Since it appears that we are not at this stage going to get much out of Bill – or the wild, slim alien as I began to think of him – I suppose I could tell you something of my life, and how I come to be here, alone, in Cornwall.  After all, one of you asked me about my nightmares, what they are, and why I have them.  I will be sparing with the nightmares themselves, but much less so with their genesis.

I lived in a big city as many young people do when they are young.  I studied then I worked.  I had one relationship, another, which was itself followed by a third.  This one stuck.  He was not the marrying type, and I wasn’t sure that I was either, so we didn’t get married.  I watched the years and the non-anniversaries stack up, amusing myself with possible markers in the absence of the dress, the cake, the barely contained hostility between close family members, the bridal suite, and the honeymoon.  So was it the first time we saw each other, there on the landing of a shared house?  Or when we first sat alone together in a room, my room, months later, after he had moved rather inconveniently and against the natural flow of the relationship to another city?  Or should it be the day of the night we first made love, after our first shared meal together?  Or to conclude the sequence, when two years later he responded to my ultimatum by moving into the flat I had bought in the sprawling suburbs of a third city?

You choose.  I don’t care to think about it any more.

We were happy, certainly satisfied, and only occasionally dissatisfied with each other.  The depression to which I had been subject since my teens visited less frequently, and we rolled along, merrily drinking with the few close friends either of us had, going out at other times to listen to music of his choosing, sometimes of mine.  I worked hard, and he worked less hard, though he compensated for this with regular handling of the hoover and a degree of ability in the kitchen which sometimes even approached flair.  He often used to speculate that being a vegetarian had held him back from his true vocation, that of chef.

After ten years of failing to celebrate whichever anniversary you want to go by, life seemed more or less the same, though each of us was earning more year on year and this coupled with increasingly discerning taste buds meant that we drank better wine and ate in restaurants which verged on fine dining; at least I no longer submitted to the greasy spoon he originally had a predilection for.

There was something missing, and my body told me – eventually begged me – that it was a new life form.  I resisted the notion for a time, realising this was a point at which we might come unstuck.  I waited until his cookery had brought off a particularly good meal and little was left in the bottle that accompanied it.  He was his usual cautious self, warming only slowly to the idea, at pains not to appear negative, even though I knew he was coming to terms with the end of something and was finding it hard to contemplate quite what would be beginning in its stead.

 ‘Yes,’ he said finally, draining the dregs, ‘let’s.’

We went right to it.  That was never the problem.

All the rest of that day, the first day, Bill slept.  Periodically I checked on him, making sure that he was still breathing; and, I suppose, that he hadn’t vanished.  Each time his life and my sanity was confirmed.  The spare bedroom was of a size matched to his proportions, being long and narrow, except that the eaves had forced me to place the bed centrally across the width, so that there was barely any space to pass at its foot, and the room tapered off into the eaves to its left and right.  The bed barely contained his length.  He slept soundly, quietly.  At twilight I put my ear to his face to catch the sound of his exhalation.  It was barely perceptible.  Only when I felt a warm, tickling sensation in the cup of my ear did I draw away.

The night was thick and the wind was up when he finally woke.  I had just gone to bed myself.  The door of my room was directly across the landing from his.  I had left it ajar so as to be able to hear even a murmur from him.  I needn’t have bothered, for my reading was disrupted by a scream not so much primal as out of this world, alien.  That’s how it sounded, even before he told me what he was.  I don’t think I’m projecting backwards in describing it so.  No human could have made that noise with our given vocal chords.  Serious digital manipulation would be required.  And the range of the scream, from low to high – only a composite of creatures from the animal kingdom could have unleashed such a cry.  It would have curdled any liquid exposed to it, blood, milk or hot chocolate.

