouse and the northern coast and spent the afternoon there – him, and Kitty.

A ewe treads in front of him.

One of mine. Nathan knows this. He knows his own, amongst Ian’s; they are Texel, firm-bodied with blue tags in their ears. They are trickier to shear in that they’re strong beasts, and two weeks ago he’d had to kneel hard on their ribs and tie their hind legs as he’d sheared them. Shearing … It’s in the Bundy blood. Ian, Hester and Nathan could all handle shears before they learnt to ride bikes or to add and subtract. They knew how to catch a sheep, drag it back and grip it tightly between their thighs before they knew how to spell Cantalay or Merme. Tom was the exception. He’d shear, but he’d have one eye on the water. Nathan grew strong from hauling sheep and mending fences; Tom’s arms thickened from lobstering, from pulling on the cord to start the outboard motor, from rowing into hidden coves.

Are you sure he’s one of ours? Their father said this, once. We’re land folk, not sea.

Nathan glances to his right.

Crest is coming into view. He sees its yellow guttering, its matching yellow door. This is the island’s highest point – the whole coastline can be seen from its driveway, from Litty in the south, round to Bundy Head. The house had been derelict, once. Once, it had been four stone walls with a leaking roof and the brown streaks of sheep urine on the skirting boards. But it was always the best position to live – the height, the views. Nathan remembers ducking through it as a child and feeling how a king in his castle must have felt – alive, amazed, buffeted by wind. Tom, also, felt that. When he was twenty-four he’d said, do you know what I’m going to do? For six summers he worked on that house. He’d hammered, hauled and rung friends on the mainland; he’d buy beers for his brothers before saying, you couldn’t help me with …? He made Crest a home again. And what a home – with bookshelves made of driftwood, curtains hung on lengths of rope, a septic tank, a compost heap, a chair forged out of wooden crates, a single solar panel as dark as a burnished eye. There was the chalky knot of whalebone Tom used to prop open the door. And the kitchen table had been part of a fishing boat, once; her name, Coralee, still hangs on the staircase. Nathan has seen it.

Tomato plants, too. Those were Maggie’s addition. The porch is south-facing and she’s filled it with them so that Nathan knows how the porch will smell today, when he enters it – the sharp fruit, the trapped heat.

He turns right, along its driveway.

Crest. He loves it and it saddens him – both.

He turns off the engine. There is a sudden hush, and he wonders what he will tell her, what words he will use and if they will be the right ones.

She appears. She steps out of an outbuilding, into the light. She holds a tin of yellow paint which is dripping down its side. Yellow paint on her arms and hands. Maggie looks up.

She smiles: hey.

Nathan shuts the car door. He comes so close that he can see she has yellow paint everywhere – on her cheeks, her nose, her collarbone. Her hair is tied back but one strand is loose and is blowing across her face so that it makes her blink, and the tip of it is yellow. There is the smell of sheep and fresh paint and Maggie’s washing powder and as a cloud’s shadow passes over them he thinks, briefly, how beautiful it is – to be standing here.

Nathan?

He doesn’t want to tell her. Just passing.

She eyes him. Liar, she says.

Maggie feels afraid. No-one is ever just passing – and not Nathan, of all people. Nathan, who tends to leave her be.

A strand of hair is fluttering, but she does not reach for it. Tell me.

A man’s been found. Washed up.

Washed up? From the sea?

He nods.

Alive?

Yes. He’s at Tabitha’s.

Is it –?

No. No, it’s not.

She tries to put the paint tin down, but it tilts, and spills, and he comes forward saying careful. I’ve got it. Here – give it to me.

* * *

Nathan leads her inside. He knows her house, and he knows to duck slightly as he steps into the kitchen, under the doorframe and the hanging copper pans. She walks with her hands held in front of her, as if walking in the dark.

Sit down.

It’s not Tom?

No.

Maggie hears the small hesitation, looks up.

For one small moment, I … Nathan shrugs. He looks a bit like him.

Dark?

Yes. And the beard. And he’s big – tall, broad …

But not Tom?

Not Tom.

You’re sure? Her eyes are round. They are like the stones that come ashore, the stones that have been rolled and rolled through the years, thrown against other stones. They are grey, with a navy edge.

Mags, I promise. This man is not him.

They sit side by side, at the table that used to be Coralee. Maggie runs her fingers over her lips. Who is he, then?

We don’t know yet. He’s still sleeping.

Where was he found?

Sye. He was lying on the stones. Sam found him. He came to Wind Rising for help and we carried him.

To –?

Lowfield.

She considers this. She takes a deep breath, releases it slowly. OK. Well … Tom never liked it – Sye. Said it was dank, hard to walk on. If he was going to wash up, he wouldn’t wash up there.

It is a half-joke; they are nervous words.

Is he hurt?

No. Doesn’t seem it.

Does Emmeline know?

Yes.

He watches Maggie. She says nothing for a while. There is a single crumb on the table, and Nathan watches her as she places her forefinger on it, rolls the crumb from side to side. Left and right. You came here because you knew people would talk. It is not a question.

You know how it is here.

She says yes I know.

He cannot think of anything to say. There is nothing to say to her that he has not said before, or tried to say, and so he sits, scans the room that they are sitting in – the spotted oven gloves, the chopping board with an apple core on it, the ferry times on the noticeboard. There are shells everywhere – cockles, whelks, a purple-tipped sea urchin on the windowsill. Beside it there is a vase of feathers with sand still on them, feathers whose blades have torn or split. Maggie the forager. She is always looking – but aren’t they all? His eyes settle on a photograph. It is held to the fridge with magnets and it is of Nathan’s younger brother and Maggie; they are wearing anoraks, with their faces pressed together, cheek to cheek. Tom’s arm is in the foreground, leading to the camera – he was taking the photo himself. A bright, blustery day.

Where was that taken?

She follows his gaze. Bundy Head. Then she lifts her finger off the table, brushes the crumb away with the thumb of the same hand – a short, rough sound. Nathan, are you still hopeful?

Maggie is like no-one else. Tom had said so, too. Nathan remembers the moment when Tom stepped down from the Morning Star six years ago, walked up to his brother and said, I’ve found her. Just three words, but Nathan knew what he’d meant. He himself had found Kitty not too long before, or she had found him, and he and Tom had gone back to Wind Rising that night and opened the rum, toasted these women who weren’t like the rest. Tom described Maggie to him – a wary, slender, blonde-haired woman collecting pint glasses outside The Bounty Inn, a tea-towel stuck through her apron which was longer than her black skirt.

Hopeful? He thinks the years … The years which have been split into months and the months which have been split into weeks and the weeks into days and the days into hours and hours have been split into a breath in and a breath out, and Tom has been missing from all of them. Hope becomes tired. It fades, regardless of how much you wish it not to.

That he’s still alive somewhere? Didn’t drown?

I imagine it, Nathan says. Sometimes.

She nods. Yes. I imagine it. I still imagine him walking up the drive. But is that the same as being hopeful? I don’t think so.

This man isn’t Tom.

I know.

