FIVE

The sea’s wild.

5 p.m.

Water flopping onto the shore and it’s bracing, it’s fucking freezing too, but I need it, so I stand and watch, out, past the waves and let Storm Edgar whip me.

It’s a slap, stinging, a THWACK to the face, wakes me.

Ice up my nostrils, like my body’s sucking in a swirl of air.

And it’s chilling me, air racing up and down my figure, pulsing through me, stretches, moulds, my body, eclipses all the things that should be blinding me right now.

And it means I can breathe – deep.

And watch the waves as they smack me, the rain as it –

Mary looks down.

Ice hurling itself at me.

Mary notices something.

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It’s a foot.

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A child’s, a left foot,

but it’s disconnected from any body.

It’s afloat.

–

Hacked off with a knife.

I think.

It’s bobbing in front of me but my eyes can’t settle on it for the rain.

But it’s real.

That’s what my eyes tell me:

it’s a real, dismembered, foot.

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And I know it’s real cos it looks fake.

Pure and clean, like a porcelain doll, foot snapped off, scrubbed and placed on the beach half a mile from my house for me to find.

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Attached to a toe, the big one, there’s a tag, thin piece of card, writing scrawled on, ink faded, washed out.

I think it says St Saviour’s.

Which makes sense cos it looks like the foot I saw twitch.

Mary looks around – no one.

She’s an alien on an empty rut of land.

And that foot’s the closest thing to something human.

I want it.

I want to own the foot.

I feel in my coat pocket: there’s a Tesco bag for life – and

I think, perhaps, it might be the perfect home for that foot.

I take out the bag, eye up the foot.

Mary picks it up.

She’s gone.

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