I was paralysed with fear.  Control over my own mobility had leached away in the instant of the scream’s echo.  It took several minutes of strained listening to the subsequent silence before the terror-flight in my heart subsided and I was halfway sure that I had regained the potential use of my petrified limbs.  I put on my dressing gown, steadying myself against the door jamb, then stepped across the landing.  Its light gave me enough to see that he wasn’t in the bed.  I turned on the bedside lamp and looked into the eaves.  He was cowering on the landward side of the house, away from the window which overlooked the sea.  I approached him softly, crouching down low so as not to bump my head.  I might have been trying to make friends with a cat, or a fox.  At first he tried to back away further, but unable to do so, he looked at me again, checking my progress.  Then his face suddenly became more composed, as if he had awoken from a state of sleep, or there had been a moment of recognition.  I could get no closer without actually lying down, so I started to reassure him that he was safe, that whatever had scared him could not hurt him.  He was pale but there was no sweat on his brow, as I routinely had following my own regular nightmares.

‘I was falling from the sky into the sea – that’s how I must have come to be on the beach – I wasn’t surfing, I… fell.’

‘Fell from what?’

‘A ship.’

‘You fell overboard.’

‘No.  No, there was no hull, no backdrop to my fall.  I fell from a ship in the sky.’

‘You mean a plane.’

‘No, a ship.  What you would call a space ship.’

‘What I would call a space ship.  What would you call it?’

‘Chan.  The reason I can’t remember anything before this morning is because I have no human memories.  I am not human.  I’m not from here.  Earth, I mean.  I’m from… somewhere else.’

‘You’re telling me you come from another planet.’

‘Yes.  You don’t believe me.’

By now this was a whispered conversation.  Unable to hold a crouching position, I had lain down on the floor opposite him.  I could sense no trace of lightness in that hard again face.  He was in earnest.  I chose my words carefully.

‘I believe that you believe that you come from another planet, but I still think that you must have taken a knock to the head.  Whether that’s because you fell from a surfboard or from some kind of boat, I don’t know.  The fact is that your mind is a blank, and I don’t believe that the likeliest reason for this is that you aren’t a human being.  Your sleeping mind was asking your dreams to invent a story that explained what has happened to you, and falling from the sky is pretty logical, all things considered.’

‘No, no, you don’t understand.  I wasn’t dreaming.  I’ve been awake since you last looked in, trying to remember.  And then it came to me out of nowhere, and I was falling – falling again – and I screamed, just as I did when I fell.  Then I lost consciousness and when I came to, I wasn’t in bed anymore.  Here, feel my forehead – I’m as cold as was when you found me on the beach.’

I reached out my hand.  He was right.  Where there should have been bed warmth, pillow warmth, there was only skin colder to the touch than marble.  Could shock lead to body temperature dropping so rapidly?  Or was I really lying face to face with an alien – an alien with the unlikely name of Bill?

He sniffed the hot chocolate as if I’d dropped poison or a sleeping drug into it.  Paranoid, presumably, without memory to cling to.  Assuming he really didn’t have any memory of what came before he woke up on the beach.

My resolve faltered.  Generally it wasn’t a good idea to pick confused and dazed blonde-headed Australians off the beach when you found them there prone and compound the offence by taking them home with you.  So I dialled 999.  As soon as I put the phone back on the stand, I regretted it.  Even in his amnesiac state, he had a gentle air about him; a harmless giant.  It seemed more troublesome to cancel the ambulance than to let the paramedics look him over.  So I fretted, went back into the living room, and remembered too late as I came through the door that he was still likely to be peeling off his wet suit.  He was standing there naked, looking down at his midriff as if he had turkey gizzards for genitals, absorbed enough not to be aware of my presence.  By degrees I retreated, with time to take in the lean muscularity of his frame, proportions broken only by his buttocks, which were pale and curiously pronounced, as if that were where all the fat went.  Perhaps when his memory returned, he would recall that he worked all day in an office, a sedentary life requiring a cushion for a backside, only emerging at the weekend to surf.

