I Rang a Bell in an Abandoned Ticket Kiosk. Something Answered From the Bay.

I had never missed a bus in my life, and that's not because I'm punctual. I'd just never needed to catch one. I was thirty-seven, I lived in Surrey on a family trust, and I had never held a job. Cars came when I rang for them. Trains left when I got to the platform, or I took the next one and nobody minded. So when I say I stood at a bus stop in Pilios Milina and read the timetable three times, waiting for it to say something different, you should know I had no practice at this.

But I'm getting ahead. The fork came first.

It was the first evening of a week I'd planned around one job. Nikos's family had handed me a steel tin about the size of a big flask, and his aunt had told me, not unkindly, that it was enough for me. Everything else had gone to a cousin in Athens. The flat, the books, the boat share, even the terrible green armchair. I got the tin. Nikos had talked for years about a cove below the coast path, and I had a photo on my phone of a hand-drawn map he'd sent me once, mostly arrows and the word here. That was the plan. Walk the path, find the cove, do it properly.

The path split by a dead olive tree with a blue plastic bag caught in it. I went left because left looked more used. It was, but by goats. I found that out about forty minutes later when the track narrowed to a shelf of loose stone and dropped away on one side, and the sea I'd been walking beside was suddenly a long way under my boots. They were good boots. Expensive, and made for a dry weekend in the Cotswolds.

The light went fast. There wasn't a sunset, just the sky going from pewter to slate to nothing while I was still looking for a way back to the right fork. I gave up on the cove around then. I told myself tomorrow, in daylight, with a proper look at the map. I could hear myself saying it in Nikos's voice, the flat one he used on me. Tomorrow, Mel. Of course. Tomorrow.

The rain came in two stages. First it was a few fat drops on the back of my neck, and I actually thought, well, that's atmospheric. Then the wind swung round off the bay and the rain came sideways, hard enough to sting my ears. I unzipped my jacket, put the tin against my chest and zipped it back up over it, and held it there with both arms. The steel was cold through my shirt. I don't know why I cared so much that it stayed dry. It's ashes in a sealed tin. But I did.

I walked faster. Then I half ran, which on wet stone is stupid, and I went down on one knee and felt the cloth go and the skin go with it. I got up and kept going. Below me, finally, there were lights. Not many. A scatter of yellow along a curve of shore, and one white one that swung.

The path ended in concrete steps behind a row of buildings, and I came out onto the waterfront with water running out of my sleeves. The tavernas along the front all had shutters down. February. I'd read that on the plane and hadn't understood it. The season was something that happened to other people.

The bus stop was easy to find, a glass shelter with one cracked panel and a timetable in a metal frame. I went in and took my phone out. It was six fifty-one, and the battery said eleven percent. The timetable was in Greek and English, mercifully. Volos, weekdays, last departure five forty. There was a smaller line under it that said it didn't run at all on Sundays. It was Tuesday.

I read it again. I checked my watch against my phone, which was pointless, since they agreed. An hour and eleven minutes. I'd like to say I was calm about it. What I actually did was say "Oh, come on" out loud to nobody, in the voice of a man returning a soup.

My room was in Volos, a nice little place with a balcony that I'd booked for the week. Taxi, then. I found the number for one on the shelter wall, scratched into the paint next to someone's initials, and rang it. It rang once and cut out. I tried again. Same. The signal bar was one tick, and it came and went as the wind moved.

I walked to the end of the front where the road left the village, because if anyone was going to drive me anywhere, it would be along there. It took me maybe six minutes. The road climbed in a bend between two stone walls, and around the bend there was an orange plastic barrier tipped on its side and a length of red-and-white tape whipping about on one post. Past that, the road was gone.

Not damaged. Gone. A whole slope of the hillside had come down across it, brown and wet and shining under the light of a phone I held up with a hand that wasn't quite steady. There were rocks in it the size of washing machines and a small tree lying on its side with its roots in the air. Water ran through the whole mess in a dozen little streams. Somewhere in it, I supposed, was the bus. Not in it. Ahead of it, I mean, or beyond it, on the far side. Whatever had left at five forty had got out just before.

I stood at the edge of the tape and listened. No engine, no voices, no digger. Just water going down the slope and the rain hitting the mud.

