The salt tang memory reaches out its tendrils, wraps itself around her, pulls and she is breathless on the shore. Swirled round by salt water and foam, she takes a single step backwards, leaving a brief indentation of bare foot in cold sand.
Steps back again onto grey rock marbled with quartz streaks washed and scoured to smoothness, draped in slick weed. Her toes find a secret pool - a world in a rock hollow where sea anemones wait like garnet cushions for the tide. Transgressive fingers slip through the curtain of fronds and into the sun-warmed water, exploring, find out a smooth pebble to caress. Place it back. Pull her hand out again and shake the drops from her fingers.
The memory tugs and she is at the far end of the beach, sun on bare back, breasts, stomach. Wading out into the sea up to her thighs, a sudden wave making her gasp and giggle - she stretches to tiptoes to lift herself away from the cold water. Turned then to face the sandy cliffs and let herself lean back until the water supported her weight. Tilts her head back to wet her hair, cool her face. Arms outstretched, dazzled.
A sudden black muzzle nuzzles her arm, dark eyes query her presence in the water. An otter-tail rudder flips and a dark shape swims round in a circle, nosing a tennis ball towards her hand. Play with me. Later, that same four-legged companion raced her to the shore and shook extravagantly from nose to tail-tip, watering the barren sand.
Another tug and she is on the footpath above the dunes watching sand martins flick in and out of nests. A pair of lovers in the grass. Sea-holly prickles her calves. Sand in her plimsoles between her toes. The black tail goes on before her, she knows every inch. Red campion, musk mallow, honey-suckle, gorse. The turn in the track where the world opens up and the breeze lifts and the smell of the ocean and the earth combine.
Memory swirls again and she is with her father watching sloe-black ravens at their cliff top courtship. Swifts stitch the sky, and stonechats perch impossibly on bramble-tips in the late August.
Then at last driving home, along the high-hedged lanes, past the white stone pub, through the village, windows down, black dog curled on a warm towel and fast asleep.
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