She thought of Alice waking up this morning, frantic that her husband wasn’t home

It was already the next day outside. The sky light behind Berwick Law, orange tracers into blue, high wisps of cloud glowing in the pre-dawn. Oil tankers with their lights on in the mouth of the firth, the street lights across in Fife. And the Inch, a dark presence against the violet sky to the west, an absence of light like a miniature black hole in the sea. Surtsey stared at it for a long time, thinking about the message.

She looked up and down the prom, but there was no one in sight. Eventually she climbed over the wall and jumped down to the beach.

She kicked the wellies off, wanted to feel connected to the sand. Scrunched her toes into it then walked towards the sea, the tide well out, a hundred yards of squelching underfoot until the soft whisper of the waves.

She stepped in up to her calves, the bottoms of her pyjamas soaked. She held her breath against the cold, felt her heart quicken, involuntary reactions, no thought required.

She pulled the pipe and grass out, packed the bowl and lit it. Sucked, kept it in her lungs, imagined she was made of magma.

She exhaled, tried to picture her spirit leaving her body along with the smoke, up into the atmosphere, circling the earth with the air currents forever. She was really wasted.

Someone knew, that’s all she could figure out. Someone was there, had seen her, and knew. But who? How?

She stared east. The sun would rise in an hour. She would have to get up, go to the office and pretend everything was OK.

She closed her eyes and realised she couldn’t feel the coldness of the water any more. You could get used to anything, it seemed.

Blazing

Surtsey stood outside the hospice and tried to clear her head. The small windows of the building’s observation tower were blazing in the sunshine, making her squint.

She’d slept for four hours, crashing when the grass buzz wore off. She woke in a fug, then remembered. Ran to the toilet and vomited in the sink, tasting grass and red wine.

She spent a few minutes staring in the mirror, straightening everything out, then got dressed and tried to anchor herself to the day.

She had her back to the sea now as if she wasn’t speaking to it for what it had subjected her to. She took Tom’s phone out of her pocket and checked it. Nothing.

She’d found an old charger cable in a drawer last night, charged it up overnight.

She shook her head at the phone now, lifted the screen to her forehead, felt its coolness, then put it back in her pocket.

She thought of Alice waking up this morning, frantic that her husband wasn’t home, that he hadn’t been in touch.

Her neck was stiff and heavy, and she cricked it as she opened the gate.

St Columba’s was one of four old, sprawling buildings on the prom, nestled between the Joppa terraces at the east end and the more modest buildings further west.

In a previous life it had been a kids’ nursery, so had swapped one regime of nappy changing and cleaning up sick for another.

Next to it were two privately-owned Gothic homes, all steep turrets and high-walled gardens, then at the far end was the scuffed up Dalriada pub, wooden pirate with broken cutlass standing outside and sit-in folk sessions most nights.

Together, the four houses were like a huddle of dishevelled elderly ladies gazing out to sea.

The hospice building was unique with its square observation tower jutting from the crooks and crevices. Surtsey didn’t know if it ever got used.

Great view

Most of the inmates, as Louise called them, couldn’t get up the spiral staircase, Louise herself once abandoning an expedition when she couldn’t lift her drip-bag frame past the second step.

You would get a great view from up there, East Lothian, Fife, the teardrop of the Inch between. Surtsey sighed and pushed the front door open. Effie on reception met her with a smile. New folk coming through the door got the professional face, but after you visited a while Effie broke the mask and there was kindness in her eyes.

She was well under five feet tall, with a thin face and large-framed glasses on a string of purple beads around her neck.

Her long grey hair was always in some intricate arrangement – today it was plaits looped over her head like a pretzel, giving her the appearance of a Ukrainian matriarch.

Surtsey touched a finger against the reception desk. “Hi, Effie, how’s she been?”

Effie nodded with her mouth turned down. “OK.” Which meant anything but.

“Did she sleep?”

“Not much. A bit like yourself, looking at you.” Surtsey lifted her finger from the oak up to her temple, where it fluttered. “I’m fine.”

Effie smiled. “Candle at both ends, eh?”

“Not exactly.” Surtsey looked along the corridor to the left. “Where is she?”

“Rec room,” Effie said, nodding. “Away in.” Surtsey’s stomach was tight as she walked. She came to see Mum every day, twice if possible, but it was never easy, she had to steel herself each time.

She understood why Iona stayed away, she would herself if she could.

The rec room was quiet, two old dears bowed over knitting in the far corner.

One of the disadvantages of dying from cancer in her forties was that everyone else in the place was twice Louise’s age.

Louise sat at one of the large bay windows looking out to sea, thin blanket over her knees.

This wasn’t her mother, but it was. On the one hand Surtsey didn’t want this wasted, six-stone shell of a woman to be the mum she remembered after she was gone.

Vibrant

She wanted to picture the vibrant woman slipping off her shoes in the sand and dancing with Surtsey and her sister, kicking up her dress as she ran round the bases at rounders, cigarette hanging from her mouth.

But then she didn’t want to deny dignity to this woman in front of her either.

This really was her mother, this was every molecule, every pore, every inch the same woman who gave birth to her after 36 long hours.

This was the woman who raised her and her sister alone, who fed and clothed them and took them out of school on exotic working holidays at a moment’s notice, to earthquake zones and volcanoes in the middle of jungles, high on desert plateaus, adrift on arctic seas.

And here she was with half her stomach and bowel hacked away by surgery, what remained riddled with aggressive carcinoma.

Ironic that someone who smoked all her life ended up getting stomach not lung cancer, but there you go.

More tomorrow.