IT WAS STILL dark when Ruth heard noises from the bathroom, then the toilet flushing and Win going back to her room, singing to herself.

George was right, Ruth thought. Her mother was going a bit peculiar. And she’d be retiring from the laundry six months from now. A batty old woman in the house all day, oh, my God. Dunt even think about it. Ruth squinted at the alarm clock. Five something? George’s breathing rattled in his chest. The fags. She worried herself back to sleep.

She awoke when George brought the cups of tea in, which was the Sunday arrangement.

“Did you make one for Mother?”

“No,” George said. “There’s no sound out of her.”

“Ent there? Thas rum, ent it? She never sleep this late.”

George kicked his slippers off and got back into bed.

“I better go’n see if she’s all right,” Ruth said, heaving her legs out from under the blankets.

“’Course she’s all right. Drink your tea.”

“She might be ill, George.”

“Ill?” he snorted. “When’s she ever been ill?”

Win hadn’t opened her curtains, so it was understandable that in the dimly lit bedroom Ruth mistook what lay on the floor for a big gray cat. Understandable, therefore, that she screamed. And understandable when she realized that she was looking at her mother’s chopped-off hair that she screamed again.

“What?” George said, from the doorway.

“Whassup, Mum?” Clem, for some reason holding his dressing gown in front of him instead of wearing it.

But Ruth couldn’t say anything. With her hand over her mouth, she was staring at her mother’s bed, which was empty, the blankets pulled away from the bare and lumpy mattress.

She was too distracted to manage the usual Sunday breakfast. Eventually, George ate a bowl of cornflakes, his silence worse than accusation.

When Clem wheeled his bike out of the shed, Ruth called, “Where’re you gorn?”

“I said I’d help Goz with his paper round. Thas five miles on a Sunday, and them Sunday papers weigh a ton, he says.”

“So you’re gorn down Arnold Pitcher’s?”

“Yeah.”

“Nip round the corner to Angel Yard, Clem, then. See if your gran’s all right. I’m that worried. I espect she’re with Hoseason and that lot, but if she ent, you come back and tell me, orright?”

“Okay, Mum,” Clem said.

He hid his face, making a show of checking his brakes.

It was like he flew to the coast.

Frankie.

The huge white sky smiled down on him. His legs were effortless.

Frankie.

Freewheeling the slow downhill out of Napton, he took his hands from the handlebars and put them in his pockets and fiddled with himself.

Frankie.

The sign that said HAZEBOROUGH was deceitful; there was nothing for an uphill mile. He stood on the pedals.

Frankie, Frankie!

Then the sea spread itself in front of him, like restless metal. A car, a bulbous little Austin A30, passed him with a clergyman at the wheel, who smiled and waved. Perhaps he had mistaken Clem’s incandescent halo of lust for something more spiritual.

A road sign: NORWICH 21 MILES. NORWICH. People wrote it on the back of love-letter envelopes as a joke. It stood for Knickers Off Ready When I Come Home. Should be KORWICH, anyhow. The k is silent in knickers. The phrase struck him as funny, and he laughed aloud. Then something, someone, an older version of himself perhaps, told him that he was laughing because he was scared. Made him stop at the top of the low hill, the sea cliff dipping down to his right. He set his feet on either side of the bike on the tar-and-gravel road. He didn’t know if he stunk when he was sweaty. Some boys did. Goz did, a bit.

The thought he had tried to smother rose up again: It’d be better not to do it than be no good at it.

The electrical thrill of anticipation changed polarity, became something closer to dread. He was trembling; his watch shook when he looked at it. Ten to eleven, nearly. The strident calling of herring gulls sounded like mockery.

Where, exactly, do you put it in?

The railway that brought holidaymakers clattering to Cromer and Sheringham did not reach Hazeborough, despite the fact that the little hamlet had a beach superior to those of its jollier neighbors. But that was not the only reason that it remained unpopular, almost, in fact, desolate.

In 1940, after the heroic disaster of Dunkirk, the Ministry of Defense made a hasty survey of England’s south and east coasts to work out the likeliest places for Hitler’s forces to come ashore when they invaded. It was fairly unlikely that they’d choose north Norfolk, as opposed to Kent, say, or Sussex. But if the sneaky Nazi swine did decide to come across the North Sea rather than the English Channel, Hazeborough was exactly the kind of place they might fancy. The cliffs there were lower than at any point for miles and miles. The sea was shallow for some considerable distance from the shore, even at low tide. So the Royal Navy tethered sea mines — big buoyant spheres of explosive with detonator spikes — a mile or so offshore. The Royal Engineers garlanded the beach, all three miles of it, with coiled barbed wire and built “pillboxes”— concrete gun emplacements — atop the cliff. When that was done, the Royal Ordnance Corps planted land mines.

