Wind. That was the first thing. Wind on his face — not cold, not warm, but present, physical, the wind as a hand pressing gently against his skin. And then the smell: salt. Not the English salt, not the Bristol Channel brine that arrived in Crosskeys on certain days when the weather backed up the estuary and pushed the sea-smell inland through the valley. Different salt. Cleaner. Older. The salt of the Baltic, of a sea that was barely a sea at all, more a lake with ambitions, shallow and cold and patient.

Cliffs. Not the Cornish kind — not the dramatic, crumbling, surf-hammered cliffsides that Peter talked about, the cliffs that fell away in sheets and sent houses tumbling into the Atlantic. Not the Tenby kind either — the painted-postcard cliffs with their candy-coloured houses perched above the harbour. These were Swedish cliffs. Gotland cliffs. Limestone. The raukar — the sea stacks that stood in the water like ancient sentinels, their shapes carved by millennia of tide and patience into forms that looked human if you caught them right, that looked like gods or trolls or the petrified remains of people who had stood at the water's edge too long and been claimed by it.

He was being held.

That was the centre of the dream, the part that the water could not dissolve. Arms. Large hands. The sensation of being lifted, of the ground leaving his feet and the sky coming closer and the world rearranging itself around the fact of being carried. He was small. Impossibly small. One year old, maybe less — the age before memory is supposed to begin, the age that the brain records anyway and stores somewhere beneath the architecture of conscious recall, in the basement, in the foundations, in the place where the body keeps the things it knew before it knew how to know.

His father's face.

This was the part that always arrived last, the part that the dream held back the way a storyteller holds back the final line — not for drama but for weight, for the particular gravity that accrues to things that are rare. His father's face, above him, looking down. The eyes — what colour were they? The dream would not say. The dream offered the shape of the face, the fact of it, the presence above him that was warmth and safety and the particular quality of being known by someone whose blood you share, but it withheld the details. The details were the price of being one year old when the knowing happened. You get the feeling. You lose the resolution.