She is sitting on the beach, alone. Her legs are curled under her, and her hands are feeling the pebbles at her side. They are smooth, like ducks’ eggs. They fit snugly into her palm. The kind of pebble David used to kill Goliath, she thinks. She looks out over the sea. It is pewter, it is lead. The waves are bloated and sullen. They clutch at the shore and rasp as they retreat, surly as a kicked cur. The wet shore shines with the slug trail residue of the waves. The cliffs, honey and butter in sunshine, are the grey of gravestones and loneliness.

She turns the pebbles over and over, rhythmically, rocking. The wind has turned her long hair into whips which lash her cheeks red and raw. She does not tuck it behind her ears. She does not look at the bag that squats beside her. She thinks back, to the time before. She can’t help it. Then, the sun was shining and the beach was innocent.

*

“Mum!” The child’s voice is high and excited. “Look!”

Rosie is holding up a strand of bladder wrack as long as her whole body. It is wrapping itself around her legs and slapping against her plump little tummy encased in its white, poppy-splattered costume.

“Great!” says Rosie’s Mum. “The mermaid’s tail.” She is busy fashioning the stones into a face and body: dried seaweed for hair, razor bills for earrings, limbs a line of carefully chosen white pebbles. Together they place the bladder wrack under the limpet-shell belt and curve the tip towards the sea.

“She’s taller than me,” says Rosie, and she lies flat on her back, arms outstretched, to demonstrate the exceptional height of the mermaid with her weedy tail.

“When the waves come in, will she swim away?”

“Maybe,” says her Mum. “Maybe she will.”

*

She starts to dig. At first, she is careful. She lifts the pebbles out, one by one, and piles them to one side. They form a cairn. As she gets down below the first layer, the stones are smaller, spikier, wetter, with more sand in the mixture. She scrabbles at them but, as she scrapes, the sides cave in on top of her hands. The hole remains shallow. The fingernail on the middle finger of her left hand jangles with pain as a flint drives under the nail. Pleased, she presses down on the stone. A drop of blood falls into the mix. It is deep enough. She begins to widen, lengthen and shape the trench.