Alfred de Vigny, Journal d’un poète, 1797–1863

‘Writing a book is like throwing a message in a bottle into the sea. You can’t control who reads your book.’

Philip Pullman, BBC Radio 4, 17 November 2003

1

The bottle lay washed up on the mud at the high-tide mark. Very blue, bright, shaped like a teardrop, it was untouched by the debris and seaweed that surrounded it.

She had taken a break from work to walk the dogs. Suddenly overwhelmed by the backlog facing her, she had turned away from her desk, summoned her dogs, and headed out to the car.

Warden Bay was not the nearest beach. It was a twenty-minute drive, but its bleakness suited her mood. She crossed from the mainland to the Isle of Sheppey, enjoying the flat, open landscape after the claustrophobia of work. In winter at low tide the grey mud of Warden Bay stretched away into the distance. The lack of features and sheer sameness attracted none of the visitors who frequented Beachy Head, with its dramatic shores, helpful car parks, convenient road access and plunging cliffs. No one visited Warden Bay in winter, although tough children who lived on the wind-blown estate behind the muddy hillocks sometimes threw supermarket trolleys down on to the shore below.

She had been on the beach for about twenty minutes, muffled against the cold and damp by an ancient black leather jacket zipped up to the chin and a bobble hat pulled low over her forehead. The dogs bounded around happily, a few hundred metres from her, keeping an eye on the general direction of travel. Their coats, rendered drab brown and black by the grey winter light, blended into the pebbles of the beach and on the rare occasions when they stood still to sniff something particularly interesting, they were almost perfectly camouflaged. Only their movement made them visible.

The blue of the bottle was a sudden splinter of colour which she saw from a distance as she made her way along the beach, shoulders hunched against the oncoming wind. Its glow belonged to a different clime, where the sun shone and the sea was a proper blue. It lay at the tide mark, where the grey mud met the grey pebbles.

She drew close, bent and picked up the bottle, drawn by its irresistible colour and its fragile smoothness. She felt she could no more have left it there ungathered than she could have abandoned her own child on the beach. Maybe she would use it as a vase for single flowers in some far-off spring. A voice told her she already had a shelf-full of dusty scavenged bottles in her kitchen, but this one was different. The shape was unusual; an Evian teardrop of blue, it would have stood out even in a bright supermarket full of garish primary colours. On the monochrome beach the effect was startling. As she crouched over it, lying slick and gleaming in the woolly palm of her glove, she saw that there was a slim scroll of paper within.