Nobody was coming for hours, and probably not till morning. I had a dying phone, a torn knee, wet socks, and a dead man's ashes zipped against my ribs. The tin had warmed up a little. I put my hand flat over it through the jacket, and I remember thinking that this was the sort of thing Nikos would have found very funny. Then I turned around and walked back toward the harbour, because there was nowhere else to go.

The waterfront was maybe three hundred yards of it, and I walked all of it slowly, reading doors. Every taverna had its shutters down and padlocked, and one had a chair chained to a drainpipe. A menu was still taped inside the glass of the second one, grilled octopus, something with lemon, prices in euros. I stood and read it anyway. A fridge motor was running somewhere behind a wall, so somebody paid the electric, but nobody was home. I tried a handle on a shop with a faded ice cream sign. Locked. I knocked on a door with a light over it and waited, and the rain ran down my collar and I heard my own knock go through an empty room.

At the far end the front turned into a stone mole that ran out into the bay. There was one sodium lamp on a bent pole over it. The wind was swinging it on its bracket, so the orange light slid over the wet stone and back again, and the shadows of the bollards went sliding with it. Under the lamp was a whitewashed concrete hut with a tin awning, the kind of place you'd buy a ferry ticket in July. There was a hatch with a roll-down shutter, closed, and a door beside it.

I tried the door because I try doors. It opened.

Inside it was black and dry, and dry was all I wanted. I pulled the door mostly shut behind me and stood dripping on the floor while my eyes sorted out shapes. It smelled of salt and damp cardboard and old diesel, the way a boat shed does. My phone light showed a plywood counter with a hatch behind it, a stool with a split seat, and a wall calendar from some year I didn't catch, stuck on a page of a girl on a beach. Nothing else. No heater. But no wind either, and the rain went from a roar to a drumming on the tin.

On the counter, in the middle, there was a bell.

A ship's bell, brass, about the size of a man's head, hung from a bracket screwed into the counter's edge. The rope on it was frayed to a brush at the end. Somebody had polished it, though, and not long ago. Everything else in the hut was grey with dust and the bell was the colour of a new coin. A cardboard tag was tied to the rope with string. Marker pen, block capitals, English, and under it a line of Greek I couldn't read.

RING ONCE FOR THE BOAT.

I read it twice. My first thought was that it was a joke for tourists, the sort of thing a ticket clerk does in August when the queue is long. My second was that there was no boat. It was February, the last bus had gone, and there was a landslide across the only road. Nothing was sailing out of this harbour tonight, or tomorrow, likely.

I sat down on the stool and it creaked. I took my boots off one at a time and poured water out of the left one. I checked the phone. Nine percent, one bar, and the taxi number still going nowhere. I put it in my pocket to save it. The tin was still zipped inside my jacket. I took it out and set it on the counter beside the bell, and then I didn't like it there, so I put it back against my chest.

That left me with nothing to do for a long time, and I'm not good at that. I've never had to be. My hand went out. I remember watching it do it. I touched the rim of the bell, cold and slick with the damp, and then I took hold of the rope, just above the frayed part, and I thought, well, it says once.

I rang it once.

It's a good bell. The note went out the door and across the water, one clean stroke, and for a second I was pleased with myself, and then embarrassed, sitting alone in a hut in the dark with one boot off, ringing for a boat.

Then, a long way out, something answered.

It was an engine. Low, slow, and not near. It carried in under the rain, so steady I felt it in the stool before I was sure I heard it. It didn't rise or fall. I've been on ferries, the big white ones with the ramps, and they have a clatter to them, a busy note. This wasn't that. This was a single engine turning over at its own pace, in no hurry, and I had the definite idea that it had all the time there was.

I laughed. It came out short and stupid. "Well, that's efficient," I said, to nobody. I wanted it to be a fishing boat, some old man coming in late, and I told myself that was exactly what it was. I bent for my boot.

The laugh stopped on its own. Something had changed in the window and I hadn't decided to look at it yet. I looked.

The hut had a small square window beside the hatch, and through it I could see the mole under the swinging lamp, the wet stone, the bollards. When I'd walked out along it there had been nothing on the harbour wall, not a bin or a crate or a cat. Now there was a man.

He stood at the edge, facing the water, with his back to me. Dark clothes, heavy and shapeless, and the lamp slid across him and away and back, and each time it touched him he was shining wet. Water ran off his sleeves. He had no umbrella, no hood, and he didn't hunch against the wind the way everyone does. He just stood there with his arms at his sides, looking out at wherever the engine was.