Those pale twin moons orbited my thoughts – elliptically, so that they would slide periodically in and out of view – as I sat on the stairs waiting for the door bell to ring.

I remembered something from my first year sociology class.  Ethnomethodology.  Goldstein or Goldfarb.  Garfinkel, was it?  Experiments in the disruption of every day life, so as to achieve a mechanistic breakdown and analysis of human interaction and social order.  Hard to draw the line between this as a serious academic pursuit, and the humiliation meted out to gullible people on candid camera-type programmes.  Involuntarily I looked up at the corners of the hallway to see whether spy cams were trained on me even as I sat there at the bottom of my own stairs.  A quick mental scan of the small number of people I knew well told me none would have anything to do with such a programme.  So for my Australian ethnomethodologist it was observation and notes in the field at worst.  An artistic intervention, perhaps.  That I could understand, though I wasn’t sure I would forgive him if this was what it turned out to be.  I preferred being in control of art, not having it control me.

‘But you can call me Bill.’  A few moments before, he had been a total blank.  Then he suddenly produced not only a name, but an informal, everyday and not especially Australian nickname.  A strange barking noise broke from me as he said it, not one I recall making before, even when drunk.  At that moment I could believe that he was playing me, and acting for the paramedics.  If I hadn’t been worried that he – even as a freshly-revealed liar, a chillingly composed and convincing one at that – was still vulnerable in his current state, it might have been enough for me to show him the door directly after the ambulance men exited through it.

So it was with ice in the ventricles of my heart and barely melted fluid circulating in my veins that I heard him out.  Because what he told me fell short of any logical explanation.  And because before I could say a word, he spat an agitated question at me.

‘Why did you call them?’

There had been a promise implicit in my voice when I told him on the beach that he should come home with me, that I wasn’t taking him to a hospital, a promise I had broken by asking the hospital to come to him.  Now he was making me feel guilty for that obviously sensible step.

‘You needed checking out.  We still don’t know why you were lying there on the beach.  I don’t think it was unreasonable to assume that you’d had a blow to your head.  For all I know about head injuries, you could have lapsed into a coma as soon as you shut your eyes just now.  In fact I thought you had, until the bell woke you.  And then when the ambulance guys were quizzing you, you acted as if nothing had happened at all!’  I stopped abruptly, aware of how shrill I was sounding, and unwilling to admit out loud that he had made a fool of me.

‘I made it all up.  On the spot.  The name, Brisbane, London, the B&B in Newquay.  I don’t know where I got it all from.  Maybe from implanted memories, maybe somehow real ones.  They would have taken me away if I told them the truth, or what little of it I know.  They would have taken me away and – incarcerated me.  Locked me up.  Eventually, experiment on me.  They might even kill me.’

It was the most he had said at one go, and it came out in twitchy, febrile gobbets.  I crouched down by the armchair, in which he had rocked forward and back, and laid a hand on his arm, and spoke to him as soothingly as can someone who had deliberately starved herself of intimate contact for longer than was strictly necessary.

When he was calm, I placed my hand on his forehead, expecting heat.  But it was still as cold as it had been on the beach.  Bed, and a hot water bottle.  After that we could see where we were.

‘It’s the name you reached for, whatever the reason.  Until we know better, let’s call you Bill.’

The trilling of a bell woke me from images of tentacled creatures swimming through space, contracting and expanding their legs with imperceptible speed into closed and open patterns which propelled them through the vacuum.  With each opening, there was a glint of a raw, fleshy orifice, and a flash of incisor.  Creatures who could make a human being disappear in one gulp.

Was that what I had been – still was?

The light from the window was brighter than when I was last conscious, and the clouds raced in faster from the sea.  Presently two men appeared, dressed in a dull green uniform.  Chan stood behind and between them, her arms crossed.  I turned my chair round towards the men, who had started talking to me in a familiar tone.  Initially I assumed that I must have met them before.  But there was also a perfunctoriness about the questions that put me on my guard.  They were acting as they would with anyone they might then decide to take away.

