She meets him with a grin upon her face. The music in the wind is louder – it's calling for him., it wants him, he knows this, it's knitted up in his heart, and he catches Meg's hand, and pulls her away.

He can hear it clearer, now, as though the salt girl eclipses his father's blood.

He tugs her through the trees – he's running. He can hear it. Finally – finally he will find where it leads. It –

'Are we going to the willow?'

'What?' But now she's pulling him, and they race side by side, and the voice, the music, it is louder, it is frantic, it's singing with joy because he's almost there –

They come to a weeping willow tree beside a river. The music settles, stains the air ochre. Meg turns to grin at him.

From between the branches of the willow emerge a filthy dog, an old raccoon. There is no hummingbird – he remembers it when he was a boy. It must have died. They come to greet the girl and boy, and Meg smiles, and hands him a turquois carving.

'It's a dung beetle.' She grins.

They go swimming. It's Meg's idea – she's good at swimming, and she likes to show off. When they're out of the water, and she is picking daisies from the ground, she starts to speak.

'Tom?'

'Yes?'

'A week ago – I saw something. I – I think it might have been a ghost.'

He laughs at that.

'Superstitious nonsense.'

'Oh, shut up. I'm a sailor, we believe everything. But it was night – and I only say it because it was here, because I'd felt odd, as though something was calling to me, and it led me here, and I'd brought my violin – and it felt like a dream- and I played a song my father used to lullabye before I fell asleep – and a woman came out of the trees.

And she had straight black hair, and for a moment I thought it was my mother, even though she called me John, not Elizabeth – that was the name she gave me, Elizabeth.

But she didn't know me.

And her hands were bleeding, and her face was covered with tears, and she looked as through she was broken.

So I thought she must have been a ghost.'

There is a long, stretched silence. Then Thomas speaks.

'I think you were drunk.'

'You bastard!' Meg laughs, herself again, and grabs the scarab beetle up.

'I was going to give this to you as a gift – but I don't think you deserve it now!'

'What – aw, Meg, give it here!' She darts away from his fingers, giggling, leaps down from the willow and sprints into the forest. He runs after her.

A black head and a fair, racing through the trees.

The people who lived then are dead.

Only ghosts are left.

Eventually, Meg runs up a hill – to the edge – and he captures her just as she's about to dive off, tugging her to the ground, about to snatch the scarab and pinning her so she can't wiggle away.

Meg puts it in her mouth.

'That's absolutely disgusting.' He remarks as she chortles. Then she spits it out and watches him pick it up, grinning satisfaction at his grimace.

'I hate you.'

'My only love sprung from my only hate.'

She says it before she thinks. Then blushes, tries to laugh it away, stands, points out to the sea, visible from this waterfall of cliff. She stops.

There is a ship. She knows that ship – the colours on those sails. It's haunted her her whole life through. Dragged to it when she was twelve – the man who said he has her mother's husband – he'd touched her face, tried to have her locked away – but she shot the sailor in the mouth and ran.

Then in China, in the port the ship came and away they went.

Out on the sea, they'd lost them in a storm.

Now here. Now here.

And once before, when she was nine, when they had sailed beside the ship and the man has stroked back her hair and said he'd made her pay, had told her how he'd cut out her mother's eyes and made her beg, before he strangled her and stripped her naked and thrown her on the dung heap, left to the flies.

Who told her what he would do to her, child of her witchwhore mother, and even though her father fought them back, tried to kill the man with greedy eyes, made them flee, the words had lingered in her head, grown louder, made her shake with terror, brought on the faith bound leap into the ocean when she was ten, the frantic screaming, the scarlet brutalization, the nightmares, the fears, the drowning kind of panic, the fear, the fear always there-

She starts to scream. She starts to scream and kneels on the ground and screams louder, clawing at her face, at the young man who stops her, shaking and trembling and screaming and feeling the violet rush take her over, and swallow her up.