No, she’s like no-one else. She’s smart, and hard, and vulnerable, and she still uses Tom’s boat, still lifts and lowers his lobster pots when most other widows would have left the island entirely perhaps or at least left the sea well alone. She wears his oilskins even though they’re too big. Only once has Nathan seen her cry. Can I do anything? He knows there is nothing that anyone can do.

And for a moment Maggie is silent. She looks at the table as if she has not heard him, as if there is something on the table that Nathan cannot see. Then she flinches, turns to him. Help me with the doorframe? I’ve got more paint on myself than … She turns her wrists over, showing him. A small, sad smile.

She was Tom’s. He will always help her if he can.

* * *

The red car skids on gravel. Its door is thrown open. Emmeline appears, hurries to the front door of Lowfield and she bangs – twice, bang-bang – on its glass. Tabitha!

She waits, briefly. Bangs again.

Her sister’s face appears behind the glass and then the door opens. She glares, her forefinger raised to her lips. Hush! He’s sleeping!

So it’s true? There’s a man?

Keep your voice down.

Is there?

She nods. Ian told you?

Nathan. Weren’t you going to?

Tabitha flinches. Don’t be snapping at me, Emmeline.

They study each other, shifting their jaws.

I suppose you’d better come in.

Tabitha leads her sister into the kitchen, shuts the door. She sees her cereal bowl in the sink, waiting to be washed; a used tea bag sits on the draining board with the teaspoon still attached to it. The floor needs mopping – Tabitha can hear the soles of her slippers sticking to it as she walks and she hopes Emmeline can’t hear that. She notices these things, when Emmeline’s here.

He came ashore at Sye. Sam found him.

I heard that.

He went to Wind Rising, got your boys. Jonny, too.

Is it Tom?

The nurse expected this – but not so soon, or so bluntly. No, it’s not. Did Nathan say he was?

He said he looks like him.

He does – a little. Same colouring.

So it could be. And he came out of the water, so –

I know he did. And yes, he has dark hair, and a beard, and there’s a likeness of sorts. But Em, it’s not him. Do you hear?

How do you know?

Because there are differences! Big ones! He’s too tall to be Tom. Too broad. The nose isn’t right and the teeth aren’t the same, and those aren’t his hands, and …

Teeth change! He could have changed them. He could have grown …

Em …

I want to see him. A statement, of course.

He’s sleeping. No.

I won’t leave till I see him.

That stubborn streak. Tabitha narrows her eyes, thinks that’s Emmeline. The petulant child who grew into a fierce, resolute grown-up who rarely laughs or takes no for an answer. But then, so much has happened. And Emmeline’s had to be tough, she supposes: Jack as a husband, that farm and four children. Four to begin with.

The grandfather clock ticks.

Fine, Tabitha says. You can see him. But – she holds up a finger – no waking him, Em – whoever he is, he needs to rest. And she leads her sister down the hallway to a door with frosted glass.

* * *

He sleeps, this sea creature. This man from the waves. This tired Poseidon.

Firstly, Emmeline sees his size. He is as broad as a boat, and as long as one. Then she sees the long lashes, the tiny lines by his eyes. His nose is perfectly straight. The beard is black – not a deep brown with a reddish hue, and with no grey flecked in it: it is as black as night is. His eyebrows are of the same blackness. The tip of his left ear is creased. The backs of his hands are veined and sore-looking – huge, capable hands.

Has he spoken?

Not much.

The man breathes like the sea.

Emmeline is in the mending room for a minute, no longer. It is enough.

She walks out into the sunlight. She cannot name it, or describe it – what she is feeling now. Disappointment is not enough of a word – not nearly. She had known, deep down, it wasn’t him. In her heart she’d known that he could not be Tom – it can’t be, it can’t be, not after so long – but she had hoped, all the same; she had snatched at the faintest of chances because she is his mother, and she must, and so she had stumbled and demanded and banged on her sister’s door and now Emmeline feels unsteady, foolish. Unspeakably sad.

Tom had a scar on his nose from a childhood fall; his lips were thinner, equal-sized. She’d know her boy in the dark, even now. She’d know him in a crowded room or by smell alone or handwriting.

Tabitha comes by her. I’m sorry.

Oh, I’m sure you are.

Emmeline leaves, and as she goes she feels, too, the swell of anger – as if someone, somewhere, is laughing. As if a trick has been played.

* * *

Who else? Who else cannot know what to think or say? They are all like fish on land now – blank-eyed, open-mouthed.

What a day … Ed Lovegrove stands with his hands in his pockets; he looks out to sea. Boy oh boy, what a day … Eighteen years as a harbourmaster, thirty-nine years as a harbourmaster’s son before that, and Edward can’t remember a man being washed ashore like this. Bodies, yes. He’s had his deaths to deal with – Jack’s, a birdspotter’s, that man from Utta who caught his foot in the line as he was throwing out pots so that they found his boat going round and round and when they hauled in the line he was already half-plucked at by fish. Ed fears the watery deaths. It is the watery deaths that he feels he can prevent by watching the weather, noting down each boat that docks here, keeping an eye on the weather station that lives at the back of his house. He has a rain gauge; there is a small anemometer to measure wind speed and wind direction. He tends to it, like a man at prayer.

But a person who has appeared? That the sea has given?

Tabitha rang earlier. She’d given the details – the beard, the injured hands – and Ed had not known the words or the way forwards. He’d said it isn’t a death, is it? So …? A man washed ashore is the stuff of books; it is not what happens in the twenty-first century to an island that relies on tourism and migrant birds and the sinking price of lamb. An island with a coloured line of jetsam – plastics, netting, nylon rope – on every beach like a scar.

We wait until he wakes. We do nothing till he’s woken.

I should call the coastguard in case …

OK, said Tabitha. But not the police. Not yet.

Fine. Not yet, Ed agreed. The police, he knows, would bring trouble of their own.

So Ed had settled in the office of the harbourmaster’s house and made the call. Mac had answered. He was eating something. With a half-full mouth he’d said, really? Jesus. Need an air ambulance?

Tab says not. Any boats down?

There had been the distant click of computer keys, and when the clicking stopped he’d heard Mac swallow, clear his throat. Nope, no boats, Ed. Well, there was a dinghy capsized about twenty miles north of you, but both men were picked up. He’s not one of yours? A guest, or some such?

I’m sure he is. Just checking, you know.

Or some half-fish creature? A part-whale? Haven’t you guys got a tale about that sort of thing? A hard, single laugh.

Mac – who Ed has never warmed to. Thanks, he’d said, hung up.

* * *

The day fades. The sky pinkens.

It is low tide. The beaches are glassy. The wading birds are reflected in the sand and sometimes they make their short, skimming flight to a different stretch of sand and land with their legs stretched out.

Curlews. Nathan hears them.

He turns off the engine but he sits, for a while. He stares at the steering wheel. Nathan has no thoughts at this moment: he is empty, worn-out.

Kitty watches him. She wears a floral apron, and as she’d been picking bits of eggshell out of a bowl of yolks she’d heard his car, looked up.

Her husband is staring at something – the dashboard?

Then he climbs out. The car door shuts and there is the crunch of the gravel, and from an upstairs bed the cat jumps down with a muffled thud as Nathan comes into the hallway, kicks off his boots.

She wipes her hands, goes to him. He tastes of salt. So?