‘Sir, did you drink anything before going out on the waves?’

‘Drink what?’

‘Alcohol, sir.’

‘I don’t drink alcohol.’

‘Can you tell me your name?’

‘Yes.  William Daniels.  Everyone calls me Bill.’  At this, Chan made a startled sort of a noise, and uncrossed her arms.  The paramedics looked round at her inquiringly.  She pursed her lips and refolded her arms.

‘Where are you from, Bill?’

‘Australia.  Brisbane.  Where are you from?’

‘Are you on holiday, or living over here?

‘Both, I suppose.  I’m living in London; down here for a couple of weeks surfing.  Probably not any more of that though after this morning.’

‘And where are you staying?’

‘In a B&B in Newquay.  The Stanton Guest House.’

‘Anyone with you there that Chan could ring, get them to come and pick you up?’

‘No.  I came down on my own.  My friends are all up in London.’

‘Can you tell me who the British Prime Minister is?’

‘Can you tell me who the Australian one is?’  I told them the name of both of the then current incumbents.  The facts came to mind as far as I could work out naturally, without neurons scrambling to connect with each other in a desperate search.  Why was I able to tell them these things when what I had told Chan was the truth – that I could remember nothing about myself?  It seemed my life depended on telling the ambulance men lies.

I let them examine my head for signs of damage, but they found no more than Chan.  Then they set me some cognitive tests.  I deliberately avoided any attempt to reflect while answering, letting whatever instincts – long possessed or recently planted – guide me through without apparent fault.  To the paramedics, I was no mystery, just another antipodean surfer who’d maybe been a little careless but lived to tell the tale without injury or scar.

Chan talked to them before they left.  They weren’t whispering, so I heard most of what they said.

‘… seems to be alright.  He’s not concussed.  If he doesn’t want to come with us, we can’t force him.  You okay with keeping an eye on him?’

Even now, remembering the moment when I stated my name for the first time, I am not sure whether I plucked it from a fold in the matter of my brain under which it lay hidden, giving off a luminosity which made me grab for it in that previously dark and empty void of computation, or if I invented it out of thin air, through information that had been gathered during the short walk from the beach to the house, or pieced together from what I had seen in Chan’s house.  What I knew with frightening certainty was that the paramedics had the power to place me in the hands of the authorities, even being ignorant of what I was, and I would do – had done – everything necessary to avoid that fate.

As the heavy-sounding engine of a vehicle started up outside the house, I cast aside any doubt.  I was sure that I had dug the name from underneath the fallow earth in my brain because it was a seed sown there by the species which had set me down on this planet.  They had placed me among these people either in the spirit of research, or with a mission that would come to me once my body recovered from the shock of its displacement; a mission that would be revealed when I was ready to effect it.

She sat me in one of a pair of chairs in the bay window, and said she would get me a drink and some fresh clothes.  Sun was breaking through the clouds.  I shielded my eyes against the brighter light and immediately she reached for a cord at the right angle of the window, and used it to lower one of the blinds.  Venetian blinds.  I relaxed in the chair, which was made of a canvas material and gently rocked when I shifted my weight.  I rested my arms on its wooden arms and my head against the cushion which hung over the top of the chair.  I closed my eyes and saw the colours of space.  I felt suddenly tired and wished that I would never have to open them again.  Or move again.  I let nebulae, comets and meteoroids drift across the interplanetary screen of my eyelids.

‘Here, take this.  Careful, it’s hot.’

She gave me a lilac mug filled with a pinkish brown liquid.  Bubbles gathered around the inner perimeter of the mug.  The liquid had a suspiciously chemical, saccharine smell.

‘What is it?’

‘Hot chocolate.  It’ll warm you up.’

