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You’ve lost an arm, so what? You’ve got another on the left. Let’s see it work. It can be done. Come on, sit down and trap the stone upon the anvil with your stump. Or, here’s the way the one-armed master goes to work; he changes crafts. He becomes the herdsman or the cook, the leatherman. His cheeses are the best. His goats. His perfect-fitting shoes. No one said, There are a thousand things to do that don’t require two arms. It takes one arm and two good legs to take a bucket to the stream and bring it back, unspilt. Do that. Or four fingers and a thumb are easily enough to take up keeping bees.
    The simple truth is this, no one had the time or inclination to find a role for me. Making flints, that’s all they knew. That’s what gave them heart. That was the ritual that kept them going, that filled their time, that stocked their larders, that gave them pride. Work made them comfortable. It made them feel, We do exist, We are important, even, We count. They were the stoneys, heart and mind. They blindly fashioned flints. And gulls laid top-heavy eggs. And the winds blew off the sea. That’s how the world was made and never pause for thought. It wasn’t made for boys with stumps.
    I promised you there’d be no lies, but you’ll excuse excursions and short cuts. What is the profit in listing here the countless days I fled the cursings of my uncle and my cousins to laze about the village staring idly into other people’s lives? Days spent doing nothing, when I was eight, nine, ten, could slow this story down. You’d fall asleep, you’d topple to the ground, if I told that. You’d dislocate your jaw with yawns if I recounted here the casual, endless rebuffs upon which my boyish indignation fed. I stalked the village like a homeless pup, unnamed, unnoticed, empty, cold, uncombed, and loved by no one but itself.
    So, seven, eight years on. I was beyond the bowman’s age. It was the end of summer and there you see me once again upon the shore, running toes along the sand. I was well. I had no colds. My throat was clear, my lips were soft. For once the wind and sea were tame, the wrack was almost dry, the birds were grazing on the beach like sheep. There were no living scallops at my feet, just empty valves, the fluted valleys of their fifteen ribs turned green and black with seacrust. I could invent for you a sea and wind and sky that flung saltweed in my face and emptied water from the pools and cast a light so dark and feeble that even lugworms took the day for night, mistook the wind for tide, and coiled their ropes too soon upon the sand. But I will keep it calm and windless. The sight was no less strange. I skimmed a scallop out to sea and there, as unselfconscious as a cloud, a ship was passing by.
    What would you do if you were me? Run back and tell the stoneys? What? That they should arm themselves and gather on the shore? That they should hurry from their workshops – the stones left baking, the bellows breathless in the hearth – and prepare themselves for trade with sailors? That they should simply stand in awe, like me, and witness from the land the recklessness of travel on the sea? They’d tell me, Scram. We’ve work to do. They’d call me Little Liar. And, for sure, if one or two were tempted to take the bracken path towards the sea to prove me false, they couldn’t reach the cliffs in time. For all the stillness on the beach, the muscles in the clothing of the sail made clear enough to me that there were breezes just offshore. That ship would soon be out of sight. Unless, of course, I followed it. Why shouldn’t I? I had no stones. I simply filled my chest with air and took off down the coast.’

8
    ‘T HE SEA VIEWED from the clifftop is a world that’s upside down. Its gulls have backs. You’re looking down on wind. The shallows, from above, are flat and patterned, green with arcs of white where the water runs to phlegm. My ship threw up an arc of its own phlegm as it dipped and