‘I dream about them sometimes. Lovely dreams, where I’m eating potatoes and butter and bread with jam. I don’t fancy eating an animal any more, though. I feel like that was always weird.’

We both looked up at the sheep on the cliffs above the town. Kate screwed up her face. There were at least forty of them today, with their heads bowed towards the grass, but they came and went so that sometimes there were more and sometimes none. Once or twice we’d seen cows up there too, also peacefully eating and apparently unbothered by the danger of kriks.

The part of the town which was visible to us was squeezed into a gap between those cliffs, a place where the land sloped gently towards the sea. When the tide was out the rusted metal of factory roofs were exposed below the cliffs. Their tall chimneys had stood above the water at first, always overloaded with jostling seagulls perched on their caps, but they had mostly all fallen over now, bashed away by the stormy waves of winter. Around that area sometimes the sea was still a funny colour – from the leaking chemicals, Dr Jones had told us. When that happened, the Jellyfish moved away.

Below the cliffs nearest to us were the ruined houses, their walls and chimneys covered in seaweed and only visible at low tide, but still interesting. Still empty places I liked to think about, imagining what it had been like to live in them, back when the sea had been lower and the town had been full of people. It was a strange thought, one that always seemed fake, no matter how much time I spent trying to picture it. And there were boats inside the houses now anyway. Boats which had been emptied of their passengers and which had floated aimlessly on the sea before ending up here, parked on top of somebody’s old kitchen. I liked thinking about the boats too: what might be inside them, where they’d come from, where they might go, and what we could do with them if they should ever happen to drift over here. I had my favourites – we all did. I liked the sailing boats the best, because they could still move even if they were out of fuel. There were a few of these, including some which looked like they might still have proper sails.

In the middle, between the houses, the cliffs, the factories and the sheep, was a dark, tarmacked road. We called it Long Street because, you know, it was long and also a street, and we were all great with names like that. It went straight past the houses, past the factories, up the hill, between the cliffs and then away. That was the best thing about it: it led away.