I didn't call to him. I want to say I thought of it, but I didn't. I got up off the stool with one boot on, went to the door, and pushed it shut. There was a bolt at the top and I slid it. It was thin and rusted and wouldn't have kept out a child, and I was glad of it anyway.

Then I sat down on the floor with my back against the counter, where the window couldn't see me and I couldn't see it. I took the tin out of my jacket and held it in my lap with both hands. It had lost the warmth it had picked up on the walk. The engine kept on out there. I counted a few of its beats without meaning to.

Nikos used to say it about me. We were at his flat, and I had picked up a carved wooden dish from his shelf and put it in my coat pocket, without noticing, on my way out to the door. He caught me at the top of the stairs and held out his hand. He wasn't cross. He just looked at me for a bit.

"You know why you do that?" he said. "You touch things because nobody ever made you pay for them."

I laughed and gave the dish back. I remember thinking it was a rather good line.

I sat on the concrete with his ashes in my lap and the bolt shot on the door, and I didn't look at the window.

I must have slept, because when I lifted my head my neck hurt and the window had changed. It wasn't light. It was the first grey hint of nothing, where you can tell the dark has thinned but can't say by how much. The rain had eased to something fine that hung in the air. The engine hadn't stopped once.

My legs were stiff. I got up using the counter and stood by the window, and I made myself look.

There was a rope on the mole. It hadn't been there when I walked out, and it hadn't been there when I bolted the door. It was wrist-thick and black with water, coiled in loops on the stone below the lamp, and even through the shut door I could smell it, weed and something under the weed, low tide gone bad. Beyond it, on the harbour wall, two people stood side by side facing the bay. The man from before, and another. Shorter. I couldn't tell you if it was a woman. The clothes were as heavy as his.

I watched them for a while and neither one moved, and it came to me all at once, the way a wrong answer does when you're sure of it. The tag hadn't said ring for a boat. It said ring once for the boat. Someone had polished that bell. Someone had left it for people like me to find. It was a summons, and I'd answered it, and now the drowned were standing on the wall waiting for their old ferry to come in. I'd called them. So the thing to do was undo it.

I knew how that sounded. I thought it anyway.

The bell came off its bracket easier than I expected, just a lift and a slide. It was heavier than it looked, fifteen pounds or so, and cold enough that my palms stung. I pushed the tin further down inside my jacket, zipped it to the chin, and took the bell in both arms against my stomach with the rope hanging down. I drew the bolt. It squealed.

Outside the wind had gone round to the bay and it came straight at me. The smell was worse in the open. I kept my eyes on the mole and not on the wall, and I walked, because if I ran I'd have to admit why. The rope lay coiled to my left. I stepped wide of it. My boots were still full of that morning's water and squelched with every step.

The mole was a lot longer going out than it had been coming in. The two of them were on my right, close enough that I could have touched the nearer one, and I could hear water dripping off him onto the stone. It was steady and regular. I heard it and I kept going. Neither of them turned. I don't know what I'd have done if they had.

At the end there was a last bollard and then nothing, just black water slapping the stone a few feet down. The engine sounded closer here, or I was just closer to the place where I'd started noticing it. I planted my feet.

"Take it," I said. My voice came out thin and English and stupid. "Go on. I didn't mean it."

I swung the bell back against my hip and heaved it out with everything I had, and let go of the rope at the last second so it wouldn't take my fingers with it. It went out over the edge in a short flat arc, turning once. The splash was small. That was what I noticed, how small. It made hardly more noise than a dropped shoe, and then the water closed and the wind went on as if there'd been nothing to say about it.

I waited for the engine to change. Slow, stop, anything.

It didn't. Same low note, same patience, same beat I'd been counting for hours without meaning to.

My heart was going so hard I could feel it in my teeth. I turned around. The two of them were exactly where they'd been, and I had to walk back past them, and I did it with my hands hanging empty and my shoulders up around my ears. Nobody stopped me. The rope was still coiled on the stone, and I gave it a wider berth this time.

The kiosk door was open. I hadn't shut it. I'd gone out and left it standing, and I remember being annoyed at that, at myself, a stupid little household annoyance in the middle of everything.

The bell was on the counter.