They sit at the kitchen table, facing each other. His wife has a sweep of navy-blue powder on her eyelids, and Nathan sees that some of this powder is also on her cheekbones as if it has dusted down through the course of the day. She smells as she always does – lotion, Miss Dior, a touch of turpentine. Kitty Bundy. At first, she’d called it a dancing name.

Mum went straight to Lowfield. I told her it wasn’t Tom but she still went.

Of course she did – softly said.

Seven years of marriage but the word wife can still feel new to him. This woman – rich-haired, curved, slow in her movements – leans forwards, over her glass. She looks down into it, holds it by the stem and swirls the wine very carefully. Her hair comes down as she does this. She has not aged – not even slightly. She looks as she did when he first met her, when she turned around in a scarlet dress.

And Maggie? Did you go to see her?

I did. He sighs, rubs his eyes.

How did she take it?

It’s been a long day, Kit – which is his way of asking for silence, now.

She leans back. She takes her hair and gathers it, holding it on the top of her head with both hands, and for a moment Nathan can see her white neck, the tiny tattoo of a bird at the nape. Well. Mine was long too. I’ve worked all day – ten hours of it. Do you want to hear about it? She waits.

Nathan says nothing.

Kitty lets go of her hair, pushes her chair back. The bird on her neck goes away.

Maggie was calm – Kitty is certain of this. Maggie, who is too neat and reserved and dignified to wail in company, or throw things at the wall. Small-boned and gentle. And she is contained, in the way cupped water is – full of reflections and moments but they pass too quickly for Kitty to read them clearly. As Kitty rinses the plates of omelette, she can see Maggie perfectly – how she’d waded out from Lock-and-Key beach on the night that Tom died. Her pink shirt had darkened as the water reached her waist, and she’d called out Tom? Tom?

Vulnerable, and lonely. Kind. Old-souled.

And she is on her own, of course. No family in the world. Having Sam Lovegrove watching your house at night is not proper company. They all try to see more of her, but she hides herself away.

It is not how Kitty would grieve. She, if she had to, would grieve wildly – with noise, mucus, paint on the canvas, blustery walks on beaches, curse words and exhausted sleep. But everyone grieves differently just as everyone loves in different ways. Emmeline is resentful; Nathan has retreated or almost, and he still drinks on his own at night. The crate that she leaves in the lane for recycling is always clinking, and full.

Their cat – tabby, overweight – butts her head against her shins.

Kitty leans down to stroke her, and as she does this she wonders how you can grieve a death if you have no bones, if you have nothing to bury or go back to. Poor Maggie. Poor thing.

When she turns to speak to her husband again, she finds his chair is empty. He’s gone away soundlessly, so that Kitty drops the tea-towel onto the worktop and stares where he had been.

* * *

And so the bedside lights go on, one by one.

The television’s bluish glow flits in island sitting rooms. Curtains are pulled into the middle, and closed. In a bedroom of Wind Rising, a girl with bitten fingernails holds her mobile phone. She sits cross-legged on her bed, and types sounds like a hard day. Hope you are OK. Does she put one x, after this, or several? Leah chooses one, and presses send. The words fly. Sending. Then, Sent.

Beneath the lighthouse, in the old lighthouse-keepers’ quarters, Rona Lovegrove bends down. She peers through the glass door of her oven, watches her sponge cake rise. She has heard this man looks like Tom. She thinks of the Bundys, and thinks of love.

Jim Coyle lies in bed. He lies in his own darkness. He tries to imagine the lighthouse’s slow flash. Jim – like the Brights – was born in the lighthouse-keepers’ quarters; unlike the Brights, he became the lighthouse-keeper himself, in time – and he misses so much about it. The drowsy tick of cogs in the lantern room. The sweet smell of paraffin. Sticky, blackish knuckles from polishing the brass.

He is blind now. But Jim still knows each crack in the plaster, each decorative curl on the wrought-iron fireplace where he used to toast crumpets, each speckle of paint that made it onto windowpanes. There was a loose brick in the boiler room which he kept his penny whistle behind. Is it still there? Might it still play the same tune, if he blew?

Beside him, his wife reads. He can hear the pages as she turns them, how their bottom edges catch the bedspread to make a dragging sound. He asks what book is it?

He asks, but Jim knows. The book has a leather smell. He’d heard its spine crack as she’d opened it.

Abigail says Folklore and Myth. You know the one.

Yes he does. And as soon as Jim had heard that a man – bearded, very handsome – had been washed up at the cove called Sye, he’d known that this was the book that his wife would turn to. She’d take it from its shelf, and find its fourteenth page. She’d smooth that page with her palm.

Dearest, she says – do you know what this reminds me of?

Abigail of the stories. Abigail who is eighty-three years old and yet whose love of this one book is absolute, childlike.

The Fishman. Your Fishman. The one you saw off Sye.

And there it is – the word he knew was coming. Like so many other words, it is uttered and the breeze catches it and it is carried out of the Old Fish Store over the island. It blows against the rusting cars at High Haven; it scuds on the beaches with the night-time spume. It has been down on the sea bed, perhaps; for years, it has been half-forgotten, tapped at by passing claws. But Abigail has hauled up Fishman now. The word surfaces – beautiful, glass-bright.

* * *

This word will make its way to all of us, in time. It will knock against our doors and we will all be saying it. Even I will talk of the Fishman – but not yet.

Night. People turn to sleep. They close the back door, or rub cream on their feet. They finish their chapters or lie in deep baths with tea lights next to the taps and think about the day’s events. In the cottage by the school a couple are making love. The brown dog at the foot of their bed yawns with a whine, flaps his ears, and they break away from their kissing and smile at the sound in the dark.

One by one, eyes close.

But also, two eyes open. In a room that smells of lavender, two black eyes open, blink twice. Three times.

He lies very still, listening.

After a while, he lifts the blankets, looks down at his long, white legs.

As for Maggie, she climbs out of the bath. She wraps a towel about her. Four years have passed, or nearly four. Who told her the grief would lessen? Grief does not lessen; it changes, and perhaps she has changed so that she can endure it better. But the grief does not grow less.

She misses him beyond words. She will never have the words for how much she misses him.

The Seals with Human Hearts

Of all the sea creatures – whales, turtles, lobsters with their intricate, grooved tails that can slide into themselves like a fan, the jellyfish, the squid, the octopus that I reckon knows far more than I can ever know – it is the seal I love the most. I always have. And it’s hard to be sure if I love the seals for the stories I have heard of them or for their expressions – quizzical, trusting. Both maybe. Both is most likely.

The first seal I ever saw was near Tap Hole. It was winter or late autumn, at least, for I wore woollen gloves with a matching hat. I had the hat pulled down very low. It covered my ears and brushed my eyelashes.

The seal looked human at first. I thought someone was swimming. But then I stood on the edge, squinted and thought I know what that is … Its head was glossy, its eyes were round. Its body was freckled, slick.

Sea-hounds, Emmeline called them. For how they barked at night.

Or they are the souls of the drowned men … So Nathan said. He knew his stories and told them, from time to time.

