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gripped by the account of her background that followed in the next document. It was the first time she had seen her life laid bare. The detail on the first page was fairly innocuous. It covered her education at local schools. It mentioned that she had been chosen for the gifted and talented program at primary school, was in the top class at secondary school, and had been a responsible and motivated student despite her older sister’s problems. Because of her older sister’s problems, Ali corrected the notes. There was even a photocopy of her last school report.
    It then gave a brief picture of her parents. Her father was a fisherman and her mother worked part-time at the council. It mentioned the A-level results that had won her a place at the University of East Anglia. Then there was a brief, cold description of Cromer: “A small town whose depressed economy is dependent on seasonal tourism and the crab industry. At one time Cromer had the highest rate of registered heroin addicts in East Anglia. It used to be a fashionable destination for Victorian travelers.”
    Outrageous, thought Ali. How could they describe Cromer without mentioning the sea? She was affronted. It was as though they had missed a crucial part of her personality. Her parents’ house on the front was so close to the water that during a storm the spray would lash against her bedroom window. This defined her more than any school report. At night she would sometimes open her window to listen to the voice of the sea, trying to gauge its mood, without being able to see its surface. In a storm it was always angry, but occasionally the anger was tempered with a mournful wail that made her feel almost sorry for its lack of self-control. In the summer, it sometimes turned a luminous turquoise color. People were tempted into its embrace, and most were released. But every August someone, usually an intrepid child, was dragged out into the waters by the fierce crosscurrents.
    Cromer might be a backwater, but Ali was certain its rhythms were controlled by primitive higher forces. Ali’s father made his peace with the sea through rituals and routines, listening to the forecast a couple of times a day, and learning to adapt to changes in wind direction like someone who switches effortlessly between two languages. But Ali never fully trusted the melodic tones of those who read the shipping forecast, nor the irrational store her father set by his self-imposed set of rules. On a clear day, from her bedroom window Ali could see as far as the lost village of Shipton, consumed by the water two hundred years earlier.
    For Ali the sea was a beguiling friend who could never quite be trusted. Much like the Skinners, as it would transpire. But at that moment, waiting in their dining room, Ali couldn’t know this. And if she had, would it have made any difference? So she kept reading and licked the skin around her mouth, missing the taste of salt on her tongue. She remembered learning at school that salt is as essential to human beings as water, and feeling as though that was as close as she was ever going to get to anything approaching a belief system.
    It said there was no mention of Ali or her parents in any local newspapers apart from an article that appeared in the Eastern Daily Press ten years ago, when her father caught a six-pound crab. To Ali’s embarrassment there was a color photocopy of this piece, with her father dressed in his yellow fisherman’s trousers, holding the crab. It even mentioned that a distant relative in Great Yarmouth had invented these trousers. Ali had her father’s smile, everyone told her. But this was the first time that she could see it herself. “A life without consequence,” she said out loud as she skimmed down the page reading notes about herself.
    Unlike the people who lived here. Ali had stood outside the house in disbelief when she arrived. It was an imposing Regency-style building with stucco moldings and a glass portico that