The Germans never came, as we know.

After the war, a decent effort was made to clear all this stuff away. It proved more difficult, and more hazardous, than putting it there. Maps and charts had gone missing. Navy minesweepers recovered fewer sea mines than they should have done; some had broken free of their mooring chains and drifted off. Tides and wild weather had reshaped the beach. In the winter of 1944, a large chunk of cliff had toppled down onto the minefield, bringing a pillbox with it.

It was four years (during which time one ROC man was killed, and two others maimed, by land mines) before Hazeborough beach was considered safe enough to be reopened to the public. And even then, in 1950, the farthermost reaches of the beach remained fenced off and marked with warning signs — a skull and crossbones inside a red triangle. In time, the mesh fences were slumped by windblown sand, and the signs were disfigured by boys with catapults. Even so, Hazeborough was regarded with suspicion. (Ruth was one of many who believed that you’d get blown up as soon as you set foot on the sand. She’d have had a purple fit if she’d known that Clem had gone there, even if his motives had been pure.) The place remained unprosperous and unpopular.

He leaned the bike against one of the rust-flaked uprights of the railings behind the shuttered clapboard café. He watched the sea lazily heave itself onto the shingly sand and retreat, sighing. The weather was on their side, at least. The wind up here could slice you to the bone if it wanted to, but today it was resting, or waiting. Above the horizon, a swath of sky was striped like the skin of a blue mackerel.

She wouldn’t come.

No, don’t think that.

The world could end now. The sky could convulse, turn sideways, become a tower of fire. He could be sucked into oblivion at any second, waiting in bloody Hazeborough to lose his virginity.

Don’t think that, neither.

A man with a muzzled greyhound walked by and gave him a good looking at.

Clem lit a cigarette and smoked it, then popped a Polo mint into his mouth for his breath.

She wouldn’t come. She hadn’t got out of going to church. She was sitting on a pew, her tears reflecting stained glass.

A tinny chirrup of a bicycle bell, and there she was. Coming toward him, waving. She was wearing a skirt and a tight white sweater under her coat. Glimpses of stocking top and thigh flickered at him, and his heart went ballistic.

The Reverend Hugh Underwood, white-surpliced, stood at the porch of Saint Nicholas’s Church, bidding farewell to his flock. It didn’t take long, but even so it was tedious. The business was nearly over when two of his departed congregation returned: the spinster twins, the Misses Fiske, clearly in a state of excitement. After a good deal of mutual nudging and urging, one of them said, “If yer’ve got a minute, Vicar, there’s somethun in the square you oughter see.”

Underwood considered this unlikely.

“Really? And what might that be, pray, Miss Fiske?”

The ladies couldn’t muster a reply between them. Instead, they blushed, made matching beckoning gestures, and scuttled off. Sighing, in need of a cup of tea and a cigarette, Underwood followed.

Borstead’s square was, in fact, roughly rectangular. Toward its slightly wider end stood an ancient stone cross, stump armed and covered in elaborate carvings blurred by time. It was, tradition had it, more than a thousand years old, placed there on the orders of Saint Dunstan himself, when Borstead was a nameless pagan crossroads. Next to it, for reasons no one could remember, an ancient fire engine was parked. It was an eighteenth-century horse-drawn cart, a lead-lined water tank and hand pump set into a red-painted wooden frame on iron-rimmed wheels. On market days, when the square was lined with stalls, the cross and the fire engine were an irritation to traffic; at other times they were largely ignored, on account of their familiarity. On this Sunday morning, however, they were the center of attention. A good many people, and not only the Reverend Underwood’s faithful, had gathered at the margins of the square to create a mocking hubbub, which hushed, gradually, as the vicar approached. Alongside Edmond’s, the haberdashery, he halted, aghast.

A circle of white-robed figures surrounded the cross and the fire engine. They were so extraordinary, so utterly unfamiliar, that for a dizzy moment he thought they might have descended from space or — less likely — heaven. Clearly, some were male and some female, yet the females had hair like men, and the males had no hair at all. And they were barefoot. A single voice persisted when silence descended: a stout bald man reciting from the book of Revelation. It took Underwood a full half minute to realize that it was Enoch Hoseason. Then he started to recognize the others. There were twelve, in all. The mad messiah and his disciples. There was heresy in the very number. Underwood formed his face into a stern mask and advanced.

