Hannah stepped forward and took hold of the soggy mound of cloth at his head and squeezed it. She wrung it out and smoothed it down a little way and when Annie helped her turn him over the two of them pulled smartly at the filthy hem to cover his naked parts. His face was the colour of a thunder cloud, and one of his eyes was gone. There was a wound in the ugly swelling of his ankles, a slice of his soft flesh beginning to uncurl from around the bone, like the peel from an orange. White sea-lice crawled in the open seam. Hannah knelt beside him and put her arm behind his neck and tried to raise him but she couldn’t move him. He was half sunk down in the wet sand and even when we lifted the hanks of his long hair so there was nothing holding him down, we couldn’t shift his weight, only roll him to and fro. So Hannah took his arms and Annie and I took his feet and we tried again but we still couldn’t move him. It was like trying to drag a hammock full of stones. I wondered if we might have to leave him after all, but Hannah said we should probably bring a door and put him on that; wait for him to float up with the rising water and float him to the shore and carry him home to Bella on the door.

She looked at Annie and asked her if she’d go with her and help her take the door off its hinges at the back of her place and bring it down, but Annie was staring at Matthew and biting her thumb and didn’t seem to know how to answer, so Hannah turned to me instead.

‘Peggy,’ she said. ‘We have to.’

‘Do we?’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said Hannah, in a firm voice, so I said all right I’d go with her if she wanted me to, but wouldn’t it be better if I stayed behind with Annie to hold him while the tide came in? If there weren’t two of us to hold him when he floated up out of the sand we might lose him again.

Hannah seemed to think about this, and for a moment I thought she was going to say, Well perhaps that would be for the best, if we lost him again, but she didn’t, what she said was that she’d go back by herself for the door and collect Mary on the way to help.