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up for the top shelf. Dangling there, elephantine, the double and triple knots grown over with skin. Hands, I’ve no doubt, would have tied a beautiful knot; but what I’ve always seen was nothing more than a really magnificent granny-slip.
    Of that magical sail there is no remnant, no scrap of the scraps that it was made of, no thread of the threads that tied it together. There are no photographs. The only sail is the sail of my grandmother’s stories, much fabricated with the collected junk of the marsh and the sea until it resembled the landscape of North Norfolk: muddy, wooded, sparse in its emptiness, luxuriant in its detail. What became of Hands’s sail remains a mystery. Perhaps it sunk in the sea during the storm that swallowed the Pip . Perhaps Hands, weeping and lost already, dragged it from the mast and wrapped it round himself as the boat took on water in the final minutes, in the middle of the night. And perhaps - imagining all possibilities - that waterlogged man held fast to the wind for a day and a night, navigating by the stars and his own inner sense, tapping the strength of a well-fixed hull until he saw the low, unassuming coast on the other side of the sea, until he lugged the boat out on to the sandy shore. Did he pull the boat into the softly shifting beauty of foreign dunes, the dunes themselves seeming to him like the waves of the German Bight, slowly rolling inland over the years? The sound of the North Sea would gradually fall away, and Hands would wipe the sweat off his brow, as he makes out a lonely figure walking towards him. A small dog trotting with its nose to the ground by her side.
    He would drop the rope and sit, expectantly, on the battered prow of his little boat till the woman came closer, stopping before him. Hands would have gathered together a clump of flowering sea lavender from the dunes, the same plant that grows in the marshes of North Norfolk. He would give it to the woman. The dog would sniff his boots cautiously. He would smile and ask what country it was.
    Later that night, after a simple meal of smoked herring and pickles, Hands would remove his boots and place them neatly at the foot of the bed. He’d drag the salty quilt over the sheets, then turn to the woman and hold her tightly, the dog curled up at his feet.
    In the morning, when the woman would go to harvest the flowers in the polder, Hands would set to work in the house. New shingles for the roof, plane the doorjambs. He’d see another crooked chimney. He’d prise the solid teak splash deck off the Pip and fashion a new washboard for the kitchen; throw the dog’s fraying lead away, and in its place he’d plait a new, stronger tether from the boat’s painter; the rudder he’d make into a weathervane, which would gently steer an imaginary course through the sky, endlessly turning, endlessly restless, fixed in position, without a course to steer, without a hand to guide it, the centre of a new home.
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    There are no answers, only questions. Questions and half-truths. The only thing we have is the quilt, living on, not across a bed or up a mast, but in the murk of my grandmother’s mind, extending, as her stories got ever longer, until it reached beyond the cottage door, across the untidy lawn, through the thicket hedges and across the marshes. Where Hands finished my grandmother continued, faithfully taking over the stitching of the quilt, adding pieces and patches, new clauses, new asides over the years until none of us who listened could find our way out. The quilt of her stories assumed monstrous proportions, unrealistic dimensions, until we were all lost at sea along with Hands. The bugger stretched for miles, across the dismal marshes and creeks until eventually it covered the Point and wove itself across the wide sand beach into the chilling froth of the North Sea, and all of us who listened realized that what Goose was talking about was not a quilt or a sail or a