Diana walked toward the sea, which was Barents Sea. Gulls perched on a cliff that jutted out into the water, black as slate. Maybe a hundred of them. There was always one in the air, but rarely more than one. They sat spread out with their beaks pointing in exactly the same direction. Toward the horizon that merged with the overcast sky to form a blurred band. As though they were waiting for something. They certainly didn’t take any notice of her as she staggered along in her worthless clothes like an apocalyptic survivor on the shores of a dead ocean.

The pebble beach was an orthopaedic minefield so she crossed it very cautiously. The reek of rotting seaweed hit her and she had turned up her collar and was hugging herself in the cold wind.

Plastic bottles. Wooden boards and whitened branches. The jagged leg of a crab. A monstrous frond of sea wrack with ribbons as thick as leather belts. As though the slimy head of a sea gorgon had been washed ashore in this desolate place. A lone feather and over there a clump that had once been a shoe. All unique and conspicuous in the myriad of pale, wave-polished stones that crunched loudly under her feet.

She glanced up at the outline of the steep cliffs, pushing their jaggedly crenellated edges up toward the sky, but there were no landmarks up there to guide her in one direction or another. The mountainside was formed of stacked stone discs, deposited one on top of the other like compacted lamellae; when she got closer to the precipitous drop where birds swarmed like insects around the ledges, it was like climbing up a flight of stairs. From time to time, she passed a pool of lifeless water.

She found him in a crevice. On his back with his feet pointing out toward the sea like some kind of insane subarctic sunbather. His face had turned pale and his eyes were pointing in the wrong direction, but otherwise he looked much as he had in life. The ball of tape with her hair stuck to it was still in his pocket. A chapstick. She pulled a mobile phone out of his right trouser pocket. She pushed her hair behind her ear and shaded the screen. It had survived the fall. It said Sunday. Three missed calls. She held the phone in her hand for a while before pushing it back into his pocket. Then she leaned over him and squeezed the left pocket. Felt the bulge of his member and next to it a small hard bump. She stepped over the body, dug out the car key and walked away quickly.