It sat on its bracket, upright, with the rope trailing over the counter's edge in the same gentle curve as before. I put my hand on it because I couldn't stop myself. It was dry. Not damp, not cold from the bay. Dry, and a bit warm, as if it had been sitting in the sun. The tag hung from the rope by its string, RING ONCE FOR THE BOAT, and the marker hadn't run.

I backed out into the doorway. I don't remember deciding to.

There were three of them on the wall now. The man, the shorter one, and a third a little apart, tall, his shoulders slumped forward. They stood in a row facing the water with their arms hanging, and the lamp swung its orange light across them and away and back. It hadn't taken any time at all. I'd been to the end of the mole and back, and I'd have sworn I hadn't taken my eyes off the place where they stood, and there were three.

I stood in the doorway with my hand still open from touching the bell. I'd thrown it as far as I could throw it. It was on the bottom of the bay, and it was also on the counter behind me, and neither of those was going to change because I wanted them to.

I did what a sensible man does, which is try the sensible thing first.

The bell was fifteen pounds and I'd already thrown it into the sea, so I didn't have much faith in distance. But a hole is different. I picked it up off the counter by the bracket end, not the rope, and carried it up the row of tavernas with my head down. Behind the third one there was a yard with a stack of old fish crates that had come down in the wind, wooden ones, grey and slimy, split at the corners. I put the bell on the concrete and started dragging them over it. The wood was wet and it splintered in my hands. One long strip went into the meat of my thumb and I didn't feel it until later. My fingers had stopped taking instructions some time before, so I did most of it with my forearms. Eleven crates, maybe twelve. When I finished you couldn't see brass anywhere, just a heap of rubbish that looked like it had always been there.

I walked back down the front with my hands tucked under my arms. I didn't run. I told myself I wasn't going to look at the wall until I was at the door.

I looked at the wall.

Four.

A fourth had come in at the far end, small and narrow through the shoulders, and it stood a little turned in, as though it had been nudged. I went in past all of them and the bell was on the counter. Dry. The rope curved over the edge the way it always did. There was no dirt on it, no slime from the crates, not a mark. I said "Right," out loud, like someone agreeing to a bill.

So I tried leaving it. Nothing in the tag said I had to keep it in the hut. I took it out to the mole and set it down on the stone about halfway, in the open, in the rain, well clear of the coiled rope. I stood over it for a second and then I went back, walking backwards for the first ten steps so I could watch it. It sat there getting rained on. The lamp swung over it and off. I got to the kiosk door, reached behind me to steady myself on the frame, and turned my head to check the wall, and I had to do the counting twice before I trusted it.

Five.

I didn't go and look at the mole. I didn't need to. I went into the kiosk anyway, because I had to know, and the bell was on its bracket with the tag hanging off the rope. I didn't touch it that time.

I went back to the doorway and stayed there. I meant to shut the door. I meant to bolt it and sit on the floor with my back to the counter like I had the night before, and I couldn't. I stood with one hand on the frame and watched them.

They stood shoulder to shoulder now, all five, facing the bay with their arms down. Up close in the grey I could see their clothes properly. They were stiff. White crust had dried along the seams and across the shoulders and down the backs of the trousers, the way a jumper looks when you've washed it in seawater and hung it out. Water still ran off them, sleeves and hems, steady, and I kept waiting for it to gather under their feet. It didn't. The stone under them was as wet as the rest of the mole and no wetter. The lamp went across them and I watched the wet on the man's coat shine, and go dark, and shine.

I tried to make myself stop. I looked at my own boots. Then I was looking at the wall again, and I hadn't decided to. It was the way you keep looking at a wasp in the room. If you look away, you don't know where it is.

The engine was still going. It hadn't changed once in all that time, whatever I did with the bell, and I'd started to think of it as the weather. Then I noticed there was something under it.

It was low, lower than the engine, and it came in slow. A long pull, and a wait, and a long push back out. Wet at the end of it. It wasn't coming from the wall. It was further out than the wall, in the dark past the last bollard, and it was much bigger than anything with a chest ought to be. I listened for it to break rhythm and it didn't. In, wait, out. Three of them, and I found I was breathing in time, and I stopped that so fast I coughed.