I wrapped my fingers around the mug and undeniably it warmed them.  I sniffed again and put the cup to my lips.  They flinched on contact with the liquid, almost spilling it, but I tried again, and this time managed to draw off some of the thin-tasting liquid.  The taste lingered in my mouth after I had swallowed.  Not unpleasant, but the sweetish tang suggested something diluted rather than its essence.   I took another sip, tracking the progress of the liquid’s heat as it descended into the internal organs of my new body.

The woman watched me as I sipped, her mouth occasionally forming into the encouraging shape of a smile.  Otherwise she gave no indication that she was aware of the novelty of the sensations to me, and I might even have come to the conclusion that she was amused, as if she were watching a human child assess a food it had not been served before.

‘I used to have hot chocolate when I was a kid, after I went swimming.  Still do, if I can.  Nothing warms you better.  I’ll go and see if I can find you something to wear.’

I cradled the cup in my human hands, enjoying its warmth.  I thought I heard the woman in the next room talking.  It must be to someone.  And because of the pauses, on what this civilisation called a telephone, or mobile.  I guessed I had better not let myself fall asleep.  A plant stood between the two chairs, its leaves gleeful receptacles for the energy disseminated by the planet’s sun.  I suspected hot chocolate was not the plant’s ideal choice of fluid, but that did not stop me from upending the remainder of the contents of the mug into its earth-filled pot.

‘Chanelcharlenny.’

Something about the way she said this string of syllables suggested to me that it was her name.  Despite her faith in the warming powers of hot chocolate, I was still cold, and began to regret watering the plant with the remaining half-cup.  How did human beings cope with such a thin dermatological rendering and such a raw and penetrating atmosphere?  I felt sure my own species must be fur-covered.

As if in answer to my thoughts, the woman re-appeared with the clothes, and a blanket.

‘Chanelcharlenny – is that your name?’

She seemed disturbed by the question, and was slow to answer.

‘Yes, but it’s Chanel…’ – she paused – ‘… Charlenny.  Chanel’s my given name.  Charlenny is my surname.  It’s Cornish.  You can call me Chan.  Here, put these on.’

She turned on her heels and left the room.  I stood up unsteadily then slowly peeled off the wet suit.  Momentarily I was disturbed by the anatomy of this sex of the species, but so many novel experiences were homing in on me, I determined to think about this very particular one later, and quickly put on the trousers.  Of thickish material, they were short on my legs.  A red t-shirt with the phrase ‘I’m a noun!’ printed across its front in white, and a grey hooded top.  Black socks, pink at the heel.  They must be her clothes – Chan’s – because they were a little tight-fighting, even compared with the wet suit.

I sat back down on the chair and drew the blanket over me.  Through the part of the window which was not screened by the blind, I could see the beach on which I had woken up, part in sun, part-shadow, also the sweep of a bay, and three successive headlands pointing crooked, rocky fingers out to sea, accusing the same point on the horizon.  Above them clouds were banked, their flat bottoms rolling beyond the final headland, its mass considerably more substantial (factoring for distance) than the nearer two.  Waves lapped the beach in long, lacy frills of white.  I watched them form and dissipate.

Despite myself, I returned to the state I had been in before Chan found me on the beach – the regenerative condition she would call sleep.

His demeanour was unnerving, but I tried to remain composed in the face of it, reasoning that if my confidence faltered, this would disturb him and leave me all the more unnerved.

He was slim – not to the point of emaciation, or self-starvation, but blubberless, proportionally not quite perfect; overlong, though not a beanpole.  His hair was wild from the sea, tangled both in itself and bits of seaweed.  His face was blue-grey with the cold, as drained of warmth as the concrete beach defences in the pearly morning light.  He was forbidding in every way – strange, unexpected, unpredictable.  But when I asked him questions in the surest tone I could muster, he was so genuinely puzzled by his inability to answer that I no longer felt intimidated.  The blue-grey face cracked, and through the cracks something vulnerable seeped out.  Something human.  Streaks of warmth began to colour the icy visage.

