Themes and language some people may find upsetting.

Alice liked how the sea here didn’t just look bright, it felt bright too. As if every part of it were a little crystal that jiggled and jostled its neighbours as the wave went tumbling towards the shore, a chandelier on the move. That other sea was not bright at all; it rolled and heaved, smooth and dark and secretive. It drew you in with its slow thunderous mountains. One slip and you’re mine, it said.

Alice rummaged her toes through the shingle, exposing a scaled-down world of rivers and streams that hurried its cargo of sand grain boulders down the beach. How did this miniature sea feel about being so far away from home? Did it still jostle and jiggle down there between the pebbles, or did it try to stay silent and not be noticed until it was whole again and safe? The tide was on the turn, it would not have much longer to wait.

Alice crunched back up the beach to the little depression she had sculpted by pushing the larger pebbles to each side. She settled herself in it – cocooned there like a baby in a car seat – and picked up a nearby pebble. It was oval and flattened like a tropical island on a map. She pressed it to her cheek to read its rhythms, then slid it down into the cavernous depths of her pocket. Here it came up against the bag of jelly babies from last summer when fourteen year old Darren was trying to get himself laid and thought a bit of cheap confectionary would do it with someone like her. She tweezered the bag open with her fingers and winkled one out – it was hard and stiff after all this time but probably still edible. Alice wondered what colour it was – sticky cherry red, sweet tangerine orange, or sharp lime? She brought it up to her mouth and saw that it was black.

You can’t take a black one home, your Da will go mental.

Alice contemplated the little figure for a moment; everyone’s favourites, black ones, as long as they were just sweets. She stroked his head and packed him away again. Maybe he should have a name; Desmond or Bob – or Norbert. She scrubbed her heels around in the pebbles and powered her weight into them like a pile driver pushing down to build foundations. She wriggled her toes, pointed them up at the sky and wriggled them again. Waving at God, she thought, and wondered if He was watching. She angled her feet into a V – serve Him right, if He was.

The sea here stayed close: Alice had watched it from when children and dogs chased it off the shingle so they could dig in the shiny wet sand to when it chased them back onto the promenade and hugged the shore like a blanket pulled up tight on a cold night. Now it was back out again, keeping an eye on things from just beyond the pier.

Other seas, in Alice’s experience, seemed to completely abandon their shores, sometimes for days. Then eventually they came sweeping in; dousing the encampments of holiday visitors who thought the beach was forever and hadn’t read the warnings with dribbles, inches, then feet of salty foam,. Wet towels, wet cool-boxes, wet Auntie Dorises who needed help to get up. Those other seas of Alice’s acquaintance could be wily and devious.

Here, though, the horizon seemed to meet the sky halfway and to hang just beyond her fingertips so that she could almost touch it. Alice extended one arm and waved into the sun, low now and ready to settle as the world turned. It struck the end of the old pier and burst out into a halo; an explosion of white gold, as if a friendly bomb had gone off. The water beneath was strewn with a magic carpet of satin streamers that rolled across the swell. You could strut like a movie star along a carpet like that. With a carpet like that, you surely wouldn’t end up in the back row being groped by your mate’s boyfriend’s spotty side kick.

Beggars can’t be choosers, Alice.

Alice had never begged because she had never needed to, but it didn’t stop people telling her she should put up with the dregs and be grateful for the attention. Alice pretended not to understand and got on with making her own arrangements which, latterly anyway, had gone quite well. The halo grew, dancing and dazzling around the pier and quivering as it met the edge of the sea. Did it hiss and sizzle as it sank, like bacon in a pan? She rubbed her face and fancied the little scabs still stood there from when she used to lean into the frying pan to feel the noises it made, and got spattered with flying droplets of hot fat.

She’s a moron, that girl.

She’s deaf.

Should have got rid when you had the chance.

But the sea was water, not fat; it was deep and rhythmical and it rumbled its bass rhythms into Alice’s bones as she drove her pile-driver heels further down into the shingle to meet them. It was a Caller of reels and jigs that communed with her by drumming through her feet and fingers and throbbing its harmonics deep within her chest. Other communings were not always so straightforward, so perfectly transmitted.

What’s she waving at?

It’s sign language.

Gerraway!

There’s a sign for everything.

What about “dumbfuck”?

