Cheshire cat-like, thought Eva: her smile, almost disembodied. It was nice having Mariam here with her in the house. When Eva saw Mariam looking out with fresh eyes at the sea, she felt the passing of time as heavily as if it had jumped on her back. She had had fresh eyes, once. Ah yes, all those journeys we make again and again through our minds, those repeated forays they call neural pathways, shadowing the real pathways, through our houses and streets and woods and coasts; the days and years that pass, seconds of opportunity and waste; how long life is, how needlessly expansive. How much Eva had lived before Zoe knew her, or Inga, or Sebastian, or Camille. In the Neolithic, they died at forty. And what they accomplished! And yet everything, almost all the sweetness in her life, had happened after that age. This, her borrowed time.

‘An Arabian sea nymph,’ Eva said to herself as Mariam entered the kitchen.

The young ones come over again, alone. It is daytime.

They approach her spring holding hands, as if they are scared.

Cwen nods. They are right to be scared, though it isn’t she who will hurt them. In their free hands they are holding a stick, a wand of what? Birch? She laughs. Birch is for shape-shifting. Still. She watches as they circle her spring, and put their heads right in, and take three sacred sips.

Cwen thinks: I am their forebear. How it is done now is how it will happen in the future.

They throw sacred metalwork into Cwen’s water as an offering: a ring from one finger, a bangle from another. Frowning, they undress.

When they open their hands again, Cwen sees that they have collected ochre from her headland. They have crumbled it into a gravelly powder which they mix with water from the spring. Between their palms, it is a vivid red. They smear each other’s faces and bodies with the paste; shoulders and breasts, along ribcage, stomachs and bum cheeks, ulna and radius, tibia and fibulas, up to the ends of their toes and fingers.

It is an old ritual of landright and birthright but Cwen hasn’t seen it done by women so young before. They are completely red now, like boiled lobsters. All their solemnity vanishes as they stand back to survey each other’s work. They laugh and laugh at each other.

If seawater is her tears, spring water the mucus of her nose, mouth and cunt, – this ochre is her blood.

She feels their naked feet moving over her, as they set off for the beach. Two red blurs. They run into the water, knee deep, thigh deep, breast deep, neck deep. They have vanished. When they emerge again from the sea, the birthright colour is dripping off them. The cold water raises bumps on their skin—