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naughty girl would do, she hid the map and held her tongue. She thought constantly about that mysterious island. And little by little, her eyes began to resemble those of her father: distant and dreamy and lingering on the horizon. When she was on the saltmarsh with her mother, following mud gullies and clinging to Goose’s back as the woman waded over to the Point, there, among the nesting colonies of the birds that blew up into the sky as they approached, my mother scanned the horizon in vain, thinking she’d see those snow-capped peaks of the island in the mouths of the white horses: I never saw it. Not never. Back in the cottage she’d spend the winter evenings dreaming in front of the fire, looking as the burning logs changed into the wave-battered coast of her strange imaginary island. Next to her, my grandmother, possibly staring into the same fire and wondering what goblin of the marsh had cast a spell over her daughter.
    Finding the island becomes an obsession. Satchel in hand, there she is, lonely and ostracized on Blakeney Quay, in a raggy grey cloth dress, rubbing her raw scalp after her hair has been tugged hard by the local kids, quietly muttering about her mysterious island until she has a reputation for being strange in the head, like her mother. The kids already have a name for her. ‘Lil’ Mardler’. The little girl who told tales. Eventually she grasped the nettle. A long evening, rain beating at the window, a plain meal of herring and potatoes on a cold plate - my mother could take it no more. She ran - startling my grumpy, dozing grandmother - to the earthenware jar, rolled the map on to the table and put four small jars of pickled samphire on it to keep it flat.
    â€˜I ain’t no Lil’ Mardler, am I? See. The island .’
    In her own twisted way, my grandmother must have been proud of her daughter’s nickname, but this map meant trouble. According to her version, it was meant to have gone to sea with Hands. She rolled it up.
    â€˜Don’t you go peepin’ no more, you hair.’
    No. It’s not so easy to brush off Lil’ Mardler. The little girl’s standing her ground till her mother explains.
    â€˜Thass Dogger Bank, thass is. Now don’t you go talkin’ no more about it.’ And before she put an end to it her mother added, ‘Thass where your father’s gone.’
    Murky untruths. Lil’ Mardler imagines her mysterious father in a playful mood, his pockets jangling with coins as he crosses the marsh early one Saturday morning, the rolled-up map sticking out of his back pocket. He stops for a minute on the high flood bank overlooking the Pit and the Point and the North Sea. In the pre-dawn silence he’s watching strange vapours rising from the saltmarsh. He’s thinking about the horizon and what lies beyond. That night he unrolls the map in front of Goose. He tells her how he’d won the map with the last wager of the night before, the one that finally broke Arthur Quail’s nerve and then his heart, forcing him to unpin the possession he so loved from above the bar. Hands’s fine fingers point out the jagged cruel Norwegian coast, the golden-ripe beaches of Denmark and the Baltic glittering with amber, then the silent brooding mass of Germany so pockmarked with the darts of the Map and Sail. Moving my grandmother’s elbows, he shows her the lonely curve of the Norfolk coast, like a great sad eye cast mournfully over the water. Then his finger moves out to the North Sea, sailing smoothly over fathom marks, sandbanks and gullies until he reaches the mischievous shape of his phantom island. What’s that, he asks, do you know, you voman of zhe marsh, you zea zalt, you creek-hopper? Got you stumped, haven’t I. Made you feel a lemon. What’s that island zhere? And my grandmother, furious the buried man was gaining the upper hand, furious that her sea might have an island where she knew it to be