He begins to call Jameson but remembers that Lauren has taken him out. With all the lights on, there is still a darkness in the house. He sits in the stillness, angry with the fading day. He sprays deodorizer around half-heartedly, then pulls on his woollen hat and ski jacket and takes two paracetamol. He will drive to Cowrie Point and forget about everything.

Outside, on the doorstep, the rain is spitting. He takes a breath of damp air through his nose, thinking of how much Angela winds him up. He hops into the pickup and slams the door. ‘Fuck the lot o’ yous.’

He looks out at Cowrie Point, soft and deserted in the dusk. The rain hits the windows and it soothes him. When the rain stops and the sky clears he gets out of the pickup. The tide crackles as it rolls over the smooth pebbles of the beach. The water stretches out in the twilight mist to the large slopes of hills like the resting bodies of giants under a huge sky. There is a tiny house with a red roof on the other side of the firth, evaporating into the falling dark. On a clear day he can usually see white specks of sheep. In the grainy night air he looks carefully for flat stones along the smooth curve of the shore. Once he has found a few he skims them across the black water. The ripples go one two for each stone. One day in summer he skimmed a stone and it touched the water six times before sinking. He tries again. One two. He is tired. Night is growing; the moon is bright. He skims another stone and a small bald head rises from the low waves. Large dog eyes stare at him. Sorry, pal, nothing personal.

He can never look at a seal in the way he looks at cows or sheep or even dogs. He sees another head some way out that sinks back into the dark waves with the first. Seals bring him the words kingdom and folk. Lauren likes his stories about selkies, seal people, stories his grandmother told him, even though they are often sad. She prefers them to stories of kelpies, folkloric monsters that take the shape of a horse on a beach or river. A few years ago, a girl at school told Lauren that kelpies wait by the water for children to ride on their backs, then gallop into the surf to drown and eat them. For the next two years, Lauren told Niall not to leave her alone near the sea or a loch; it became a kind of game. He feels now that she’s getting older he no longer has to reassure her that kelpies are imaginary. Selkies, though, they are almost real.