He looks up again. Not many stars, neither. He can see a distant smattering, out where the sky is at its darkest, at the place where the sky meets the sea. Swings the glasses back to the moon. The clouds have moved on. It sits there, a clipped thumbnail, discarded on the dirty black sheets of the night sky.

Waning Crescent, he muses. Sounds like a nice place to live. Can visualize a row of well-tended trees and high, terraced properties shielded by wrought-iron, black-lacquered spikes. Can imagine a child, sitting in a distant skylight, staring through a telescope and jotting down constellations in a neat lined notebook. He’d like to live on Waning Crescent. Would like to live anywhere other than here, truth be told. Four years they’ve been marooned on Sunk Island and each day has been more disappointing than the last. The wife had promised him magical sunrises and vast skies; a private wilderness teeming with rare birds and serving up nightly celestial spectacles. Fat chance of that. It’s cold and bleak and miserable, and while he believes that all suffering breeds character, he considers himself, at sixty-eight, to have developed sufficient character to be excused having to build any more.

He hurrumphs, unbidden, lost in crossness. Feels better at once.

A light flicks on, not far above his head. He doesn’t change his position. Just keeps his vigil, standing here by the gatepost in front of the sturdy Victorian farm cottage, gazing into the air above the Humber estuary as if willing a trawlerman home safe from a storm. The light from the house serves as a timepiece. He knows it to be 10.05 p.m. His wife, Dinah, will have finished her programme, made herself a herbal tea, and made her way upstairs. For the next ten minutes she will busy herself with whatever it is that women do behind closed doors, and then she will head to bed to read the next three chapters of whatever silly romance novel has been bringing a blush to her cheeks this week. Mr Dash will join her in an hour. He prefers her to be asleep while he completes his ablutions. There is a creakiness, an uncertainty, in his movements of late and he does not wish his wife to see him becoming enfeebled. She is ten years younger than him. There’s still a lot of life in Dinah. Life and light and lustre. There was life in Mr Dash once. But the buggers forced early retirement on him, and his youngest daughter died of the cancer, and they lost a fortune selling off the family home at just the wrong time. And now he’s here. Sunk Island. Somewhere between Hull and the arse-end of bloody nowhere. Half a dozen houses spread out around a church and a crossroads; making do in one of the smattering of old homes that hunker down, hidden behind bow-backed trees, sheltering from the merciless gale that howls in from the sea. His hobbies are what keeps him going. Birdwatching. Astronomy. And Dymphna, next door.