Every morning Bernadette woke with the mournful wail of herring gulls in her ears and the sun streaming in through chinks in the patterned curtains. The gulls nested on the top of Castle Rock, a hundred foot high cube of yellow granite which lay crumbling on the shore. 
      From the rock the shore swept away to the east in a great arc. The other side of the bay stretched out to the west in a long green spit, a pattern of fields divided by hedgerows with the odd cluster of white cottages. It seemed impossibly distant and inaccessible as if it were merely painted on the sky.
      When the tide was in, a sheet of water covered the bay. In the mornings it was almost blinding to look at – the silver blade of each wave reflecting the morning sun. Then Bernadette ran to the beach, jumping on the big flat pebbles, to stand and mutely watch her older cousins athletically skimming pieces of slate over the water. On days when a fresh breeze blew, the wavelets gleamed with foam and dashed themselves recklessly on the rocks. In the evenings the sea was so calm and the rose tinted sky so serene that the tiny waves crept forward apologetically, fading with the feeblest whisper into the sand.
      When the tide receded the aspect of the bay was transformed. A vast expanse of bright sand was laid bare. A broad stream divided one shore from the other. At low tide it was possible to wade across the channel and walk out into the middle of the bay. The remains of a wrecked ship were dimly visible far out across the sands. 

The rising tide had been known to leave witless visitors stranded out in the bay who would have to be rescued by fishing boat. Mr. Green, who lived in a ruined, ivy grown house on the shore, had once witnessed a drowning: a young man who, in panic, tried to wade back across the channel as the tide rushed in and lost his footing and couldn't swim. Bernadette often conjured up the image of this man: carried on the men's shoulders as if on a bier; the sea water streaming off him and his bright blue eyes filming over like the eyes of a fish; staring at the sky but not seeing the people clustered round or the wheeling shapes of the gulls; the slack mouth noiselessly gasping and water gleaming on his sodden features. 
      Her cousins had long planned a walk to the wreck. She had listened to them discussing it, knowing that they would never ask her to go with them. And she had stood apart and smiled privately, as though she too had a secret. But her secret lacked the sweetness of complicity. 
      It was the deep purple shadowing beneath her eyes which disconcerted them, a famished look which accused their plump bellies and made them squirm inwardly. Why was she so thin?, they wondered, was it that she didn't eat? 
      One morning they appeared on the sands with full knapsacks and an air of determination about them. Bernadette sensed that they were setting off on the long planned walk. She followed cautiously at a distance. 
      The cousins had crossed the channel and walked some way out onto the sands, when, looking back they observed a small figure in a flapping dress tramping doggedly towards them. 
      "Oh, no! what's she doing here?”
      They waited, arms folded tightly across their chests until they could see her pale face. 
      “Go back home!”
      “Can't make me,” came the stubborn reply. 
      “Look, you can't come with us, it’s too far. Go home!”
      “No.”
      “Just bloody clear off, we don't want you!” snapped the taller one. 
      They turned their backs on her and continued. She followed, slowly but with more determination.
      It was a different world out there. Far from the familiar noise and shelter of the shoreline. The endless sand had been moulded by the tides into intricate ribbed patterns. Sometimes it was hard packed like concrete and the ridges of the sand hurt her bare feet. Other patches were soft and wet like quicksand, her footprints left a silvery trace as they sank in and filled with water. 
      The sand was strewn with curious forsaken objects. There were brittle sun-bleached shells sticking up jaggedly; the abandoned carapaces of crabs; smooth, whitened, heart-shaped skeletons of sea urchins, looking like tiny sinister skulls. Shapeless relics of stranded jellyfish, trailed like heaps of spilled viscera. Huge black-backed gulls, with long, yellow, scalpel beaks stood around and glared with hostile amber eyes.
      Bernadette crawled slowly across this desert leaving the shore and civilisation far behind until it dwindled to a dark green line splashed with white. The other side of the bay loomed large, she could pick out hitherto unperceived details: grazing sheep, strings of washing hanging out. The wreck, which at a distance looked like a spidery hieroglyphic etched on the sand became a confused network of black timbers protruding from a curved hull; a jutting fish-bone of a structure. 
      As she came up to the wreck she found the timbers barnacle encrusted and weed grown. Where the posts emerged from the sand, pools had formed, filled with tiny crabs, transparent shrimp which flickered invisibly against her exploring hands and twitching russet-coloured anemones. 
      Her cousins ignored her. They scaled the long hull, shouting and laughing, their shadows gesticulating on the sand among the criss-crossing timbers, slowly lengthening as the afternoon wore on. 
      Bernadette judged the merits of each pool. 
      This pool here's the most beautiful. 'Tis a garden to be sure. Here's a crab dug himself in. She touched it gravely, tentatively. 
      And in this shell is a hermit crab. She pushed it over then, watching it flail helplessly, took pity and put it right. 
      And look! she exclaimed to herself, a blenny, puffing out his wee cheeks. 
      She took up a piece of bladderwrack and popped its cells one by one: blenny, lenny, henny, wenny, she sang as she popped. 
      She dug a series of little holes with a scallop shell and flooded them with a channel dug from a larger pool. Then she collected all the razor shells she could find and ranged them in rows of descending size. She made a mound of sand and constructed a palisade with the razor shells. On the outside she scooped out a moat and inside she arranged concentric circles of scallop and cockleshells decorated with tiny pieces of crimson weed.

Engrossed, Bernadette was oblivious to the slanting shadows. A stiff breeze blew across the bay and from time to time a mass of cloud hid the sun, draining the bay of colour. Bernadette finally stood up, chilled in her damp clothes. She stood up perhaps a little too quickly. The sky seemed to throb before her eyes

SOLD OUT