Head pounding, he pulled himself up, undid the buttons on his shirt and realized that his collar had ripped. He frowned. His hand was shaking. He remembered being at The Ship. Eating. Drinking. He had seen the other fathers take their sons to The Ship when they came of age. Buy them a drink. He’d had to navigate it by himself. A more ramshackle introduction: bottles of whiskey on boats, vomiting whilst old seamen looked on and laughed. He’d had to learn quickly. The way they made him feel like a man and then simultaneously treated him like a boy.

He reached for the water, drank deeply and then regretted it as the cold liquid lay heavy in his stomach. He was accustomed to sleeping for shifts of three or four hours through the night on the boats, could sleep through the hardest of gales. Get up, shock himself into work, get shouted at, soaked by the cold spray. The churning of engines and the tension of ropes threatening to overwhelm him. You had to keep on your toes. All it took was a loop of rope around your ankle, the sway of the boat, and you’d be in and gone. An arm in a chain pulley. As he grew, he began to find his place, squaring up to one or two of them as his shoulders filled out, and they left him alone. In this way, he could live. Hauling, and pulling fish from the sea, his knife ready to gut, packing fish in ice, their stunned eyes staring.

And now he remembered it, the argument. Someone he didn’t know. He felt suddenly breathless, hungry for air. He swung his legs over the side of the bed, leant forward. Something. Someone had said something. He got up, his legs stiff and unsteady, and walked to the window. Pushed the curtains back, pulled the greying nets to one side. He tried to unlock the sash windows, to pull them up, but they were glued shut with old paint. He leant against the cool glass and looked out at the harbour, the tension in his chest worsening. It was quiet this morning, and still. He saw the dull grey sea and the harbour wall and then he remembered. The fair-haired man. Their laughter. The things that he had said, and what Joseph had said in return. His eyes widened, a sudden weakness spreading through his body.

Both Nefyn and Hamza knew that they must go to the boat but neither of them was in a hurry. Their separation would soon come and would already be painful enough. They dressed, the doors to each room open, and Nefyn tied back her hair. Hamza pulled the chain of the compass over his head.