Me? I liked Abigail’s version most of all. In her well-worn armchair and with her Earl Grey tea she unfolded her book called Folklore and Myth and said, in the beginning, when the world was made, the seals were given human hearts … I asked why – and she’d looked up, surprised. I don’t know why! It doesn’t matter why … What matters is that it says so. She tapped the page – see? I like this because it is fitting; it seems a tale that’s right. For seals are drawn to human voices, after all; they bask on rocks, human-like, and they have eyes that are expressive as human eyes can be and I might easily believe that seals speak our language and feel our private human pains. That they grieve as we do at the world’s sorrows – at its wars, famines, its loneliness and bombs.

Also, they can fall in love. There are tales of seals loving a person so much and so deeply that they wish for that human to join them, at sea. They wait, offshore. They sniff the salty air, and call. And so it has been a form of consolation, in the past: she didn’t drown, not really. Her soul lives with the seals, now … Where she is loved, and well-cared for. Where they dart, dapple-bodied, through shafts of light.

* * *

Abigail Coyle believes this. For her, it is the truth.

Her sister was loved by the seals. Thomasina was loved for she looked like them – with eyes so black that Abigail could see her own face looking back at her. She has a faded photograph that she keeps by her bed – both of them, in matching pinafores. They do not look like twins. They never did. Abigail is the shorter, plumper girl – her dress is straining at the buttons, and one sock is rolled down. Thomasina is taller, with her hair untied so that half of it covers those seal-eyes. But it does not hide the look of suspicion, the narrowed stare as if she does not trust this moment or the person who is saying good … Hold it … On the count of three …

Abigail turns in bed. She looks at this photograph now.

Thomasina. Who was openly called the beautiful one.

She drowned at fifteen. She floated in that pinafore – a damp, patchwork star. And she is buried in the ground but Abigail believes – knows – that her sister’s soul is not in Parla’s graveyard, in a wooden box. Instead, her soul – her, Thomasina’s true self – rolls with the seals that loved her, and which she loved in return. In that cave, they found her. Join us, they said, gentle-eyed. Come and swim at our side. So her twin sister – the elder by nine minutes, the taller by three inches and who could do backbends and walk on her hands – lowered her nose and mouth underwater, closed her eyes, and did.

Abigail pats the pillow. She sorts out the blankets, tucks them round her.

When she heard of this strange, bearded man, her first thought was of her twin. The sea is Thomasina’s. All things that come from it belong to her – the pearled insides of mussel shells, or a squid’s dark ink. And her second thought? It had been of a story she knew. Kept in a leather-bound book.

It has been a long time since she took Folklore and Myth of Parla, Merme and the Lesser Isles off the sitting-room shelf. But this evening she bent down to it, blew off its dust.

It was her mother’s book. In Abigail’s childhood, it was hauled off the shelf in Wind Rising after stormy days or days of such hardship that her mother cried. They read it at bedtime. Its pages were turned very slowly, and they sounded like a person saying hush, now … So many stories. Their mother read them over and over: the whale that answered the foghorn, the gannets which gave their fish to good people, the changing wind of the north. They became friends and they became the truth, for Mercy believed them absolutely. We only know the foam, she’d say – meaning this human world is merely the very surface of it, and there is more, so much more, that we lack the vision for.

Abigail’s mother was from Merme which is an isle known for its strangeness. They ate many things but not seals, never seals – for seals have human hearts.

It is a well-thumbed tale. The seal that has been drawn here lies on its side, one flipper raised as if in greeting. But Abigail keeps turning …

She goes to the fourteenth page.

The Fishman of Sye. It is barely a story – merely a description of this part-man, part-fish. He is tall and strong, it says. He is dark-haired and does not age. There are two drawings of him. In the first, he is in the water: his shoulders are grooved and muscular, and the tip of his tail can be seen. In the second he is on land. He walks on white, capable legs and he is watched by others who are amazed and smiling. Beneath this, it says he comes ashore to restore hope and wonder! He is bearded, and black-eyed.

Hope and wonder. Abigail smiles. She can hear her mother saying it. She can see her mother’s long, straight hair falling down onto the page as she followed the words with her finger. Once, long ago …

The northerly window frame rattles to itself. Jim lies beside her, breathing through his mouth so that he makes a soft, popping sound.

Abigail has not always believed. She did in the beginning. She believed absolutely just as her mother did, and so did Thomasina who claimed she’d seen his tail. They believed all the stories entirely – why should they not be true? If we exist, why shouldn’t they? And it made Abigail feel safe, somehow – to know that seals understood her and a shell that knocks against your foot as you walk is your shell, meant for you, and that nobody actually ever really dies. She’d smile in her bed, to think of this. But then Mercy did die. And a little after, Thomasina died too, and Abigail’s faith was swept out of Wind Rising and lost like autumn leaves are lost – scattered and not coming back. Where is the Fishman, with his bright eyes? Where are the whales that speak of love? How she wanted to see them. How she wanted proof. She’d cry so that her tears dampened her bed-sheets; she’d wear her twin’s coat to bed and snuffle into its sleeves. And one night, Abigail looked at the pictures in her mother’s book and thought please … Send me a sign. Something to prove that the people she loved were not truly gone; something to show her that yes, there are souls, and yes, there is magic, and there are reasons behind everything so that nothing is ever over, or lost. Please … And as if the Fishman heard her or as if the seals heard and passed the message on, there was a new sighting of him. Not by Abigail; Abigail didn’t see him. But the lighthouse-keeper’s son did. The awkward, slightly spotty boy called Jim confessed that yes, he had seen him – a bearded man and a mirrored tail, near the cove called Sye.

Over six decades have passed since then. Six decades, and Abigail can’t climb over stiles any more. Her feet tend to be blue-coloured so she has to prop them on a stool, when she sits. So much has been and gone. And for six decades she has believed in something she herself has never seen but has longed to. And he is here now.

I have been waiting. That is how it feels – as if the Fishman has always meant to come to her and this – now – is his chosen time.

Abigail settles back, closes her eyes.

Hope and wonder. There has never been more need for a touch of that. These are not good days – with all the world’s troubles that she hears on the radio; war in dusty countries, abductions that chill her to the bones. Who is making money on this island, now? No-one is making money. They count coins like beans. Fleece and meat make so little; lobsters do not always come and tourists are the same. No-one seems to have plans as such – no little dreams that may one day be made tangible – and when did that happen? When did the dream-making end? The ambitions, however small? Hers had been small, but she’d had them: a husband, a safe place, a solid Parlan life. Good health for the ones she loves.

And there is so much sadness too. It is a sad isle, for certain. Abigail sees it, and feels it: it is on everything and left there, like salt.

He will come ashore for one or for many.

He will only stay until the next full moon.

She turns out the light. Folklore and Myth lies on the floor beside her; twice in the night she will visit the bathroom, and both times she will bend down to feel its leather edges. It is more than a book to her, as this man is far more – far more – than just a man.

Four

Can you see him now? Legs that seem to have no end? The dark matting of his hair that, if a hand was laid there, would cover that hand? His body was hard, too – harder than other bodies, as if he was not only skin and bones. Was he even human? He felt stronger than all the humans I’d known and it made me ache – this strength under my palms, this anchor.

But I do not touch him yet.

I have not even met him – but I will.