I backed away from the door. I took a step and a step, and the stool caught the back of my knee and I sidestepped it. The tin was in my jacket, against my ribs, where it had been since the path. My hands were shaking so badly by then that the zip had come down a few inches without my noticing. I felt the steel slide, felt it go past my belt, and I grabbed for it and got the edge of my jacket instead.

It hit the concrete and rang.

Not loud. It was a dull round note, and it rolled. I heard it go across the floor in the dark part by the counter, and I heard it stop. I got down on my knees and started sweeping the floor with both hands, flat, fingers spread, the wet concrete gritty under my palms. I found a cardboard corner. I found the leg of the stool. I said, "Nik, Nik, come on," which was ridiculous, and I kept sweeping, and I did not look up at the window.

The light reached the tin before I did. A white oblong slid in through the open door, over the concrete and up the base of the counter, and there it was on its side against the plywood, six inches from where my hand had just been. I grabbed it. I knelt there with it against my chest and my heart going.

Then I heard boots outside, and the squeak of rubber on rubber, and somebody coughing. The beam swung off the floor and away. It was moving along the fronts of the tavernas, stopping at each door.

I got up and went to the doorway. I didn't care what it was. If it was a person, it was a person.

He was at the taverna with the chair chained to the drainpipe. He was short, stooped, and wiry, in a long rubber coat that shone under his torch, with white stubble on his face and a woollen cap pulled low. Someone had nailed sheets of plywood over the front windows, and he was pressing each corner with the flat of his hand, checking the nails. A caretaker, I thought. Somebody paid him to walk about in this.

"Hello," I called. It came out thin. "Excuse me. Hello?"

He turned and put the beam in my face. I put my hand up and he lowered it at once, and I saw him take me in, a wet foreigner in a kiosk doorway at that hour. He said nothing. I pointed past my own shoulder, not really deciding to, and he followed my arm with the torch.

The light went out along the mole and found the wall. Five of them, shoulder to shoulder, facing the bay. The beam took the white crust along the seams of their coats and the water running off their sleeves, and it held there. He didn't swing it away. He stood with the torch out in front of him and his mouth a little open.

Then he crossed himself. Forehead, chest, one shoulder, the other, slowly, the way you do a thing you've done since you were small. His lips were moving.

I nearly cried, and it was relief. He could see them. I hadn't lost it, and I wasn't the only one standing there with it. And straight after the relief came something worse, which was that I wanted him to have it. I wanted someone else to hold it for a minute.

I went back in. The bell was on its bracket with the tag hanging and the rope curved over the counter edge, dry. I lifted it off by the bracket end. It was as cold as ever and weighed the same. I came back out, and I didn't think, I'll say that plainly. I walked up to him and pushed it into his hands.

He took it. Anyone would. If you push something heavy at a person's chest, their arms come up. I said, "Please. The sea. Take it out there. Please." And I pointed at the end of the mole, at the water, jabbing my finger like a man asking for the toilet in a language he hasn't got.

He looked at the bell. Not at me. He looked at it for a good while, and the torch went under his arm, pointing along the ground.

Then he walked.

I hadn't asked him to go that far. I hadn't asked anything of him, really. He went down onto the mole with the bell out in front of him in both hands, keeping it level, and the torch beam bobbed ahead of him on the stone. He stepped wide of the coiled rope on the left, just as I had. He passed the lamp. He passed the wall, and the five of them didn't turn, and he didn't look at them.

I followed as far as the first bollard. My arms were empty and light and I hated how good that felt.

Halfway along, the torch slipped out from under his arm. It hit the stone and rolled and stopped with the beam pointing at the water. He didn't bend for it. He'd been walking with his shoulders up round his ears, and I watched them come down. His head lifted. In the orange of the lamp going over him I saw his face, and it had gone slack and mild, the face of a man who's just been told something pleasant.

He took the bell by the rope, swung it back, and rang it.

It was the wrong sound. Mine had gone out over the water clean. This one was flat and wet and stayed low, close to the stone, a note with no room in it. He rang it again. And again, evenly, without hurry.

"Hey!" I said. Then louder. "Hey! Stop that! Sir!"

He kept walking. The ringing kept time with his feet. I went out past the bollard, past the lamp, six steps, seven, and the rope was there on my left, black and reeking, and I stopped. I couldn't make myself go by it.

"Stop! Put it down! I'm sorry, just put it down!"

The engine hadn't changed. It didn't answer him or me. The old man was thirty feet off and I don't think he heard one word. He rang and walked, and the ringing came back to me flat off the water.

