1
"The world used to be a bigger place."
"The world's still the same... There's just less in it."
The air, still humid even past midnight, was tinged with a sweetness not unlike freshly baked bread. Palm tree leaves swayed and rustled within touching distance of the balcony edge.
Lizzie leaned over it a little further, liquid dark chocolate eyes fixated on the horizon.
The beach of Costa Daurada lay stretched out before her just across the empty roads and cycling lanes, like a smooth score of tan chalk smudged over with black.
Darkness was painted over the sea too. The whole view was one great sweep of an inky brush, layered just visibly where the sable sky met the water.
She was watching the thin strip of ocean where the moonlight hit its waves, coaxing them into a dusky grey spangled with translucent white flashes. The closer cresting surges that slapped at the shore were the most mesmerizing - constantly changing, catching the surreal moonbeams only to throw them away again as they dived and rolled.
Lizzie had been to Spain before, when she was seven, and to Italy when she was twelve. Both times they had stayed by the coast - her father and mother and she - but every other holiday had been America or Switzerland or France, far inland.
She watched the coal-coloured enigmatic sea, and it also seemed to watch her. As though it recognised this twenty year old Elizabeth, grown out of her childish swimming costumes and gappy teeth.
Because the thing about it was - she frowned, and brushed her long fringe out of her eyes - the thing about it was that the ocean felt more familiar than it should.
More familiar than anything.
Aged seven and twelve she'd noticed nothing, or hadn't understood. The difference now was that, though she still didn't understand, she felt as though she ought to.
Even with her lids tightly shut in a giddy confusion, the gentle breathing of the tide may as well have been the background to her whole life.
It was an infuriating paradox. Looking out over it, she could feel an immense anonymous pull at her gut, at her breath ripped from her lungs, at her entire self from the roots of her hair to her soles. All of her focus was drawn to that shoreline, upon those tumbling waves.
She needed to run, down the flight of stairs from the apartment, across the street, down the sands, and then.
And then, what?
She had been there already this week; leaving the sun beds her parents were anchored to, she'd wandered over the dunes, dipped her toes in the thin slips of water that first kissed the shore, then chased them into the shallows and waded up to her stomach and stood there, waiting.
Nothing whatsoever had happened.
The excitement - the lure - the whatever it was - seemed to have crept further out as she'd pursued it, challenging her.
Fifteen minutes later, Lizzie and her father had pushed a pedalo onto the water while her mother watched the sunbeds and bags.
"This is fun," he'd grinned as they snailed out, rocking with the waves, "so where to? South America? The Caribbean?"
He showed an unusual amount of spirit for a politician, but that wasn't why Lizzie flinched, or why a bolt of ice shot through her body.
For a second she'd thought, this is it, this is it -but the feeling had slunk away as quickly as it had arrived, and the ocean seemed utterly empty and the breeze too heavy.
Somehow, she knew the answer - if there was one - didn't lie in any distance. It was more about what she was doing there. As though something bigger was supposed to happen.
Now, with the witching hour's ambience making the world glitter and chime in the starlight, with the Mediterranean crouching at such a tempting distance, she couldn't resist it.
She tiptoed inside, grabbing a pair of sandals as she made for the front door.
The wet hit her like nothing else ever could. Cooling, satisfying, gorgeous. It sucked at her ankles like it was scanning her, sussing her out. Or welcoming her. Maybe both.
It gave nothing away though - only tugged her gaze towards the sharp line of moonlit sea against murky air. Her heartstrings twinged simultaneously.
Something was out there that was meant to be her's. Had been her's.
A long time ago, but not when she was young. The emotion was too fierce, too complicated and conflicted, to be a child's. She had been herself and not herself.
She was talking nonsense.
Suddenly she jumped, and nearly cried out, straining her eyes into the darkness, where a moment before they had only been resting lazily.
She couldn't have seen it - there were no boats like it on this coast. They were all glistening, sleek white, so modern.
But her gut told her it had been there, or at least a ghost of it. An old wooden ship with tattered black sails, cruising just on the edge of the white waters, far out where the unnamed pull of desire had guided her stare.
A black ship on a black horizon.
And it somehow made so much sense.
Spooked, she turned tail and fled all the way back up the beach and dived into her cool, light bed sheets.
But the image ran with her, and hovered above her like a night bird as she pulled the covers around herself. In the shadows of unwatched corners, it waited to enter her dreams as she surrendered herself to sleep.