He is looking at the ceiling of the mending room. He looks without blinking – the white paint, the single hair-thin crack.

He can smell the sea. Also he can hear it, and he lifts his head. He tries to sit up, and in doing this there is the bed’s creak, and the dragging sound of his dry heels against the cotton sheets.

Curtains move; the window is open.

He can also hear footsteps. They grow louder. Pat, pat.

* * *

Tabitha knows he is awake before she comes into the room. A nurse’s intuition, perhaps, or a woman’s. She pushes the door and she is right – he is there, trying to sit up. His arms are bent and he is wincing. She puts down the water she is carrying and says careful! Careful! Here – let me help …

He has been sleeping for over thirty-six hours. In that time she has watched him turn, heard him murmur; she has held glasses of water to his lips, whispered drink – and he has drunk. So she knows that he is real enough. But seeing him now – awake, moving … He is even larger as he moves. His chest is defined as chests, on Parla, don’t tend to be so that a deep cleft runs down from his throat to his waist.

He exhales, as if pained.

Are you OK?

A thick, even beard. Hair like a thatch. There is sand, also. Last night, she’d cleaned sand from his skin, ears and nostrils but not from his hair – and it is on the pillow, in the crook of his elbow and in the creases of the sheets.

Do you understand me?

He gives a single nod.

Good. Tabitha blushes. The question seems childish. She hands him the glass of water. You need to keep drinking.

He takes the glass.

Where does she start? What can she say? Do you know where you are?

A flinch, which is no.

On an island called Parla. You were found on a beach the night before last. Do you remember the beach?

She watches him drink – the long draws of water and the movement of his throat. He drains the glass, lowers it. A beach?

Yes. A stony one. She takes the glass from him.

The man shakes his head.

I’m the nurse. Tabitha. Bright. My father kept a lighthouse so it’s a fitting surname. Her smile is quick. Your name?

For a moment he looks at her. Then he turns his stare away and looks out of the window, at the dark-green nettle patch and the sea beyond. He is thinking. He thinks for a long time and in that time Tabitha looks at his profile, the lines on his forehead. She hears the grandfather clock in the hall. I don’t know –

You don’t know your name? Really?

I’m sorry …

It’s alright. It will come, I’m sure. No headaches?

No. And he looks troubled, then. He looks lost, so that Tabitha lays her hand on his forearm. It is all she can think of doing. He has come from the sea like driftwood. He has no memory and marks on his hand that she cannot fathom, and this is like an old, old tale that is hard to have faith in, in modern times. She is sixty-five, and it’s the twenty-first century, and surely there are no mysteries left? Falling in love is serotonin. Phosphorescent water is not God’s light.

Yet here he is. Sea-smelling.

Do you remember anything?

Being in the water.

Good. That’s something. She pats his arm. How about food? You must be hungry.

No answer.

A drink, then? Tea?

He says tea … And he says it as if he does not know what tea could be, or perhaps he is agreeing to it – Tabitha can’t tell which. But he says tea … again, and he looks grateful, very tired.

Tea for two. She smiles. I’ll be back in a minute. You stay put.

She goes to the kitchen, feeling happy. She puts the kettle on.

The wind lifts a flake of rust from a car, at High Haven. The ivy that grows on the minister’s house taps against the wood.

Alfie Moss is by the primary school. It is closed for the summer but he stands in its playground all the same. He does a clumsy somersault on the fence and when he lands he wipes his nose on his bare arm.

The primary school is three rooms in a grey stone building. It has a single classroom with its desk, globe, and its stack of plastic drawers with the children’s names taped on them. It has a whiteboard at one end that squeaks when his mother writes on it. There is also a tiny kitchen and beside it there are two toilet cubicles – one with a pink door, and one with blue. Alfie uses the blue one, as do the three other boys that catch the boat from Utta. He doesn’t live on Utta; Alfie lives next door.

Alfie steps back from the fence. He is checking his palms for splinters when he hears footsteps, looks up. His mother is coming down the path; her hair is a cloud and the gold cross around her neck catches the light as she comes. She shouts Alfie! We’re late – into the car.

They drive down towards the harbour – past the viewpoint, and the airstrip. Alfie presses his nose to the glass. He squints at each person who passes. He has heard there is a new man on the island – he came from the sea and he has no name. He has heard, too, that he looks a bit like Uncle Tom. But Alfie is too young to really remember his uncle Tom.

* * *

Three times a week the ferry comes and goes. For nearly a century, a boat called the Morning Star has made its way across the sea, tilting left to right and followed by gulls. This ferry – the vessel that sits in the harbour now – is the third to be called this, so it has Morning Star III painted on its prow and perhaps it is larger than the Stars that came before. But it has the same blue bottom. The same white railings with lifebelts on.

On two days – Monday and Wednesday – it leaves Parla and sails directly to the mainland and back. It is nearly a two-hour journey in each direction when the weather is kind, or when Ed does not peel away from the usual route to follow a dolphin pod or a whale’s spray. In the summer, he often does this – for the passengers are mostly holidaymakers who live in cities, far from the coast. For them, a flash of back in the water is a gift, and he loves how they point, say look! There! In choppy sea the journey may take over three hours. In high winds or high water, the Star does not run at all.

On Fridays, it makes its way over via the other isles. For these other, smaller islands this is the only ferry service that they have – one boat every seven days. Parla is busy and easy to reach compared to these strangely shaped rocks: Utta, with its standing stones and cluster of salt-walled homes; Say, with the many sea stacks that gannets whiten; and Cantalay, where there is a single sheep farm and a ruined fort that the wind whistles through in winter. Merme is uninhabited, now. No boats go to it. Nothing does, except the puffins and they do not stay long.

Today it’s Friday. Today, the Star will go out to these islands. It will creep in and out of their harbours, carry lives and luggage elsewhere. The ferry is fuelled and ready. Its white railings are shining in the morning light. The metal gangplank which the passengers must walk upon is also white and when it is lowered down onto the quayside there is a sudden, hard chime which sends up the gulls, makes a black cat flinch down against the ground.

It is nine twenty in the morning. There is a slight glint of dew on the fields and there is already heat in the sun. Most of the islanders are at the harbour. The grass verge that leads down to it has their cars parked upon it – cars with no wing mirrors or hubcaps, and most have dents in their sides. Hester steps out of a hatchback, pulls open the door behind her seat saying out out out to Alfie.

As they walk down, they pass a purple car. Its passenger door is open and a small, denim-covered bottom is beside it; its owner’s head and body are still inside the car. There is the smell of baking, and ginger. Hester glances inside as she passes – she sees the dark butter icing of a chocolate cake. Alfie does too – Mum, look … They hurry down to the Morning Star.

Rona straightens herself, sees them go. In her arms she carries six plastic, airtight boxes. They are transparent – they hold scones, chocolate cake, iced gingerbread, a cheesecake with grated limes, flapjack with apricots, and a huge, powdered Victoria sponge that’s filled with homemade jam. She rests her chin on the uppermost box, shuts the car door with her foot.