Frankie dismounted and let her bike fall onto his, her pedals barging into his spokes.

“Hiya,” she said, and the awkwardness of it, the fact that she’d never said it before, melted him.

He embarked on a number of sentences that he couldn’t complete.

“Are you . . . ? Do you still . . . ? Did you, was it, I mean . . .”

She busied herself with herself, ignoring him. She fussed with her garter belt through her skirt, tugged her sweater back into order, shrugged her coat into shape. Tossed her hair back. Then she looked up at him. Her face was almost expressionless.

“Shut up,” she said, then planted her mouth on his and forced her tongue in, pressing herself against him. He was shocked; they’d never snogged openly in a public place before.

“So,” Frankie said, pulling away, “here we are. Still alive, just as I said we’d be. Where are we going?”

“This way,” he said.

He didn’t dare take her hand until they were some way along the beach, out of sight of the cliff-top huddle of fishermen’s cottages and gabled bungalows. Despite the enormity of what they were about to do, Frankie seemed to be without a care. She lifted her face to the bright pallor of the sky. She inhaled the sea air like a tourist. The silence between them didn’t appear to bother her; in fact, she seemed to want it. His own anxiety was so strong that he thought it might be audible, plangent as cracking ice. At least there was no one else around, he thought. He had no faith in his luck. It would not have surprised him if they’d come face-to-face, at this momentous moment, in this remote spot, with someone who knew him, someone who would report his assignation and bring the world down in a heap.

The gorsy jumble of fallen cliff forced them closer to the low surf. They walked across a springy mat of seaweed, bladder wrack. Its brown blisters popped beneath their feet, which delighted her. She let go of his hand and jumped on them, bursting them childishly, laughing, little squirts of water staining her shoes. He stood watching her, smiling like a parent.

Beyond the landslip, there was a sign on a pole: a pocked and dented skull and crossbones.

Frankie said, “What’s that mean?”

“Beware of pirates, ” Clem said. “Come on.”

He took hold of her hand again and led her toward the cliff, where a great slab of concrete, a wartime ruin, angled into the sand. He reckoned that in the lee of it they would see anyone approaching before anyone approaching would see them.

“Will this do?”

Frankie looked around as if she were considering buying it.

She leaned her back against the slab and smiled and opened her arms, which parted her coat, and said, “Come here, Clem Ackroyd.”

So he went to her and kissed her and put his hands up inside her clothes, up her back where he could feel the bra strap and the silky shiftings of her shoulder blades. She parted her legs, and although he almost didn’t want to, he shoved his shameful hardness up against her. Miraculously, it excited her. She placed her hands at the top of his hips and tugged him tighter in, lifting herself, mumbling his name into their kiss.

He thought, Is this it? Like this, standing up? Is this what she wants?

Then her mouth was smearing away from his, and she was somehow laughing and gasping, “No,” at the same time. She pulled away from him, shrugging her coat off. She spread it on the sand and sat on it, leaning forward, her arms wrapped around her knees. Not looking at him. Distant, as though he weren’t even there and she was lost in a private moment. He felt something that was the comfortable opposite of hope. Then, as if she were alone and getting ready for bed, Frankie flipped her shoes off and reached up under her skirt. She unfastened her stockings and peeled them from her legs. Such outrageously beautiful legs. She stretched them out and fingered the sand with her toes. She felt under her skirt again and fiddled with something. Produced, like a magician, her garter belt, a flimsy-looking thing like the skin of a small black reptile, and . . .

And looked up at him.

“?” her eyes said.

?

So he took his shoes and socks off, awkward, leaning against the slanting wall of the pillbox.

With her eyes on his, she undid her skirt and cast it aside. Her knickers were pink with a white lace waistband. Her belly curved like a question mark up toward the edge of her sweater.

With unsteady hands, he unbelted and dropped his jeans. He somehow got his right foot stuck and had to hop around to keep his balance. She laughed, and he tried to. While he was still struggling, she stood up and ran down to the slow surf and walked into it.

He didn’t know whether to lie on the coat and adopt some sort of seductive position until she came back or to follow her. From this distance, she looked so like a child, in her sweater and pink knickers and her arms held out and the cold, lazy foam separating and regathering around her shins. She turned and called something, words shredded by sea sound and gulls.

