Driving those rutted back lanes along the coast you would find places I swear did not exist until we got out of the truck, the wind blowing over the dunes, cows wandering the beach, shitting and lowing, and we would walk the tideline, bladderwrack and oyster shell, frazzled tangles of blue-green rope, a mouldering boot, while seals watched us with their dark baleful eyes, and one night you told me about selkies, the shapeshifters who come out of the water in human form and cause mischief, and then it was getting late, time to head back, but you said fuck it, let’s sleep in the dunes, and so we did, we set up our tent in the dunes, lunar white sand under a gibbous moon, and far down the coast a fire smouldered along the rim of the mountain while you told me about your father, how he had died in a fire, and how it had marked you, fucked you up badly, and we drank wine beside the tent and ate the periwinkles we’d gathered that afternoon, a bucket of them, pulling them out of their shells on the dressmaker pins you’d stuck in a cork, tossing the empty shells onto the exposed midden, the dunes having shifted to reveal it, this four thousand year old scrap heap, evidence of people who had lived here before us, so long ago, people who’d had names, souls, eyelashes, and we saw someone walking the dunes in the moonlight, and I said it was a selkie, and you said you were a selkie, and you took me into the tent and made love to me in that place that must have had a name but which I would never be able to find now, not now that all of these years have passed so quickly, and if I went looking for it or for you I would find nothing but a song of drying rocks, of shimmering bones, of birds in a whirl over a void.
