Robert Belltower was not at his cabin but the key was where he had left it, under the third rock. Inside, the framed photos and the Calor gas stove and the chair had gone but the bed remained, and two of his driftwood structures were still outside. He emptied his rucksack on the floor and slept for eleven uninterrupted hours and dreamt for the first time in a while about fish. In the dream, gulls hovered and chuckled at the fish then he awoke and realised the chuckling gulls were outside. In the following night’s dream the old man from the pub was by a campfire singing the folk song again, ‘Little Meg’, but when the old man spoke it was in his own young Californian voice. His beard was very long and he felt it to see where it ended and realised it was a vine and that it led into the hedgerows. As he felt along the beard into the hedgerows, the crowd around the campfire, who were young, and all in couples, pointed and laughed. When he woke up the song was very clearly in his head so that all he could do was pick up his guitar and sing it until it wasn’t there any more. Afterwards, he walked up the undercliff, but something had changed in his foot, and he didn’t get far. He swam, first under a setting sun that was like a lump of hot metal on the horizon, and then under a brighter moon, because when he swam the foot didn’t hurt as much, and he hoped that perhaps the salt water would heal it in the way it had with cuts and bites he’d sustained. He went much further under and slept dreamlessly that night but was brought back to the surface by the realisation he was being hit by a rolled-up magazine, wielded by a woman he had never met.

‘GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT!’ she screamed at him.

He struggled for words, slurring his first attempt at them. ‘It’s OK! I’m his friend!’ he managed to shout back at her, but she continued to hit him as he stumbled and clung to the walls.

‘Who? Whose friend?’ she asked.

‘Him! The one who lives here! Robert!’ he spluttered, stuttered, between blows.

‘No you’re not. He doesn’t have any friends. He’s dead! DEAD!’

And it was then, as the light faded again and he let himself fall into it, that he finally knew he was insane, and was a man who made friends with ghosts.

*