So he went to her, his shirttails flapping below his sleeveless sweater, his feet wincing on the stones and broken shells. The coldness of the water was withering at first, then an almost pleasant numbness. Frankie’s arms were folded under her breasts now, and she was gazing out at where the blue-gray horizon was silvered by slants of light.

“Frankie?”

It was like waking her up.

She said, “I don’t believe all this is going to come to an end, actually. It just can’t.”

“Yes, it could,” he said stoutly. “Right this minute some Russian or some American could be pressing a button, and we wunt know anything about it until . . . well, you know.”

She turned her head and looked at him.

“It’s not going to happen.” She said it brightly and firmly, with tears in her eyes.

His heart went as dead as his feet.

“Ent it?”

“No.” Then she smiled. “I love it when you go all pouty. It makes you look ever so young.”

She put her arms around his neck and kissed him, the cold gray water sloshing at their legs.

“Come on, then,” she said, and took him by the hand and led him away from the sea.

“Mr. Hoseason!”

Enoch seemed oblivious to the vicar’s presence. He carried on declaiming the words of Saint John the Divine.

“Mr. Hoseason, sir! What is the meaning of this, this unseemly . . . exhibition?”

At last Enoch lifted his eyes and fixed them on Underwood’s. The dark ecstasy in his glare made the clergyman flinch.

“‘I know thy works,’” Enoch recited, his voice grimmer than before, “‘that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot.

“‘So because thou art lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spew thee out of my mouth.

“‘Because thou sayest, I am rich and have gotten riches, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art the wretched one and miserable and poor and blind and naked . . .’”

Good grief, Underwood thought. He knows the damned thing by heart!

It was clear that he wasn’t going to get any sense out of the blacksmith, so Underwood looked around the circle of Brethren until he caught the eye of Jonathan Eldon, whose denuded head was specked with razor cuts.

“Jonathan, for the love of God! What are you doing?”

“Awaiting deliverance,” Eldon said placidly.

“Deliverance? Deliverance from what?”

“Death.”

Underwood glanced around the square, uneasily. The crowd, though still small, had increased in number. The expressions on its faces ranged from scandalized outrage to coarse glee. There was, unmistakably, ugliness, or the promise of it, in the Sunday-morning air.

Someone called out from the crowd, “They’re waitun fer the Bomb to drop, Vicar!”

There was the kind of pause that precedes laughter, but no one laughed.

Ruth had her hands in the sink, peeling potatoes, when the phone startled her. She peered out of the kitchen window and called George but got no reply. No doubt he was in that bleddy shed of his, with the transistor radio on. She wiped her hands on a tea towel, hurriedly.

“Hello?”

She heard pip-pip-pip and the clunk of a coin.

“Ruth? Thas Chrissie.”

Which made Ruth uneasy straightaway. Chrissie Slender was a regular visitor, Wednesday afternoons, sometimes Saturdays, but had hardly ever phoned.

“Chrissie? Whassup, then?”

“Ruth, you better come downtown. Thas Win.”

“Mother? Whatever d’yer mean? Hev somethun happened to her?”

“I dunt rightly know howter tell yer, Ruth. She’re in the square with Hoseason and that lot.”

Ruth felt a chill run through her. The hair on the bedroom floor. Oh, my God.

“Whas she doin in the square, Chrissie?”

“She’re makin an exhibition of herself, Ruth. They all are. I dunt like to be the one that tell yer.”

“Oh, Chrissie!”

“Get you down here, Ruth. An if yer got a spare coat, you bring that an all. Or a blanket or somethun.”

“Whatever for, Chrissie?”

She heard Chrissie hesitate.

“Win hent got hardly nothun on,” Chrissie said. “I’m worried she might catch her death.”

Ruth sat down heavily on the little chair beside the telephone. One of those hot, distancing spasms ran through her, and she clasped her hands on her plump knees until it was over.

When she came back to herself, she thought about Clem. Why hadn’t he come back to tell her what was going on?

She felt an inrush of incomprehension, of being excluded from events. She got to her feet and took off her pinafore and went outside to find George.

Frankie and Clem lay down on her coat in the soft shadow of the World War II gun emplacement. Their wet feet had gathered sand, so that they wore gritty pairs of ankle socks. They kissed, lengthily. She pulled him tight to her but kept her legs together. He pushed her away a little so that he could put a hand to her breasts. They murmured each other’s names when they paused for breath. After a while he thought she might be expecting him to force her, so he slid his hand down between her legs. This did not have the effect he’d desired. She levered herself into a sitting position.

