The beach was where the girls spent their days. Being within earshot of the waves was not enough. They’d walk up against the waves and climb the rocks, and sit there talking on summer evenings. Once, they found a tunnel formed by fallen rocks that led to an undisturbed pool. Because there was no place to stand or hang on to, they didn’t stay in the pool too long. They’d swim there a little, then go back through the tunnel, flick themselves across the stones then, surfacing, kick on their backs for the shore, step out, sit up on the rocks and talk.

It would be too easy to imagine that they were talking of men. But the girls never talked about men directly. Their experiences were told as if they had happened to some other. They laughed at how men, in their excitement, would wet their trousers with semen.

“If a girl had a wee fellow knocking up against her,” Catherine might say, “and she knocks back, do you think she might hurt him?”

Or Sara might say: “What would it be like for a girl to take one man after another into her?”

“Oh, can you do that? Wouldn’t one of them mind?” asks Catherine.

“It must be strange to have something hanging off you like that,” says Sara.

Catherine tucks her elbows in against her ribs and blows out as if she has the shivers.

Each remembers how coitus is described in a medical tome of their father’s. How the organs are drawn in quick blue-and-white sketches. Their imaginations make certain words leap off the page. Words go beyond what they mean. They slacken, stand, grow moist. They mushroom at first light. They steal your breath away. For Catherine it is the word intercourse. For Sara, who has lately begun to masturbate vigorously, it is two phrases: the penis at rest, the penis erect. It has a Biblical sound – the penis. When Catherine touches herself she thinks of her body opening like a moist flower. Their heads are filled with dangerous diagrams and words that all arrow towards men. Each word points to the loins. None points towards the heart, the lungs, the brain.

They brave guilt and condemnation. They are glad their bodies contain the evil they do.

Humming of sex, the girls walk Corrloch. The Mullet boys lower their eyes. This is very enticing for the girls. The boys follow the thrust of the girls’ calves, each slip of the heel, then, dry-mouthed, begin shouldering each other. The cry is issuing from someone else’s throat. Someone else is having what they can only dream of.

Summers belong to the Adams girls.

“I don’t want to go,” said Catherine.