The five turned. All of them, together, with no sound of boots or cloth. They faced him, and their arms came out from their sides and opened, palms forward, wide enough to take a person in. Water ran off their hands and never reached the stone.

He didn't slow. He went straight past them, into the space between, and on to the last bollard, and the last of the mole, and he stepped off the end still ringing.

There was hardly a splash. The torch lay where it had fallen with its beam on the black water, and the note kept coming, muffled now, from below. It went on, flat and steady and wet, and I felt it in the soles of my boots.

His name was Stavros. I found that out later.

The thing I'd been getting wrong came to me all at once, standing on the mole with my hands empty.

Nobody on that wall had ever looked at me. Not when I rang it, not when I carried it past them in my arms, not when I threw it. They faced the bay the whole time. They only turned when a man walked out holding it, and then they opened up for him. They weren't waiting on an old ferry. I hadn't called anybody. The bell had been sitting on that counter keeping something shut, and I'd rung it and lifted it and thrown it and pushed it into a stranger's hands, and every time I did something the lid came up a bit more.

It wasn't a bell you rang. It was a rope, and there was somebody on the end of it, and whoever held the bell was the one being pulled.

I'd put it in his hands. He said nothing, he looked at me, and I said please.

I ran. Not the way I'd walked out. I went past the lamp and the bollard and the wall with my eyes on the kiosk door, and I did not look at the five, though I felt them there, still turned toward the end of the mole. The note under the water followed me the whole way. It came up through my boots.

The door was open. I got in and shut it and shot the bolt, and the bolt didn't matter and I shot it anyway.

The bell was on the counter.

I'd stopped being surprised by that, but not by the rest. The rope was hanging over the edge of the plywood and it was running with water. Every other time it had come back dry and faintly warm. Now it was cold and wet, and a thin stream ran off the frayed end and pattered on the concrete, and there was a dark patch spreading under it. He was still ringing it. He'd taken it to the bottom with him and it was here anyway, and I could feel the flat note out in the bay all the same.

I went to the far wall, as far from the counter as the hut allowed, and put my back against the concrete. I slid down it. I tucked my hands into my armpits because they were shaking and because I didn't want them anywhere near anything.

The tin was still in my jacket. I got it out with my left hand and put it in my lap and held it against my stomach. It was cold and it was the only thing in the room that was mine.

That's when my right arm moved.

Not much. The elbow came away from my ribs an inch. I looked at it and pushed it back with my other hand, and it stayed a minute, and then it drifted again, out and forward, toward the counter. My fingers started to curl. Slowly, all four, the way a hand closes around a rail.

"No," I said. It came out very small.

I pressed the wrist against my knee. I sat on it. I got it under my thigh and leaned my weight over, and the whole arm worked against me, steady and patient, and it didn't hurt. That was the worst of it. It wasn't fighting me. It just wanted to go, and it had all night.

The tin slid off my lap. I'd let go to hold the arm down. It hit the floor and rang, a proper round note, and rolled a foot and lay there. I didn't reach for it. I thought of Nikos in the flat with his hand held out at the top of the stairs, and I thought, he'd never have done this. He'd never have touched it.

Then the window went pale.

It was at the edge first, a grey smear along the bottom of the glass, and then the whole pane. The engine dropped. It had been in my teeth for hours and now it thinned out to a murmur, a low thing far off, and I felt something in my chest give way. I was crying before I knew it. I put my face against my knees and sobbed, out loud, ugly, with my arm still trying to leave me.

Morning. It had to be. It was over, they'd go with the dark, someone would come with a digger, and I'd have to say something to somebody about the old man, and I'd think of what.

I raised my head and looked at the window.

It wasn't morning. Morning doesn't sweep. The light went across the glass from left to right, white, without a flicker, and stopped, and came back. It had edges. It had a source, low and out on the water, and behind it a hull so much darker than the bay that I could see only where the light stopped. No mast lamp. No red or green. Nothing on it showing at all.

It went over the window again, slow, looking.

The light stopped on the window and stayed. Then the engine stopped.

I'd been listening to it for so long I didn't understand what had changed. My ears rang with it being gone. There was the rain, thin now, and water dripping off the bell rope onto the concrete, and my own breathing. Nothing came off the bay at all.

My arm went.