“Oh, God,” she said.

“What?” Clem asked thickly.

Frankie groped under the coat and produced from its pocket a small flat bottle. She twisted the top off it.

“Brandy,” she said. “For Dutch courage. Strictly speaking, Dutch courage should be gin, I suppose. Do you like brandy?”

He was fixated on the little display of flesh between her knickers and the rucked-up edge of her sweater, and the two dimples above her bum.

“I dunno. Never had any.”

Frankie took a swig and inhaled through her nose while swallowing, like someone in pain. She held the bottle out toward him. He sat up and drank. His throat and then his chest caught fire, and he coughed, spluttering spit and spirit into the palm of his hand. She laughed and took the little bottle back.

“Do you have any ciggies? I’d like one. The Condemned Woman Smoked a Last Cigarette sort of thing.”

“Frankie . . .”

“Please, Clem.”

He crawled over to his jeans and fumbled the cigarettes and matches from the pocket. They lit up and smoked in silence for a while. Then she took another swig from the bottle and passed it to him, shuddering.

“No, thanks.”

“You must. You have to have the same as me.”

“Why?”

“You just do.”

He drank, this time keeping the brandy down, and felt a shelf of heat form itself at his diaphragm. When he turned to her, she was smiling and serious. She threw her ciggie away and then plucked his from his fingers and threw it away also. Before he could get on top of her she rolled away, then back to him. Like a conjurer, she displayed something in her fingers that hadn’t been there a moment earlier. A little packet.

“Ta-daa!” she said.

Clem frowned at it. “What’s that?”

“A johnny.” She bit her lip. “Just in case the end of the world doesn’t happen.”

He lifted his gaze to her face. His mouth was hot and dry.

“Where’d you get it?”

“Does it matter?”

“You didn’t get it from Griffin’s, did you?”

“Lord, no. Are you nuts?”

When he continued to goggle at her, she put the thing in his hand and lay back on the coat sacrificially, closing her eyes.

“I pinched it from Daddy’s bedside cabinet, if you really must know.”

She pulled him down onto her.

“If you like, I’ll close my eyes when you’re ready to pop it on.”

We were hopeless, of course. Inept, frantic, silent, shamefully quick. How could we not be?

It’s one of life’s countless little cruelties that you never forget your first time. So instead of forgetting, we have to forgive ourselves, which is a far more difficult thing to do. I’ve never achieved it. But I guess that in my case there were special circumstances.

Anyway, we managed it, Frankie and I. She helped me, showed me what to do. And my response was to suspect her: how come she knew?

But what nearly ended it before it had begun, what almost deflated and unmanned me, was the grotesque fact that we were using one of Gerard Mortimer’s condoms. Even as her marvelous body gave way to me and let me in, I couldn’t help picturing her furious father’s moist mustache.

“Dunt drive into the square,” Ruth said. “Park round the back of the church.”

“I was going to,” George said.

He was tense with the anticipation of shame. He parked the Land Rover on Vicarage Street and followed Ruth through the kissing gate into the churchyard. She hurried past the gravestones and the church porch and out into the square, where she stopped, speechless, and put a hand to her bosom.

“Ruddy hell,” George said.

All sides of the square were now lined with people. It was quiet but not silent. A murmuration of onlookers. A voice rising and falling but not pausing. Ruth recognized her almost unrecognizable mother among the circle of robed figures and almost fainted.

“Oh, George,” she cried, and hid her flushed face against his shoulder.

Win’s slumped old breasts and belly and buttocks were clearly discernible through the thin white cotton. Her cropped gray head was lifted, and she was smiling bitterly at the sky with her eyes closed. Her mouth was working silently.

“Christ on a bike,” George said, and, as if in response, Police Constable Neville Newby cycled slowly into view.

P.C. Newby was a large man who believed his physique represented the weight of the law and therefore ate to sustain it. His uniform was not quite correctly buttoned, and he had the look of a man whose lengthy Sunday breakfast had been rudely interrupted. He dismounted, laboriously, outside Cubitt and Lark’s and propped his bicycle against a lamppost. He assessed the situation while removing his bicycle clips, then advanced upon the Brethren, who paid him no attention. He surveyed the circle slowly, nodding to announce that he recognized each of its members. He came full circle back to Hoseason.

