But still, I hesitate. I can’t quite take these last few steps. I look out at the sea, down at the white-frilled waves around my boots.

‘I’m not afraid of pain, Charlie. I’m not afraid of dying. I’m afraid of fear.’

Charlie swallows. ‘Everyone’s afraid of fear.’

‘Will they all come? Will they all be there?’ My voice is too small. The stutter in my heart too big.

‘It’ll be the way you wanted it to be. I gave you my word.’

I glance back at the beach and headland one more time. ‘Goodbye, Charlie.’

And as his mask finally starts to crack, I turn away quickly and begin walking into the sea.

The cold feels almost hot. I take in gasping breaths as I march fast and hard through the waves. Everything hurts: my knee, my ribs, my jaw, but I feel very sure that I can’t fall – that I must not fall. Because my cocoon is getting smaller, its walls bowed inward by the growing weight of water. As the surf gets higher, I start trying to swim. There’s a rock out past West Point, just below the Roeness headland and the stony ruin of its church, and that’s what I head for. I’m determined to do this right.

It takes a long time. When I finally escape the waves and reach the rock, half-submerged and slippery with seaweed, my arms are dead weights, and everything below my waist is numb. I half-pull myself onto the rock like a fat seal, breathing hard and fast, coughing out seawater. When I look back at the beach, there is Charlie, standing on the shoreline. He’s looking my way, and I wonder if he’ll raise his arm to wave. But he doesn’t. I look behind me at the ocean, so impossibly vast now that I’m inside it. The relative shelter of the western headland is welcome, but its shadow is not. I look back towards Charlie and the sun, and try not to wish I was there instead of here.

I rest for a while and look up at the sky, see strange half-aware visions of black towers and white-bright lights, beacons of fire along headland and cliff. When a wave washes me off the rock, I come awake with a shout, and the panic I feel as I struggle to reach it again finally rips a hole in my calm, my resolve. The current has changed, it’s stronger, sharper. The sun has dropped halfway below the Atlantic horizon, turning the sea the colour of blood, and scudding grey skies have chased the white clouds away. I’m cold. My teeth are chattering and pins and needles prick my skin. I feel impossibly tired, as if I could sleep forever, and any relief I feel about that, about how painless and easy it might be to just slip into sleep again, is shattered when I look back at the beach and see only Charlie.

But he promised. He promised. And so I have to wait. I have to keep holding on.