It didn't jerk. It pulled free of my thigh, and the weight I'd put on it was nothing. My shoulder came up off the wall and the rest of me followed, because there was no other way to go. I got the left hand down and snatched the tin off the floor as I was hauled past it. I shoved it in my jacket and it banged against my ribs. That's all I did. It's the only choice I remember making.

The counter came at me. My right hand went out, opened, and shut on the rope just above the frayed end. It was cold and wet, and it felt as if it had been waiting for me. I pulled. I put everything into opening my fingers, and they didn't hear me. They tightened. The other hand came up and I tried to pry them off one at a time, and I couldn't move a single one.

"Let go," I said. "Let go. Let go."

The bell came off its bracket in my right hand. I didn't lift it. My arm did, easily, all fifteen pounds, and it hung against my thigh, knocking and dripping. The tag flapped on its string.

The door was bolted. My arm didn't care. The hand kept the rope and used the heel of the palm and the side of the thumb, and the bolt squealed back. The door swung in. Cold air and the smell of weed came in with the light, and I saw the mole.

The lamp was out. The white beam had it all, every bollard, the wet stone, the coiled rope, the wall. The five were still on the wall, but they'd turned, and while I watched they stepped apart, three to the left and two to the right, until there was a gap down the middle. It was neat, and it was for me. The salt on their coats was bright in the light, and their faces were pale and slack, and none of them looked at me.

My feet moved. I didn't tell them to.

Past the gap the mole ran out, and past the last bollard was the light, and behind the light was the boat. I couldn't see its hull. I could see where the light ended and something else began, higher than the mole and higher than the kiosk roof, and it was leaning. That's the only word I have. It leaned toward the shore on the far side of the glare, and it was cold. I felt it on my face from forty yards. It wasn't a person. It didn't have to be told anything. It was waiting for the bell.

My right arm rose, elbow first. The bell started to swing back, the way Stavros had swung it. I felt the rope take up the slack.

Ring once. I'd done that. I'd rung it once, in a dry hut with one boot off, to be funny.

I got a foot against the sill. It wasn't much, but for a second my legs were mine. I thought about Nikos at the top of the stairs with his hand out, not angry, just waiting for me to give the dish back. I thought, he'd have said this was the bill. And I thought, well, all right.

I dropped.

I went straight down onto my knees in the doorway. The weight of me pulled the arm with it, and the arm fought me the whole way, and it lost, because I was heavier than the arm. I threw my right hand flat on the threshold, palm down, the rope crushed under it. The steel edge of the sill was cold and gritty. My fingers spread. They wanted to close, and there was stone under them.

The door was on my left, standing open against the wall. It was iron, painted white once, and it had never been shut gently. I got my left hand around the edge of it.

"Sorry," I said. I don't know who to.

I swung it.

It didn't feel like pain at first. It felt like a sound, a flat bang, and then a white place where everything was gone, the light and the wall and the kiosk and my own name. Then it was pain, and I heard someone screaming and it was me. I felt the fingers give. I felt each one go, and I can still count them.

The rope slid out from under my hand like a thing that had been let off. The bell dropped. It hit the concrete once behind me, a dull knock, short and dead, with no ring after it, no echo, nothing coming back off the walls.

The light went out.

It didn't fade. One second it was on the door and the next there was plain dark, and the smell of weed and cold going back out over the water. I hung there on my knees with my hand in the door. I couldn't have moved it if I'd wanted to.

I listened for the engine. It didn't start.

I got my hand out of the door around the time the window went grey. I don't remember deciding to. The door had swung back a few inches on its own, and my hand came away with it, and I made a noise and then didn't make any more.

Real dawn was ordinary. That's what I remember most. Grey sky, flat grey bay, a bit of drizzle that wouldn't commit to being rain. A gull was walking along the top of the harbour wall, looking for something, and there was nothing else on it.

I crawled out of the kiosk on my knees and my left hand, with the right held against my chest. My fingers had gone the wrong colour and the wrong shapes. Two of them pointed off sideways. I didn't look long.

The wall was empty. No one at the edge, no wet on the stone, no smell of weed. I looked for the rope on the mole below the lamp, the black coil I'd walked around all night, and there was only wet concrete and a bollard. The sodium lamp had gone off at some point and hung there, swinging a little for nobody.