I picked the seaweed out of his hair as I felt his scalp for bumps or cuts.  His head was a weird shape – in one place it was as though a slice had been taken across the sphere of his skull, as you might pare an apple of a bruise to its skin.  But there was no blood.

He must have been knocked out by his board while surfing in the dark, a foolish practice that only someone who believed himself immortal would undertake.  He was extremely lucky not to have drowned, and I told him so.  By rights I should have found a body during my morning walk, and the consciousness that I had not turned my relief into exhilaration, as if it was I who had narrowly escaped death.  And so I ended up offering help and taking temporary responsibility for this lost antipodean soul.  How could I not?  He was helpless with amnesia and I was the one who found him.  I would at least get him to a hospital, despite his protestations that he didn’t need to go.

He was also a mystery and any that my life might once have possessed was long gone.

‘You’d better come with me.’

Tremors coursed across his face.  A tic from the cold, or frayed nerves, or both.

‘Not to a hospital, just to my house.  Have a cup of coffee and get yourself warm.  Here, take my jacket.’

Whatever sense was left in that battered skull gradually came to him now.  It barely fitted him, lending his frame a look of the scarecrow.  He got the fleece on, after first inserting the wrong arms into each sleeve, straightjacket-style.  I wasn’t sure if he would be able to walk, but I wasn’t going to risk having to support him all the way uphill or allow him to nuzzle me again.  So I set off for the gap in the dunes, and he followed.  Once we were on the narrow thread of sandy path, I checked again.  He had lagged behind, but he was still coming, concentrating on the path as if it were a particularly abstruse line of philosophical argument.  On the road up to the house I let him draw level.

 ‘You think I’m Australian?’ he said.

I wasn’t sure if I was healthy and well, or sick and hurt.  I wasn’t sure what or who I was.  I wasn’t sure of my body, or how I came to be in it.  How I came to be here, standing on unsteady legs on a beach in what I somehow knew was dawn light.  So I reached for certainty, for the being – the woman, my brain prompted – before me who had been concerned enough to stop and check on my well-being.  That must mean that she knew who she was, where she had come from, and where she was going.  She must know that she was human, and be unafflicted by a sense that she was not quite familiar with this planet.

The woman’s hair was not unlike mine, except that it was dry.  Without questioning the logic of how I knew it, I was aware that she was one sex of this species, and I was encased within the body of the other.  I found I was immediately attracted to her face.  It caught and reflected the morning light.  It suggested openness even as I guessed that my own face, of which I still had no clear physical conception, was one which had the air of being closed off, craggy like a rock.

‘I – I don’t know how I got here.  Or who I am.  Where I am, even.  In fact – this is going to sound strange – I don’t even know how it is possible for me to talk to you.’

I must have mumbled the last sentence, because the woman ignored it.  Perhaps she had understood nothing at all of what I said – it sounded strange enough to my ears.

‘You’re dangling a leash from your ankle.  You must have taken a knock – to the head, from your surfboard.  Don’t you know you shouldn’t go out on the waves late at night with no-one else around?  Let me have a look.  You’ll have to drop down a bit for me to see.’

I dropped to my… haunches and the woman took a step forward, taking a handful of my hair and checking the scalp underneath.  Her hands moved through my hair swiftly, methodically.  When her fingers touched the shell of my skull, I could feel their warmth.  Unconsciously I pitched forward, my face meeting more warmth in the form of the soft clothing she wore.  Unhurriedly she moved to the side, evading further moments of contact.

‘See anything?’ I said, knowing as I did that I was able to corrupt this language, abbreviate it, and be understood.

Her hands kept exploring a while longer before she said ‘No’.  One or two more unmethodical back-trackings followed before she stepped back and looked me over.

‘You don’t remember anything about yourself, or how you got here?’

I rose, considered the question, and said no.  ‘Nothing.’