“Enoch,” he said loudly. “Enoch, what in God’s name do yer think yer doin?”

Hoseason continued to read from the book.

“‘And he opened the pit of the abyss; and there went up a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit.’”

“This wunt do at all, Enoch. Come along, man. I dunt want to hev to arrest you all.”

“‘And out of the smoke came forth locusts upon the earth; and power was given them, as the scorpions of the earth have power.’”

“Dunt you push yer luck, Enoch,” Newby barked, adjusting his helmet, “and dunt call me a scorpion. You take yer people away nice and decent and get yer clothes back on, and I wunt hev to call Norwich for a van to take yer all away. ’Cos I can do that, you know.”

“‘And it was said unto them that they should not hurt the grass of the earth . . .’”

Newby hissed his impatience and turned to Enoch’s brother.

“Amos, what in hell is all this about?”

“The hour is at hand, Neville.”

“Don’t you bleddy Neville me,” Newby said fiercely. “Thas Constable Newby to you, Amos.”

“All office is cleansed away,” Amos said beatifically.

“What?”

Amos said (while his brother announced, “‘And the shapes of the locusts were like unto horses prepared for war’”), “We’re doing nothun illegal. Is it against the law to declare our love of the Lord? Or to surrender ourself to his unimaginable mercy? Strip off the trappuns of earthly power, Neville Newby. Take off thy helmut and stand with us. Even at this moment it ent too late.”

By now the constable was so hot with anger that it seemed his abundant nostril hair might spontaneously ignite.

“You ent right in the head.” He glared around the circle of saints. “None of yer is.”

“‘And they had breastplates,’” Enoch declared, his voice rising, “‘as it were breastplates of iron; and the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of many horses rushing to war.’”

“I’ll give yer bleddy chariots,” Newby declared. “I’m off to phone Norwich. If yer still here when they come, be that on yer own head.”

He strode back to his bicycle, but didn’t risk the ungainly act of mounting it in the full gaze of the public. Instead, he marched it back through the square, as if it were a young vandal he’d nabbed by the collar. At the church gates, he caught sight of Ruth’s stricken face, and halted.

“I’m sorry to see yer mother here, Ruth,” he said. “She dint seem as mental as the rest of that lot. Why don’t yer see if yer can’t talk some sense inter her?”

He noted the mackintosh over George’s arm.

“An see if yer can’t get that coat on her. That ent a pretty sight, is it?”

And with that, he plodded on his way.

Ruth looked at the faces around the square. There were none she didn’t know, hadn’t spent her life among. The idea of them all watching her as she made the long walk to her mad mother, the shame of it, brought her to the edge of nausea, of swooning. She burst into tears, noisily, and stumbled back into the churchyard. Reaching the bench where, in her long-gone age of innocence, she’d shared lunch with poor soft Stanley, she sat down, took off her spectacles, and wept.

George came to her and, after a moment or two of hesitation, sat beside her and put his arm around her shoulders.

“I’m sorry,” Clem whispered.

“Don’t say that. Don’t spoil it.”

They were lying on their sides with their arms around each other. He could feel Frankie’s breath on his neck. His fingers trembled in her hair.

“It was nice,” she said.

“Was it?”

He remembered her short hiss of pain, or anger, her lips pulled back from her teeth. It had shocked him.

The light had changed, brightened. A wind they could not feel rattled the gorse above them. He wondered about the tide, how high it might come, and when. Stupid holidaymakers were always getting cut off by high tides, all along the coast. Having to be rescued. If he and Frankie were . . . God. He quelled a ripple of panic.

She said quietly, seriously, “I expect it’s something one gets better at with practice. Like the violin. Or anything, really.”

He sort of laughed, or scoffed. He couldn’t help it. She lifted her head and looked at him gravely. Her eyes were so dark and liquid and lovely. He forgot this, sometimes, because he thought so much about her other parts.

“What? Don’t you think so?”

“Yeah. I spose.”

“You spose,” she said, mocking him. “Well, let me tell you, Clement Ackroyd, we are going to find out. We are going to put in lots of practice.”

She kissed him.

“Lots and lots. Okay?”

“Yeah. Okay.”

She propped her head on one hand. “You don’t sound too sure.”

He was in a state of sticky wilt. He didn’t know what to do with himself.

“Frankie, leave off.”