On the quayside itself are the island’s men. Edward Lovegrove, of course. He wears a luminous jacket with matching trousers and a baseball cap with Skipper on it. He takes the cargo – suitcases, bicycles, cardboard boxes – and puts it in a crate that rests next to the boat. Anything else? He calls this out and Rona quickens her step. Yep, Dad! Her car keys are hanging from the back pocket of her jeans and they jangle as she hurries.

There are other men in bright-yellow clothing – the crew, the men who have worked on Morning Star for years, or all their adult lives in some cases. George Moss – late fifties and not yet greying – stands at the end of the gangway, a rolled cigarette between his thumb and forefinger as if throwing a dart. He sees his wife and son coming. Alfie waves cheerily. On you hop, George tells him. Hester’s hair is wild-looking, today – the curls are tight like springs and he loves it like this, wants to push his hands into it and grip those curls at their roots. He winks at his wife as she passes.

Sam Lovegrove and Jonny Bundy are also in fluorescent yellow. They are both on board, making the ferry’s final checks – securing lines, checking lists on clipboards, handing out brown paper bags just in case the water gets rough. Sam has not slept properly for two nights now and it shows in his face. There are shadows under his eyes; the sunburn has lessened against his pale skin. Jonny is by the winch. He leans over the side of the boat, watching Ed pack up the crate. Rona, he thinks, is looking good today. She always looks good – but those jeans are tight and when she peers over the side of the crate to make sure her cakes are packed well, and safely, he can see down her top for a moment. White lace – very nice. She has sunglasses pushed up into her hair.

Nine twenty-five. Ed shouts, last call! Kitty hears this and kisses Nathan. She carries an overnight bag, steps onto the gangplank. She pauses to say something to the skipper who laughs, touches her shoulder. Two tourists are the last ones on – clanking with binoculars, sour-breathed from the seasickness pills they have taken, sad to be leaving Parla for city life.

Sam lets them pass. Then, at that moment, puts a hand on either side of the gangplank and leans down from the deck. George?

The older man treads out his cigarette, looks up.

Has Maggie been? Haven’t seen her yet.

He nods. On the far side. Under the tarpaulin.

She must have come early.

She was waiting for us. Maybe seven thirty? She’s done herself proud, though. One of them is a monster.

Sam steps back. He goes to the far side of the ferry. Sure enough, he finds the black plastic crate with tarpaulin on it, and he crouches down beside it. Slowly, he peels the covering aside. The lobsters shift as he does this. Their smell is fishy and cold. They are midnight-coloured, their claws tied with elastic bands, and he wonders what time Maggie went out to get them this morning – first light? Maybe it was still dark when she went. Maybe, he thinks, she’s not sleeping either, and he imagines her, in that little boat – hat and gloves, setting out at dawn. The birds would still have been roosting. Perhaps the first sign of daylight was a pink glow in the east and she would have seen it – on her own, in that boat.

Everything about Maggie makes him sorry.

He covers the lobsters back over, secures the tarpaulin to keep them safe.

* * *

On Fridays, the boat doesn’t come back. It takes nearly three hours to dock at the three smaller islands, making the journey to the mainland nearly five hours long, in the end. It’s too much to return the same day. So tonight, the Morning Star and its crew will stay overnight in the mainland’s harbour with the stacked lobster pots and fishing fleet. That’s a pungent harbour, ten times bigger than Parla’s. It has the ferry office, a youth hostel, a small museum of fishing life, The Bounty Inn with its picnic tables and a trailer which sells cockles in paper cones. The gulls are bold, beady-eyed. Some will take a chip right out of your hand, and laugh as they eat it – ark-ark!

Nancy knows all this.

She sits cross-legged on the sea wall. She looks at the quayside, the dark sand and the Star.

Ferry day, in Nan’s head, is her day – or her family’s. Her father runs the boat. He runs the whole harbour and has to write down which boats come in and out, and he has to listen to the radio each night to hear what the weather will do. If it’s too rough to sail, he runs a red flag up a pole. Nan likes that flag. It is the same height as her bedroom window, and it goes snap in the gales as if it’s talking to her. He marks down sightings of whales, too, and rare birds. But Nan’s father spends most of his time caring for the ferry. He polishes the brass bits, scrubs down the deck, sponges the green mould from the life-rings that hang on her sides. Sometimes, the ferry is hauled out of the water and run up onto rails as if she were a train. This is the boat’s dry dock. Nan has stood beneath her as the Star’s rested there, and looked up. It feels like looking up a fat lady’s skirt.

The ferry will leave any minute.

She squints. The winch lifts the crate from the quayside. It swings a little so that her father puts his hands up against it, guides it across. Jonny operates the winch from the boat. Nan isn’t too keen on Jonny. He once called her a rat, as if she couldn’t hear, and Rona doesn’t like him much either. Creepy Jonny Bundy which sounds like a nursery rhyme.

Rona. Nan studies her. She can see a beaded chain on her sister’s left ankle and her toenails are painted bright pink. Rona is watching the crate because her cakes are in it. She makes cakes for her tea room at the lighthouse, but she also makes them for a café on the mainland – a café with dried starfish in its window and deckchairs outside. Nan has been there, with their mother. Last summer they went. They had banana bread and a coconut slice, both made by Rona two days before. In loud voices they said how good the cakes were, how they were the best they’d ever had in all their living days and everyone should try some so that the café would order more.

Nan’s favourite cake in the world is a chocolate brownie. Definitely. For her sixth birthday she had a plate of brownies, with actual cherries in. That was her best birthday yet.

Her father and brother are on the Morning Star.

Her mother and sister are on the quayside, watching it.

Ferry day is our day. The gangplank is pulled up, on board. The ferry begins to shudder, the water behind it starts to churn and very slowly the Star turns from the quay. She can see Alfie Moss, waving. She can see her brother Sam, too – his yellow hair which she is sometimes jealous of. Kitty is also on board – her skirt is blowing and she wears sunglasses so that Nan can’t tell what she is looking at. Perhaps she is looking at Nathan, but he is not looking at her. His hands are in his pockets, and he’s looking at the ground. Maybe there’s a shell, there? Or a beetle? He looks at the ground for a very long time.

* * *

There is a track which leads from Crest towards the most northerly part of the coast. At the cliff edge, there’s a fence – wire that sags, rotting posts. There is a sign by a break in this fence which reads Do Not Use In Wet Weather – but Maggie has often used these steps when the rain has been so heavy that it has bruised her. She’s used them in a thunderstorm. She’s used them at night.

They are slick, black steps cut into the rocks and which lead down to a small harbour. Uneven steps, and steep. Once, perhaps, they’d been used for smuggling since the lighthouse’s beam never reaches them and they can’t be seen from the sea; but they are not used for that now. They wind down into darkness and end, abruptly, on a slab of rock. This slab is the quayside. It is lost entirely at high tide and so it is both rough with barnacles and velvety with weed, and Maggie is careful when treading on it. She comes here three times a week, or more: Pigeon is kept here.

Pigeon. Named by Maggie herself, long ago.

So she can always find her way home.

Maggie started early today. She dressed in the half-dark, made a flask of tea, put a head-torch on and made her way down those steps. She looked east, as she readied the boat. She looked through the harbour’s narrow opening and saw the dawn – pink, grey, the last blue of night.