‘What’s your name?’

No name that might be mine came to me.  The woman pursed her lips and moved hair from her eyes.

‘I can’t see a cut or a bump, but you must have amnesia or something.  We should get you to a hospital.’

‘I don’t want to go to a hospital,’ I said hastily, as images rolled through my mind of my body on an operating table subject to the examining whim of some clumsy human doctor equipped with the crude implements of a backward medicine, universally-speaking.

‘You must be from down under to judge from your accent.’

Down under?

My brain’s linguistic prompting process had so far provided me with every verbal eventuality, thought or spoken.  I must have spent many years studying this language to the degree that I could speak it without arousing suspicion of my… extraterrestrial nature.  But ‘down under’ had me stumped.

The cheek of my human face was pressed against something wet.  I opened my two new eyes, shutting them instantly against the bright grey light.  In the moment these overtly light-sensitive organs had been open, I had observed packed brown stretching away from me, fringed by white.

Somehow I knew that what lay firm beneath my cheek and stretched into the distance was sand, and the white, water.  I raised my oddly heavy head.  Wet strands of hair fell in my eyes.  Limbs that must be attached to the torso of my new body lay prone against the sand, numb with cold but dressed in some textured material but for which I knew I would be colder still, or dead.  A wet suit, wet from the sea.

I had command of my thoughts, and my thoughts commanded this strange language without trouble.

Curtained by the damp hair, my eyes were adjusting to the light, and the organism’s brain – my brain – was modifying its original assessment of the nature of this light from bright to dim.  I bent my upper limbs – arms – at their elbows and pushed my body up using hands – fingers – muscles until I was kneeling.  I noticed the rhythmic sound behind me which first I had taken for granted.  Waves breaking on the sand; a beach.  Never stopping, varying only in strength.

I looked down at my new body – so different from my old one, I thought, before realising I could not remember what shape or size or colour or texture the earlier version had been.  I watched my chest rise and fall as I breathed in the sharp, ruffled air, noticing also the tangy smell of the sea.  My hands felt for the fastener of the black suit at my neck, wanting to release it so that I might breathe deeper still, and more easily.  My numbed fingers fumbled for some time before they were able to draw the zip down.  Hair appeared, and beneath it, skin.  The wind crept in and tickled the reviving flesh I had exposed.  I adjusted the zip upwards a fraction.

Though my legs were heavy, they responded immediately to the mental urge to stand up.  I wobbled uncertainly on my feet, instinctively putting my arms out by way of balance, finding nothing but that fluid air.  Somehow I steadied myself, and looked down at my legs, where there were flashes of colour – light blue and fluorescent yellow stripes which produced a green blend where they crossed.  Around my left leg was some kind of cord, frayed at the loose end, as though I had been chained to something.

‘A surfboard.’

This grainy guttural utterance honked out of my mouth.  It seemed I could speak the language as well as think it.  I pictured an object which was long and curved and made of some kind of hard lightweight substance which served to make it buoyant.

 ‘Are you alright?’  said a voice which was not my own.  It was lighter, higher, kinder.  I turned slowly towards the point I guessed it came from.  There, not many human steps from me, stood another of the kind, with mostly similar bodily attributes, but seemingly softer and rounder, beneath a different kind of clothing.

‘I’m not sure,’ I said in answer, because I wasn’t.

Two dozen or more wetsuited surfers, like black seabirds, shags or cormorants, sitting on the sea as it swells beneath their tucked-in legs.  Or seals getting up on their tails to follow the waves as they become two-third or three-quarter circles in rolling, tubular motion.

The plane of the sea, rising up towards the horizon, its undulating body threatening at any moment to swell and engulf the bay window of the house in which I sit.

The Land’s End peninsula erased by a seamless blanket of mist and low cloud. The froth painting the golden sand a brilliant white, glossy in the sunshine.

That’s the sand that I washed up on.  How did I get there?