“Or are you one of those boys who lose interest in a girl once they’ve had her? Are you going to finish with me now that you’ve made me a tart?”

“Yeah,” he said. “You read me like a book, Frankie.”

“Or a poem.”

“Or a poem,” he agreed.

“Tell me you love me,” she said.

But before he could speak, she pressed two fingers onto his lips.

“Don’t say it if you don’t mean it. Don’t, honestly. Don’t say it just because we’ve, you know. Had sex.”

“I love you, Frankie.”

“More than before, or the same?”

“More.”

“Good,” she said, and lowered her head onto his chest.

He looked up at the colorless sky, where gulls drifted, scolding and mewling.

We’ve done it, he told himself. We’ve actually done it. Yes!

Yet what he felt was worryingly familiar and childish: something like getting caught stealing fruit from someone else’s garden.

They walked back along the beach, making silly dramas of dodging the slow overlaps of low surf.

She said, “We’ve never done this before.”

“I know that,” he said.

“No, not that. I mean, we’ve never walked anywhere holding hands. I really like it.”

Something, a slight catch in her voice, made him look at her. She was nearly crying.

“Hey,” he said. “Hey, c’mon, Frankie.”

They stopped, and he put his arms around her, awkwardly.

“Hey. Whassup?”

She sniffled into the folds of his jacket, shaking her head.

“I hate everything. I really do, actually. All I want is to be with you. Everything else is such absolute shit. So boring. D’you know what I wish?”

“What?”

“That the world would end right now. That Kennedy or thingy, the Communist, would blow us all up. I expect it would hurt. It would be ghastly for a minute or so. But then it would be all over. I wouldn’t have to go back to Mummy and Daddy and tell lies about where I’ve been and then think up more lies so I can meet you next time. I don’t want to do that anymore. I really don’t. I can’t bear it. It’s all so mucky.”

He thought, She’s ending it. Because I was no good.

Suddenly he was exhausted by the very thought of the long ride back. Sickened, as though he’d already smelled the warmed-up and congealed Sunday dinner waiting for him. As though he’d already tasted the lies that he, too, would tell.

Frankie seemed to have read his thoughts somehow.

“I don’t want to go home,” she said, so childishly, so innocently, that it made Clem laugh.

“I don’t,” she said more fiercely. “I can’t bear the thought of it.”

“Nor can’t I,” he said. “Come on. The tide’s coming in.”

When they could see the rooftops of Hazeborough hunched at the cliff top, they heard voices. Yells ripped meaningless by the wind and the surf. At some distance ahead of them, an ancient timber jetty sloped into the sea, sand and shingle banked up against it. Two — no, three — young boys, their shapes made indistinct by sea glitter, shouting and throwing stones. As he and Frankie drew nearer, Clem saw that the boys were not stoning the jetty but something close to it, half buried. Something rusty black and spherical with stumpy little legs.

Clem would never be sure if he’d recognized it in that last instant. Whether he’d yelled a warning just before everything stopped making sense, before all memory turned false. Before all that had been separate and different — sea and stones, wind and sand, his and Frankie’s place among them — erupted into the same thing: a silent roar with huge rough hands that picked him up and changed him terribly and threw him away. It all seemed to take a long, long time. Something was happening to his arms and legs and face, but those parts of him were far away, floating by themselves. He wondered where Frankie had gone, thinking that he should be looking after her, that she would be frightened.

Then something big thumped into his back and he was still.

Just before he went to sleep, he heard a pattern of sound: ssshh-tick-tock, ssshh-tick-tock. Like someone kind, a nurse perhaps, trying to persuade a clock to stop.

When he woke up, he was dreaming. His head was in a bubble through which he could see the empty sky. The bubble was the glass cab of a big machine, but nothing would obey the controls. He sent urgent blurred messages out to its limbs. After a while he saw, at the corner of his eye, something come alive and lift itself out of the sand. It looked a bit like a hand at the end of a ragged tube. It seemed to be pointing. He looked beyond it and saw a pair of legs, splayed and painted red, sticking up out of a drift of sand, close to a dummy’s head wearing a red mask and a black wig.

He could not understand why he couldn’t hear anything while at the same time his head was full of noise.

Frankie?

The word came from nowhere.

His eyes refocused on the hand at the end of his arm. Actually, it looked more like a red knitted glove that hadn’t been put on properly. Then fiery fingers that were colder than ice pressed themselves against the side of his face and ushered him down into a merciful and fathomless darkness.