And she’d hauled on the cord to start the outboard motor, thrummed across the water, past Sye and Bundy Head. A cool, early morning. The smell, always, of fish and diesel fumes. She’d felt the motor’s vibration, heard the quiet slosh at her feet of water that had come aboard in various ways – off the pots, or rainwater – and it is the same every time. It does not change – how Pigeon smells, how the silence rushes in when she turns the engine off. There are the same rituals as there always were, and she finds a comfort in them. Pigeon is familiar. So are the orange fibreglass buoys, the sound of the sea against the boat’s sides, the gulls that follow hopefully, the ghostly loom of the lobster pots as she pulls them up from the dark.

Nothing changes on Parla. That’s what she was told, when she first came. It stays the same – just so you know … And Maggie had loved that. She’d loved the idea of a safe, strong, unchanging life. Just Tom, and her, and the water.

But then he died. And everything changed. Nothing changes here proved, in fact, to be the greatest of all lies. He died and so much died with him; countless more things were lost. She learnt this: that grief changes more than you ever thought it could. All certainty goes away. All strong things stop being strong. Tom was there and then he was not: and so what could be relied upon? Nothing felt safe any more: a lone sock felt symbolic; an embrace from a friend seemed like a trap; letters had no meaning or too many meanings so that sorry for your loss felt coded, impenetrable, too hard to understand. Maggie believed, for a time, that she was being lied to. She’d eyed others, looking for that lie. Nothing can be trusted – to be kind, or safe, or to stay with her.

I will not feel or care for anything. I will rely on nothing.

But no-one can live like that. Maggie tried to be self-reliant, and hard – but she could not fully. She had to give shape to her days. She had to hold her hand out or she’d sink, she knew that. And it was routines that Maggie turned to. Tentatively, she sought comfort in small, necessary, practical things – so she’d make proper coffee in a cafetiere, clean the bath, pluck tomatoes from her plants and inhale their bitter smell. She’d pull the cord on Pigeon as she used to when Tom was still living. She’d bind the claws of lobster with coloured elastic bands.

And this place. Coming here.

Maggie is walking, now. She has left the half-moon harbour; she is walking down the island’s western coast. The wild west, Tom called it: bare, fully exposed. No other islands lie to the west of Parla; from here, there is only the open sea. And centuries of storms and thundering water have battered it – picked off rocks, and scooped out caves so that this coastline echoes. The sea booms; the birds wail. She hears them now, as she walks.

This was her routine, too: she’d walk on this coast at every low tide. For two years Maggie would come, twice daily – so she has come to know each stile, each thistle patch, each rabbit hole. She knows each track through the gorse, how the word Tom! bounces back to her from every dank cave wall. And in the early days, before she believed that he was truly gone, and not returning, she’d step down the wooden staircase onto Lock-and-Key and tread across its sand. For it is on this beach that a whale stranded itself, where the best shells have come, where there has been driftwood so smooth and bleached by the waves that they looked like bones and it’s here that Maggie has found pottery shards and a piece of glass that had been so worn, so turned over and over by the sea that it had been rolled into a ball. A marble as green as an eye. There is a fence, too, on which those lost rubber boots have been hung – boots that have been washed ashore without their other, matching halves – so they look out to sea forlornly. And if something of worth – something she’d loved, and still loved – was to wash ashore, she has always believed it would be here. This beach.

Lock-and-Key. Named because the headland to its south is shaped, or partly, as the beach is. It has the same outline, but inverted. One might fit the other … If you squint. So she was told.

Maggie steps down the staircase now.

The row of rubber boots is still here – still waiting.

Tom. Who knew all the beaches. He knew each cave, each promontory. Tom was Parlan entirely, and so he knew the history of houses, the names in the graveyard, how puffins fly, how to coax the lugworm out, how to read the weather by clouds or a sheep’s positioning, how to cook mussels in garlic and white wine. So many stories in his head – of love and loss, of the old pig farm. Maggie had been in awe of this.

You’re lucky, she’d told him.

I feel it. Kissing her.

She was told time would help. People said it to her, meaning well: give it time … But time does not help. All that happens with time is that you grow tired – so hugely, indescribably tired. He was everywhere and nowhere. He was in the gold band on her finger but he was not in the house, not in their bed. And she began to grow tired of walking on this beach: walking on this beach meant she was looking at each sodden piece of cloth, each inch of rope, each footprint in the sand thinking is that his …? She would hurry towards new driftwood. She’d make her way to each line of faded plastic in case it held a clue. And one dusk – one awful, half-lit, winter dusk – she’d thought she’d seen a person lying on Lock-and-Key. In the gloom, she saw it: a dark and indefinable shape at the water’s edge. So she ran. She dropped to her knees as she reached it. She plunged her hands into the shape, gasping, swearing, saying Tom with sand in her mouth and tears in her eyes – and it was weed. Just weed. Two metres or more of tangled wrack which had fooled her, briefly, in the evening light. And she knelt by that weed, and sobbed. He is not coming back to me. He is not coming back to me. She knew, she knew. She knew he was not. She had to admit this, kneeling there.

Maggie never wants another moment like that moment – no more crouching next to weed. No more Tom! – sand-tasting. And so for four years she has tried to live a small life. A safe life. No changes.

No hope, and no loss.

But now this … A man. A man has come ashore. Nathan says just passing and she spills her yellow paint, and for one tiny, impossible moment …

Maggie closes her eyes. The wind finds her hair and it tugs, tugs.

I have to see this man. She must. He is not Tom; she knows he is not. But he is a new, rolled mass of weed; he is a new indefinable shape that she must kick at, at least, to make sure of. For otherwise, she will always be thinking what if …?

She will see him tomorrow.

This human driftwood. This jetsam that washed up with more unwanted things.

* * *

He is sleeping again. He is upright but his eyes are closed. Tabitha smiles, and takes the empty mug from his hand.

People are children again, when they sleep. Their frown lines go and their worries do, so that they lie as they would have lain in their childhood beds. She’s seen it enough. Her brother-in-law, Jack Bundy, was a fierce, bad-tempered piece by day but she found him sleeping in the armchair once, and his left hand was near his face as if trying to hide himself or, even, suck his thumb. He’d looked like a boy, not a middle-aged man. And if Jack Bundy could look sweet-natured …

She brings the blankets around her patient. She wonders, briefly, who else has done this for him – for whoever he is, he’ll have had a mother. Does he have a wife? There is no ring. No white mark where a ring has been.

Amnesia. It’s a new one for her. Nearly half a century since she became a nurse, and how many amnesiacs has she met? She will have to research it – books, online.

Tabitha pads through to her kitchen.

It is small, square. It is dark, too, for its single window looks out onto a bank of grass. A sheep has been here this morning – she can see its fresh droppings, berry-bright. Tabitha exhales, picks up the phone. The task she must do is motherly.

Hello? It is answered after two rings.

Em, it’s me.

What do you want?

I have a request …

There is silence from her sister.

Well – it’s this …

* * *

The quayside is empty, and still. Nancy cannot see anyone now – just their black cat and a gull that walks like a man in a waistcoat, his hands behind his back. The gull has eyed the cat; the cat, in turn, is treading in the shadows, keeping her distance. As a kitten, she got pecked at; her ear is split at its tip.

