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station.
    The carriage rocks across a set of points. The fields are planted with cereals. In front of them, in a broad, bright band coming right up to the edge of the rail bed, poppies tremble beneath a cloud of moths. The moths are tiny, white-winged, light as ashes from a bonfire. The gust of our passing catches them and choreographs them, and for a moment they abandon their zig-zag trajectories and give themselves up to the slipstream’s swirl.
    Abruptly, the train is canalised again; it rushes along a weedy, rackety corridor made of fences, wickets, head-high breeze-block walls and here and there, in the more open stretches, flagpoles, greenhouses, gazebos, weathered trampolines and bleached-pink plastic pedal cars. To travel at speed between these back gardens is to glimpse the collective unconscious of the region – its lonely pride and thin hope.
    ‘We’re doing up a boat.’ Michel, weary of our silence, has decided to compete with the racket of the train. ‘Did I tell you?’ he bawls. ‘Hanna and me.’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘We’re doing up a boat.’
    The train slows to running pace and we emerge from between back gardens, through weedy fields and bare gravel lots marked out by chicken-wire, into the apparent chaos of the coastal banks – a vast, near-barren shingle expanse that edges year by year, bizarre and unmappable, further into the sea. The train brakes again, easing its way over uncertain ground.
    It dawns on me that we are still running through gardens. But these are big, barren gardens, without fences, without walls. To say that nothing grows on the shingle would be unfair. A few local specialists thrive among the pebbles. Their geometrically simple flowers and cactus-like leaves suggest an occupation of dry land by pioneering seaweeds.
    A roll of rusted wire lies across the pebbles, as sculptural in its way as the column of a ruined temple. Even this is not right, because the mind should not have to strain so hard for its metaphors. Better to say that this abandoned concrete pill has shape and mass of its own; and that tar-paper shack embodies the theory of its own construction. Things here are themselves. They are too few to gather into categories.
    Paint sticks arranged in a pretend flower bed. An arch made from the planks of an old boat. A rabbit skull perched on a rock. Rows of pebbles, set more or less upright. A half-buried tyre. Old fishing net, pooled in a perfect circle. Buoys. Rusted cans. I would lay odds that some of the subtler effects aren’t even deliberate, and what seem to be gardens are simply happy accidents: artefacts of the starved eye’s hankering for pattern. But this, I suppose, is the gardener’s art around here: to set the eye right to the landscape, so that, from the hulks of derelict fishing boats on the horizon to the cracked concrete kerbs marking the road to the railway station, everything comes into focus – one giant garden.
    The railway runs unfenced over the shingle. At our current crawl, you could safely jump from the carriage and head off in any direction, towards any landmark. The tar-paper houses. The lighthouse. On the horizon, black hulks of old boats, upturned, make fishermen’s shelters.
    ‘We’re fixing up this boat,’ Michel says. It’s the third time he’s mentioned this in as many minutes, and already there is a pall of futility about the enterprise, especially here, where year by year, inch by inch, the shingle piles up on itself, making new land.
    ‘Hanna wants us to sail around the world.’
    Here the land gathers itself and rises to meet your footfall. What need of boats, round here?
    She looks like an urchin spilled from the chorus of an old musical. Hanna. A five-foot-nothing shit-eating grin above a threadbare green jumper and holed, varnish-spattered jeans.
    These, she tells me, are the clothes she wears while she works on the boat. Already with the boat. No sooner are we out through the ticket-hall-cum-giftshop than she has her arm