I went back and looked inside the kiosk, from the doorway. The bracket on the counter edge had two screw holes and nothing hanging from it. No bell, no rope, no tag. The floor by the door was dry. I stood there holding my hand and waited for something to come back, and nothing did.

Stavros's torch was out on the mole, where it had rolled. The lens was cracked across. I walked out to it, slowly, and I didn't step wide of anything, because there wasn't anything. I picked it up with my left hand and clicked the switch. It worked. I turned it off again and stood at the end of the mole with the black water three feet below me, calm as a bath, and looked at it for a while. Then I put the torch on the top of the last bollard, where somebody would find it. I don't know why that felt like the right place. It was all I had.

I had the tin. It was on the floor of the kiosk where I'd dropped it. I picked it up with my good hand and put it inside my jacket again, and the zip took me three tries.

The digger came at about eleven. I heard it before I saw it, a proper diesel grumble, ordinary, with a reversing beep. I sat on the bus shelter bench with my hand in my lap and watched two men in orange council jackets go past on the front in a pickup. One of them looked at me and lifted his chin, and I lifted mine. I'd expected questions. He didn't have any. A wet foreigner on a bench in February, with his hand wrapped in his own scarf.

Nobody asked about Stavros. Nobody had missed him yet, or if they had, they hadn't come down to the front. I had the whole speech ready for a while, the one I'd drafted on the kiosk floor. There was an old man, he took something out to the end of the mole. It was true, and it was no use to anyone. What would the police have done with it? They'd have looked at me and at my hand. And I'd have had to say who put it in his hands. So I sat on the bench and said nothing, and the silence went on getting easier every hour, and I'm not proud of that. His name was Stavros. I learned that afterwards. I never told anyone how he got it.

Before the road was open, while the digger was still working, I walked out onto the mole again. I'd told Nikos's aunt I would do this properly. The cove was somewhere up the coast path, past a fork with a blue bag in a dead tree, and I couldn't have got my hand up that slope if I'd tried. I had my phone, at four percent, and the photo of his map, all arrows and the word here. It said here on it a lot. It would do.

I stood at the end of the mole beside the bollard, with the torch still sitting on top of it, and took the tin out. It was cold, the way it always was. I held it in my left hand against my hip and worked the lid with my thumb. It stuck, and then it gave. I hadn't looked inside it once in all the days I'd carried it, and I didn't now. I tipped it out.

The wind took most of it. Some fell on the water in a grey skin and sat there a moment, and some blew back against my trousers, and I didn't brush it off.

"Sorry it's not the cove," I said. "It's the wrong end of the bay. You'd have laughed."

Nikos never made me pay for anything while he was alive. Everyone else who knew me was the same. I think about that more than I think about the rest. He was the only one who ever held out his hand, and I gave him the dish back, and I thought it was a good line.

I stood there till the tin was empty. Then I screwed the lid back on with my thumb and kept the tin, because I couldn't think what else to do with it.

The bus came at ten past one, the first one through. The driver looked at my hand and said something in Greek and pointed at his own chest, and I nodded. I sat at the back. The road went round the bend where the tape had been, and there was a raw brown wound in the hill and a flattened barrier. I watched the harbour get small in the window and didn't look for the wall.

In Volos a young doctor set the fingers in a small room that smelled of iodine. She asked how it happened, and I said I'd caught it in a door. She looked at me, and then at the X-ray. Two of the bones had shattered, and she didn't think they'd knit right. She was correct. I have the right hand still, but it doesn't close. It sits on the table like a glove somebody left.

I never learned what the bell held. I looked, afterwards, the way you would. I looked up the harbour and its ferries and the drowned and the people who'd polished things. I found a summer timetable and a photograph of the kiosk with a woman in a sun hat in front of it. There was no bell in the picture. I don't know why it wanted my hand, or why it was my hand it took hold of when there had been a whole old man before me. I've got nothing on that. I just know I put it in his hands and mine were next.

I don't ring things. Doorbells, the bell on a shop counter, the little brass one at a hotel desk. I knock, or I wait, or I go away. Someone at my sister's put a bicycle bell in my hand once, as a joke, and I put it back down and went outside for a while.

And the engine hasn't stopped. It's low, and it's in no hurry. I hear it when the house is quiet, under the fridge and the pipes and the rain on the glass, patient, a long way out. I don't get up and look. I know which way the water is.