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water, furious that the first bit of rock out there might not be Scandinavia, in short, furious - sucks and chews her finger and finally, desperately, shouts it out:
    â€˜Thass Dogger Bank, thass is!’
    Â 
    Goose had hidden Arthur Quail’s great map in the earthenware jar. Hidden it because it spoke of a man she’d found and lost in the space of a few brief months. She never intended that map to be found. She’d already told my mother, and anyone else who asked, that that man’s last known whereabouts was bailing the Pip in the middle of a storm, with Arthur Quail’s great map of the North Sea pinned to the splash deck. Goose would tell us about the cracks that yawned open in the rotten hull, how the gannets swept down to peck his head, push him under, tweak him by the nose - the rising water above the shin, above the waist, above the neck - the thin silent mouth sinking after the boat into the storm, into the dark, into the dogfish jaws, the lobster claws.
    But my mother had found that map in Lane End. And I think about Hands pulling the quilt off the washing line and hoisting it up on the mast of the Pip , and I wonder, why go to sea without a map?
    Did he sail home, or did he hear the screams of Goose’s labour coming from inside the house and was overwhelmed by such panic his dextrous fingers had tied themselves in knots? Thunderstruck with indecision, maybe he’d tried to block out the noise of the woman screaming his name by concentrating his mind on practical work. He sees the upturned hull of the Pip on the lawn next to the mudslide with the patches of repair-work he’s completed a few days before. He wonders whether the pitch has dried. Will it be buoyant? Will its passage through water be smooth? Will displacement levels be affected? The breeze buffets his cheek and he instantly gauges it on the Beaufort scale. Already the sounds of the birth are fading. The quilt stirs on the line. The quilt, the quilt is filling with the wind like a sail. No, surely not, this cumbersome patchwork nonsense, which has spread and spread though those long hard evenings, surely it can’t contain the wind? What is the breaking point of that twine I used? Did I double the thread? And he pulls the quilt along the line out of my grandmother’s restricted sight, pulling the fabric between his hands and examining the hems. His fingers begin to unknot. Just the briefest moment of regret for what he’s about to do: Jeder macht mal eine kleine Dummheit , he says to himself, and he knows he’s absolving all blame too. Then he’s watching the fine silk of the dug-up parachute gathering the air. Fabric like this is spun by the angels. Deutsche angels. When the quilt is hoisted up the mast of the Pip , Hands has lost himself in the beauty of his science. The boat bobs into the water like a cheeky duckling, giddy with life. Yes, just a quick spin into the Pit, it’ll focus my thoughts, get rid of the fallow. I’ll take a rope and practise my knots and then, when I return - just see - I’ll grab that umbilical cord and tie the greatest, tightest knot that’s ever been seen. A knot my child will carry for the rest of its life, and when that child is in the bath, on the beach, dressing for bed, whatever, he or she is going to look down and see that tidy little scar in the middle of their belly and put their finger in and marvel, yes marvel, at their father’s handiwork.
    The ridiculous lengths one can go to clear the family name. Was it the wind’s fault - suddenly picking up in a squall to capsize the boat and send his honourable intentions to the bottom of the sea? Were the fish to blame - did they bite through the hull before he could tack his return to the birth of his child?
    My earliest memory was seeing my mother’s belly-button. My first crawl was to get away from it. As a toddler I was really terrified, pulling my mother’s jumper down when she reached