No, there wasn’t a sign for that, but once Alice had seen it mouthed, usually with curled lips, and eyes with bad jokes in them she thought she might be able to finger-spell it. Then she decided she wouldn’t bother because she knew it meant ‘Alice’ and that was a conversation she didn’t want to have. Eventually, Alice discovered that ‘dumb’ and ‘fuck’ could be used separately and had separate meanings. ‘Dumb’ meant not keeping up with everyone else and speaking with a mouthful of marbles and being stupid. ‘Fuck’ meant having her knickers pulled down at the youth club and some boy’s dick shoved hard up between her legs, then being left on her own to sort herself out.

The other sea had not wanted to have a conversation either, although it had kept pitching itself upwards from below the plimsoll line as though it might, like a whale making silent overtures. Turned out, all it wanted was the thing she was carrying.

She’s the size of a bloody house!

Well, I don’t know what she eats at that place.

She’s wrong in the head.

Alice stopped being the size of a bloody house in the December. She was on the ferry coming back from a Christmas shopping trip to the mainland with the bunch of misfits from her Adult Ed group. Mike had just kissed her again and she had been all ready to sneak off with him when she got seasick. She hoped it would go away quickly because there weren’t too many opportunities to sneak off with Mike, and when he put his dick up between her legs, it didn’t feel like it was either dumb or a fuck. Mike wore a helmet because of his fits, and people thought he was stupid, like her. Well, stupid or not, he could move those hips pretty well and so could she. Even better, he didn’t mind she was fat and no one told her she couldn’t take him home. She hadn’t though; she didn’t want her Da looking at that helmet and calling him names behind his back because he thought he couldn’t hear, or to his face because he thought he couldn’t think. But Mike hadn’t taken her home either, and she thought he might ditch her if her Da got going on him. So when people said things like ‘Alice and Mike’ or ‘Mike and Alice’,and gave her one of those knowing looks, she just acted dumb to put them off the scent.

Alice had already found that if people took you for dumb because it suited them, it wasn’t too difficult to play dumb when it suited you, so when her Ma told her to stay away from Norbert, she just gawped at her and hoped she’d give up. But she only gave up after Norbert’s Ma gave up, which she did even though Alice had not gawped at her. Without a word, she upped sticks and carted herself and Norbert back to Jamaica, or wherever it was Norbert’s Da had cleared off to, so that was that. Alice went back to being dumb but tried not to be quite so fucked because that would rub all the Norbert out of her. She held out a good few months too, until Mike came along, but it transpired she’d been wrong about the rubbing out anyway.

She’s got a new boyfriend.

Daft enough to take her off my hands, with any luck.

Don’t you use that sign to your Da, it’s not a proper sign.’

It was a proper sign. Everybody used it and it meant go away. Alice took to using it quite often, in between stuffing herself with mashed potatoes, chips, burgers, ice cream, cheese, custard, cakes, bananas, pork chops, sausages, fruit pies, fish fingers, and any sort of bread. She gave up milk and cereal though, because they made her sick, and lately she had wanted to eat tuna all the time.

It’s her hormones.

How bloody old is she – seventeen?

It happens later for her sort.

The ferry was on that other sea; the deep, dark heaving one that did not converse. Down in the toilets, echoing stainless steel with discarded paper towels all over the floor and a smell of hurried bowel movements, Alice thought about throwing up. She thought about it because that was what she expected to happen, but instead there was this almighty dragging, squeezing pain that swung on her guts, tied them in knots, and forced them down and down and down.

When she left the toilet, the ferry was riding out a sudden squall, waiting for a safe moment to make harbour. It was full dark and the ferry’s lights were twinkling on their cables and making stars in the great pools of salty wash that shifted this way and that as the boat rolled and pitched. Strands of kelp slithered from one side of the deck to the other, and hung like mouldy decorations off the ropes and rails.

 All yours accounted for?

Stuffing it down, honking it up, or at it like rabbits in the loos!

Any chance they get, eh? Poor buggers.

Alice’s current rabbit was down in the café shooting cartoon ducks on a screen and her other one, the one she couldn’t take home, was long gone. But now she had an unexpected reminder of him and it was settled under her coat, snug as a bug in a rug. Alice thought maybe she should show it to someone, but there was no one on deck because they had all gone below to get out of the wet. Maybe she should show it to God, then. Alice undid her coat and fished around under her cardigan for the new arrival. She thought it ought to be kept warm so she had burrowed down to her bra and let it lay across her stomach, then pulled her blouse and cardie over it and buttoned up her coat.

 You can’t take a black one home, Alice.

