She walked to the bus stop, Tessy beside her. The temperature had dropped as the wind grew stronger. A dark van with blacked-out windows drove slowly past in the direction of Channel View. Marnie wondered if it was the undertaker’s van, sent to collect the bones. Behind it was a sleek saloon that might have contained the coroner, both vehicles trailing death like exhaust fumes.

She shouldn’t be so morbid. Lately, her mind’s tendency to veer towards the bleak had been troubling Marnie. She’d had a strong sensation that something malevolent was approaching, often feeling uneasy for no good reason. A few days earlier, walking along the estuary path, she’d been convinced someone was following her. She’d kept looking over her shoulder, but nobody had been there. She’d tried to summon some essence of Alice from the sea to keep her company, but Alice wouldn’t come. And she wasn’t sleeping well. She was having night terrors. If it wasn’t for Tessy waking her before she reached the screaming, soaked-in-sweat stage she’d have been a wreck by now. Another thing: Marnie hadn’t thought much about Denise in years, and had considered herself completely over whatever grief she’d felt at the loss of her mother. But in the past few weeks, every now and then she’d been overwhelmed with a longing for her mother so intense she could hardly bear it.

Marnie was almost at the bus stop. She glimpsed the estuary, moonlight shimmering slick on the surface of the water, and had a sudden longing to be out there, to feel the damp wind in her face, the spray against her skin. When she was a child, Mr deVillars had had a boat, the Starling. During fine weather, he and John Morahan had taken the boat out fishing, and sometimes they’d taken Guy and Marnie with them; Will Jones too. Marnie and Will had loved those excursions, but Guy wasn’t a natural-born sailor. He’d used to sit at the back, his chin pressed into the swell of the life-vest, pale and ill-tempered. Occasionally he’d leaned over the side of the boat to be sick, and then sat back up wiping his chin. Marnie would pretend she hadn’t noticed but Will used to smirk. He’d always hated Guy. Will had been like his mother; no compromises. And he could be terribly jealous.

The boat used to reveal the magic of the estuary. The water at the shore-line was murky, full of silt. Yet out deep, close to the islands, it was perfectly clear and glassy. You could look down and see the life beneath the surface, seaweed, fish, shellfish, the glorious colours of the underwater world. It was this that Marnie used to think of when she thought of Alice in the estuary; this beauty and calm and wild peace.

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