Nancy shuffles forwards, drops down onto the sand. There is a shell here – blue, and chalky inside. She brings it right up to her eye and looks at it. It is joined, with two halves and when she presses those halves together the shell clacks, like a mouth.

She makes the shell say hello to the cat. Hello to the mean-looking gull.

What have you there, little Nancy?

The voice makes her jump. She turns. It is old Mrs Coyle with her walking stick and her butterscotch breath. She has made her way down from the white house, near the sea wall. There is a line of sweat between her nose and mouth. Mrs Coyle dabs at it.

Another lovely morning. All this lovely weather!

She tucks the tissue up her sleeve.

May I join you?

They sit side by side on the harbour’s bench. Nan swings her legs. It’s a shell.

And a fine one, too. A mussel shell. Look at that blue …

I found it down there.

Well, they’re common enough. Have you eaten mussels?

Nan shakes her head. She likes doing this, as she has glass bobbles at the end of her plaits which knock against each other. She shakes her head more than she needs to.

Your brother could find you some, I’m sure. Whilst he’s out walking.

Nan picks at some grit she finds in the shell. She is not sure what to say to Mrs Coyle, or what to say about mussels, so she says Sam found a person on Wednesday night. He was washed up at Sye.

So I heard.

Daddy says he probably fell off a boat.

Does he? Perhaps.

Nan looks up. Do you think he did?

Fell overboard?

She nods.

Well, perhaps. It’s nine miles to the mainland, which would be a very long swim.

She squints at the ferry. Is he a ghost, maybe?

Oh I think he’s real enough. Your brother carried him! So did the Bundy men. If he was a ghost how could they carry him?

A pirate?

No pirates.

Nan studies the shell. I think he’s a pirate.

No, no. I don’t think so.

Who do you think he is, Mrs Coyle?

Abigail smiles. Me? She stays quiet for a moment. She takes the tissue out, dabs her nose and pops it back again. Then she leans towards Nancy and says do you like stories?

Stories?

Yes. I thought most children liked stories.

Only good ones.

Ah! Very wise. Have you heard of the Fishman?

She looks up from her shell. A Fishman?

The Fishman. A man who has the tail of a fish, but he can also grow legs and come ashore?

Nan stares. He’s a fish? A fish who grew legs? She looks down at the shell, wide-eyed. Maybe she has heard the story. Maybe Alfie told her in the playground once. And there is a book on her shelf – a pink spine, with thick cardboard pages – which has a mermaid in it, and so she turns and says like a mermaid?

Abigail considers this. Yes, in a way. But it’s always a man in the stories – a strong, bearded, good-looking man.

The mussel shell goes clack.

My husband saw him, once. At Sye.

Nan’s eyes grow like moons.

Jim was young, but he remembers it. Says he looked up from the beach and saw a man swimming – a man with dark hair, and a very solemn face. Then he went under, and where he had been swimming there rose a huge, silvery tail …

Mr Coyle saw him? Properly?

He did.

And this is him? This man is the Fishman he saw? But he’s got legs now?

Abigail smiles. Why not? Humans think they know everything but there is so much more.

They are watched, as they talk. One of the oldest and the youngest inhabitants of Parla, side by side on the wrought-iron bench.

Dee Lovegrove stands in her bedroom. She has taken a pillowcase off the radiator, and she folds it by the window. Outside, she can see them. Nancy is wearing her denim dungarees with the heart-shaped buttons. She insisted on plaits this morning but one is already escaping its band and there’s mud, Dee notes, on her knees. Never, ever tidy. Nan discards clothing like petals, sticks her fingers into all manner of dirt. It was sheep dung last week, and diesel the week before. Little Nancy Lovegrove. Dee feels a pang of love. It is the sudden punch of it that she always feels with her children – Nan’s reddened knees, or how Sam puts his sunglasses on, patting the sides to make sure they’re in place. Today, Rona had looked so beautiful, standing on the quayside with her arms full of cakes and Dee had watched her step back from the crate, shield her eyes against the sun. Dee had thought, she’s mine. All grown up.

And her other boys, too. After Sam, there came the twins – as alike as shoes are. In the first few years of their life, it was Dee and Dee alone who knew who was who, and it was their ways that told her, not how they looked. Ben would gaze past her, as he lay on the changing mat; he’d watch a bee or a bird’s shadow on the bedroom wall – whilst Austin’s eyes would be on her, and her alone. Austin spoke first by three weeks. Yes, Dee knew who was who.

A pang, too, for those boys. Where are they now? Backpacking. Sticky with mosquito repellent, drinking beer with foreign names. Meeting girls, no doubt. Austin claimed he would not shave again till he was home, and Dee tries to imagine it – that wriggling tot on the flowery changing mat being able to grow facial hair at all. Ben wants to get his eyebrow pierced. How did it happen? Be safe, boys. Drop me a postcard, sometime.

But they fly. It is what the fledged birds must do, and she’s always known that. The nest can’t always be full.

She looks at Nan. Nancy aged six and three-quarters, who is far from fledged, thank God. There are the great surprises in life, and then there is Nan who was conceived after half a bottle of sweet sherry and a fumble on the sofa when Dee was nearly forty-four. She’d thought it was her menopause until she was sick in the footwell of the car. The risks … Ed had been nervous. But a life had been made so the life must be born. And now that life is swinging her legs on the bench outside.

Above them, and above the stone wall, is the sea. Wide, wide water. In the far distance is the white dot of the Morning Star and the trail of white water she leaves in her wake. It will be a house of girls tonight – just Dee and her youngest daughter. She wraps her arms around herself. Her other son, too, is on the Star – her second oldest child, with his stoop and silences, with his migraines which make him whimper with the pain. Sam, who loiters near Crest, runs along the coastal path or stays in his room, lifting weights. He does not do much more than this. No speaking, no letting go of the old ghosts. He trawls his self-blame as boats trawl their nets; it gathers everything, and slows him down, and one day she fears he’ll go under.

* * *

At Lowfield, the nurse is outside. She stands in her garden and watches the wind, as it blows through the grass. The nettle patch at Litty whitens, for the undersides of the leaves are paler than their tops. She loves these small moments.

In comes a car with a broken exhaust.

Emmeline parks, and climbs out. She leans into the back of the car and lifts out a large black plastic bag; the plastic has stretched and greyed in places where Emmeline’s fingers have been. Here.

Perfect. Tabitha goes to it. The bag is passed over as a child might be – with the nurse’s hand going underneath it, bringing the bag to her chest. I’m sorry I had to ask, but it’s all I could think of.

I’ll want them back.

You’ll get them back. Of course you will.

And I don’t want them torn. Or damaged.

They’re already torn and damaged – aren’t they?

Emmeline sniffs, ignores her. Has he said anything yet?

Not much.

His name?

No. Thank you for these. And Tabitha goes inside.

In the kitchen, she unties the bag and reaches in. There is a cream shirt, a blue jumper with a hood. Socks. T-shirts. They are clothes that Tabitha partly remembers. They were Tom’s – fraying, stained or worn-out clothes that he’d kept at his mother’s house. For once he’d met Maggie, he’d wanted to make room for her clothes – in his wardrobe, up at Crest.

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