Well, where else was it going to go? She pulled it out a little, enough to see its face and that its little chest that stayed resolutely flat. Alice gave it a squeeze and a tiny bubble popped out of the large dull-red nostril that sat above the short dull-red channel running from its nose down to its mouth. She unwrapped it a bit more; there was a great coil of blue and purple rope attached to it, snaking around it, and with a huge wadge of meat like an engorged pancake sagging at the other end. Alice pulled on the rope and another bubble emerged, so she followed it up and round and down and back until she got to the baby’s neck. Tight like a noose. Maybe God did not want this child and so He had strangled it. Or maybe He wanted it so much He took it back straightaway. It was hard to know. Alice thought perhaps He should see it anyway, just in case. Maybe He would fix it so it could blow its own bubbles even though He had not seen fit to give it a proper face so it could do that from the outset. She decided to confront Him with the whole package – pancake, rope, noose, and blue-black baby with the crack in the front of its head so that He could tell her what to do, and maybe apologise.

But the sea, this deeply private sea that had cut up rough and begun throwing boats and water around, apparently did not want God to see this baby because it threw Alice sideways with a crashing wave that came over the deck, and sluiced her baby out of her arms. Two minutes later, after washing it back and forth in the foam, with Alice sliding around trying to grab it like she was on some fairground ride, Norbert’s little boy disappeared over the side.

Alice hung onto the railings where the last big wave left her dangling after it broke her nose on them. New blood dribbled down to mingle with the old blood, the sea and the salt. She wondered if there should be tears too, but what was there to cry about? Norbert’s Ma had taken Norbert away, God and the sea – or both – had taken Norbert’s baby away, and she couldn’t have taken a black one home anyway, because of her Da. It most likely hadn’t even been alive. Probably it was for the best.

When someone from the crew found her, Alice was still clinging to the railings with the kelp, soaked to the skin with the blood stains on her clothes making sea-washed maps that led nowhere and pointed to nothing. She gave him a thumbs up sign but stayed where she was and let him skitter over the deck to reach her. Then she hooked her arm into his and he skated them back like amateur dancers on a frozen pond. 

Below deck, in front of the cartoon ducks, a first aider peered hard at Alice’s nose, and tapped it with a nail-chewed finger.

Breathe in.

Alice mimicked the pantomimed clue and rattled a thick wet breath up through her fat red nose.

That’ll do.

The first aider looked her up and down.

Nothing serious. Does she know what’s happened?

Alice knew more than anyone else what had happened, but since no one was inclined to ask, and anyway it was between her and the Almighty and the sea, she gave the first aider her go away gawp.

She should see her doctor tomorrow.

Alice watched while the man inspected his finger as though it might add something to the picture, wiped it on his pants and looked again. If the finger had more diagnostic information, it was not letting on so he shrugged in a what can you do with people like this? sort of way, and shuffled off to record an NAD and an NFA in his notes. He was right on both counts: nothing abnormal had been discovered because the abnormality was reacquainting itself with a salty fluid environment, and because of that there was no further action to be taken, at least not immediately.

The sun was halfway into the sea, rippling like a mirage and with banners of deep rose badging the evening across the sky. The magic carpet had become a flattened stairway of antique gold, flashing silver at its edges. Alice signed hello, and a wave crashed gently onto the beach below her hollow, deepening the freckles of another rank of pale pebbles and bringing the stairway closer to her feet. The moon – a bright counter weight pulled up out of someone else’s night by its big showy partner – hung overhead. Alice lifted a new pebble to her face; she sniffed – seaweed, salt, sand flies, and a surface smooth as ice cream. She rolled it around in her hands, it was pink and grey and sparkled as though it had fairy dust mixed in with it. She put it in her pocket with the first one, and felt the soft clunk as they met. Pebbles were percussionists, making music that was free to anyone who knew how to listen. She found another; this one had holes in its surface so that she could imagine it as a Lilliputian world with mines and men working in there, all of them living and dying in her hands. Alice polished it on her sleeve and put it in the right-hand pocket for balance. Then a black one shaped like an egg caught her eye. She fancied maybe it was a mermaid’s egg and she should look after it, so she cleaned it on her sleeve, blew it a kiss, and stowed it with the miners’ world. Probably there were hundreds of mermaid eggs on a beach like this, all waiting for the right person to rescue them and help them get home. She liked that idea.

