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out to catch herring they underplay the effect of the swell on them, holding casually onto the side, timing their movement. Drunk, they stagger and lurch and make more haphazard progress, unbuttoning their flies with owlish deliberation. Down on the sand you tell him and he shakes his head to clear it, looks back and sees you still there. You can see his mind shifting like a tide turning, draining backwards to leave everything looking untouched, saturated but untouched.
    You better tell me all this tomorrow and we’ll think about what we’ll do to get rid of it, Lornie, you’ve caught me at a bad time here .
    He slumps down next to you, hands over his face, hair in the sand. Next to you the sea pulls, searches, sighs. Had a bit to drink tonight.
    Hiss and silence, hiss and silence. You hiccup your tears. After this, at home, there will be the ammonia smell of soaked hot nappies, a cot reeking of vomited milk .
    Anyway, I’m out on the boat three days a week, how can I be sure it’s mine?
    Your blood sings. Sand under your digging fingernails, mica glittering even in the moonlight. You turn your scalded face to him, and he is unconscious. One hand rests lovingly, caressingly, on his belly.
    Out there there’s a trough, just where the water darkens and the surface ruffles like a sheet blowing on a line. Schools of tiny fish rock back and forth and there are shattered bits of kelp tumbling. In the trough, things go in rough and come out smooth, their edges worn away and polished. They are ground together and when the sea offers them back, nothing is sharp, nothing can cut.
    You shake Matthew. He grunts and sleeps on. You are murderous, your mouth a black shadow of rage, sucking air in. You want to get a rock. Before you is a vision of smashed shell, drizzling water, grey salty tissue. You imagine that small sudden violence of skin tearing, blood, mucous, grit. How easy it would be, now, to flood seawater through this, let the tide rinse everything clean.
    You roll him into the water, towards the trough, and the sound coming from your mouth is a growl, a hiss. Once you saw a drowned man on this beach, returned searched and worried at by the sea. He lay like someone exhausted, resigned. A shining piece of ribbon kelp had twined itself around his neck, and his face had stopped resisting — welcoming the water in, welcoming the sand into a mouth at last relieved to be vulnerable. Matthew’s body drifts easily into the shallows, unresisting. Soon waves will turn his face over and down. His lungs will breathe another element entirely.
    You squat trying to rub grit from your legs for a long time before you realise it’s not sand but regrowing hair. Only eight weeks ago you placed your foot on the chalky green rim of the bath and pulled the razor up in long strokes. Soap making the skin tight, blood trickling from a nick in your shin. Only eight weeks ago, it was your hipbones protruding through the fabric of the dress, your stomach that was flat.
    You crouch, rocking, waiting for the sea to taste and take its gift.
    In my room now, there’s matting made of rope and a picture framed in weathered wood like old palings with the paint flaking off. How my mother would have laughed — or would she have wept? — to see these signs of poverty, which she worked to rise above, turned into this desirable high art. Perhaps these palings came from the shacks themselves, perhaps the collection of old bottles and driftwood fragments on the high shelf behind the bar came off one of those windowsills. I have no doubt they bulldozed the shacks, set a match to them. I can see the idle drinkers from the pub, standing outside and shifting their weight on the lawn, watching the orange flame and roiling black smoke, as clearly as if I witnessed it myself.
    Not daring to put a foot on his neck, or kick him further into the trough. As you stand, you think you feel the thing in there fluttering and somersaulting,