Still, the clothes were more valuable to me. They offered the safety I had once found in Ifrahim’s old trousers and the apron that shielded my body. Hopefully, they would make men’s eyes slide across me without seeing, tell them I was just another grubby lad, and not a young woman with a body that could be bought. Not a young woman who was wanted for murder.

There, hidden amongst the boats on the dark beach, with the sea as my only witness, I began to shed who I had been. I used the knife to hack the stained kitchen apron into strips, and then pulled the blouse and chemise over my head to bare my chest. I could barely see myself as I wrapped the fabric tight over my breasts, cinching it, knotting it firm. The blouse had a scrap of lace at the collar. I hacked it off. Without that, it looked enough like a man’s shirt. The old work trousers would serve as drawers, and to bulk out the stolen pair. Next the jacket, too big, but all the better to hide in.

Finally, in the darkness, I dragged the scarf from my head and shook out my tangled mass of hair. At the edge of the shore I knelt, and sawed through handfuls of it, letting it fall like black weed into the surf. Take her away, I told the waves, the woman they’re looking for, take her away.

My head felt light, my neck naked and prickling in the sea breeze. I ran a hand across the uneven tufts, then knotted the scarf around my neck, for comfort, as much as anything. Last came the man’s cap. It was just as well it was dark, or I might have lost courage and wept to see those scraps of myself, hair and lace, being washed out to sea.

The beach was silent, but from what I’d seen that evening, there was no guarantee it would stay that way. I didn’t want to be caught up in the darkness by a gang of smugglers, wanted nothing more than shelter.

At the border end of the beach, a campfire trembled in the night. With one hand on the knife in my pocket, I walked towards it. The light from the flames illuminated the edge of an empty warehouse where shadows moved and people muttered and coughed. No one said a word as I crouched down before the fire, though some looked. Mostly men, one woman, her face lined too young. She began to speak to me but when I glanced at her from beneath the hat’s brim, her gaze was vague, her speech a meandering string of English and Spanish that made no sense at all. Some boys, perhaps only ten or eleven, laughed at her and eyed me appraisingly before going back to scraping at crab shells with their teeth when they saw I had nothing to steal.