When Alice got back from her Christmas shopping trip, her Da was down the pub and her Ma was mithering over the dinner no one had eaten so she didn’t even notice Alice’s nose, never mind the fact she was half the size she had been when she left. Well, that was fine, Alice had lost the present she’d bought too, an Advent calendar discounted because it was faulty and anyway half of Advent had already gone. Sorry Ma, went over the side with your grandson who was faulty too, and all his days had gone before he even had a whole one. She sat at the table and waited for dinner, but it didn’t arrive until half past ten because that was when her Da got home. Most of it was charred by then so he binned it and went to bed, and her Ma binned the rest.

Alice never heard the words her Da threw at her Ma every night, or the ones her Ma tried to throw back, but she knew about the thumping and banging that bled through the walls, and her Ma’s pale face with its blue badges around the eyes the next day. When she walked in on them a short while later and saw her Da’s face snarled and red and his lips tight over his teeth, and her Ma’s eyes popped like a mouse in a trap with his hand over her mouth, Alice ran. Her Da found her in the shed, betrayed by a galvanised ash bucket that couldn’t keep its lid on. He took her back, tossed her into her room like a bag of washing, and next day her Ma was wearing her normal morning face.

He’s a good man, your Da. Took you as his own when he needn’t have.

Alice didn’t give her the go away sign. But she did give it to her Da when he came to her bedroom that night and started unzipping his pants.

Time you made yourself useful, you little nigger bastard.

It was a long way to this new sea, the one that cast brilliance over its surface and sent her mermaids’ eggs to look after. Alice found you could get a long way if you offered a few services and people thought you were too daft to tell. One of her lifts even gave her a jacket when it turned a bit nippy. A big camo job with a multitude of pockets you could stock an army from. It smelled a bit from serving as a mattress in the back of his truck, but it was better than the lacy knit she’d been wearing before he ripped it trying to get at her tits. She transferred her things into it from the tatty shoulder bag she had from last year’s fete, and he fed her egg and chips at a motorway café before turfing her out on the seafront at seven in the morning.

Now it was getting late and Alice was quite stiff from incubating in her nest, also a little light headed from sitting in the sun and not eating or drinking since the breakfast stop. This was most likely what set her off thinking; that and the sight of a large ship creeping in silhouette across the horizon like a shadow puppet. Where had it come from and where was it going? Off the edge of the world?  Or into a different set on some massive stage? Suddenly it became apparent to Alice that this was not a different sea at all: whether dark and heaving, sneaky and devious, bright and jewelled, they were all the same sea – the same mighty organ playing the world over for all people over all of time. This sea had been everywhere, it had seen everything, and it knew about her and Norbert and Norbert’s baby and her Da and not taking a black one home. She sat up and leaned forward to consider this new perspective. So this was the sea’s plan, was it? Or God’s and it was in cahoots with Him. Bringing her here, showing her the eggs which, now that she was thinking more clearly, could not be eggs at all – even fantasy ones – but prayer stones? Bigger, obviously, than rosary beads because the problem was bigger than any twitching of a few baubles on a string could handle.

Alice pushed herself to her feet and bent to pick out some more of the prayer stones God had put here for her. She also gathered bits of sea-smoothed glass, shells, driftwood, and crinkly sponge from nearby and arranged them around her hollow like the fancy stitched edging of a sampler. Many of the pebbles she found places for in the jacket that, clear as day now, she could see God had given her for just this purpose; first relocating jelly-black Norbert to the top inside pocket that sat handily right over her heart so it could look after her most precious things. Then she fastened down all the pocket flaps to keep the fairy dust pebbles, the inky jewelled worlds, and the prayer stones close and make sure they got home with her.

Finally, Alice built a small cairn from the piles of shells and pebbles she had stacked at the sides of her cocoon; first laying down a layer of smooth flat prayer stones for substance then piling on top handfuls of the rocky, edgy stones that were still unshaped and new to being pebbles. She stopped when the cairn reached her ribs: she would need to breathe her first sea breath when the time came, and she would need to hold her baby when God and the sea gave it back to her.

The sky turned purple then black, and the sea drew itself up onto the beach to wash down the shingle and tweak floating debris from between the pebbles. It twinkled up at the lights on the pier and the promenade, and echoed back at the stars as if they were friends nodding hello. The moon flooded a new sheen across the water – silver and bright bridal white, from the gavotting crown that kissed the horizon, to the frills and froths dashing their white sergeants up the beach. Alice leaned into her hollow, arms outstretched like the wings of a flying fish, and waited for God’s rocksteady to dance her black bones home.

Conboy-Hill, 2016. Accepted by Bahamut Literary Journal which sadly folded before publication.