Isla’s mother was the last person to leave after the tide took the first home. Her neighbours had retreated one by one from Spurnsea until Cathy faced the sea alone, clinging limpet-like to the crumbling coastline. When the local news visited “The Last Resident of Spurnsea Odde”, Isla saw the cliffhung village she grew up in on television, her mother standing windblown in front of it, sermonising on rising tides and carbon emissions with a stubbornness Isla inherited, something Anya reminded her of as they watched the broadcast.

It’s one of the few comparisons anyone has made between Isla and her mother. Always whimsical where Isla was practical, impulsive where Isla preferred routine and careful thought. When Isla moved into university halls, Cathy uprooted herself to bounce between continents and return with stories of riding horses in Spain, hiking the Rockies alone, walking, drenched, through mountainous clouds.

When she settled again, it was back on the eroding elbow of coastline she anchored herself to in her retirement; grew more attached to as the coast advanced, pouring herself into Skelford’s preservation as the tide sucked it away like a boiled sweet—into the museum Isla wanders through now, switching on the lights in Cathy’s cottage.

The project—a vast, eclectic collection of Skelford’s artefacts and ephemera that took up Cathy’s office before spilling throughout the rest of the house—consumed Cathy in her later years. It became an act of protest, with her steadfast refusal to uproot herself, her ceaseless letters and petitions, her lecturer voice returning as she described her museum to the news reporter as a kind of anticipatory folklore.

She spoke with a passion and clarity that’s never reached Isla. A semiotician’s tongue. Not the remote, administrative language of death: words like testator and devise and bequeath. Her mother’s will devised her sinking cottage to Isla and bequeathed her its contents with none of her verbiage, no sentiment.

Isla never inherited her way with words; prefers to keep them to herself until she can arrange them. Anya’s one of the handful who gives her time before filling the silence, though lately Isla can only offer the type of vague, reassuring platitudes she’s tired of hearing. She finds herself adopting the same detached language she uses at work.

Surface thoughts, Anya calls them. Verbal shrugs.

It’s easier to remove herself than feel it in its entirety. To attribute her loss to some anonymous caller. Easier to drive to her mother’s cottage after work and stand in the living room, the chamomile scent of her hanging in the curtains, then to go home and explain to Anya that she’s afraid of leaving the doors open too long here. Forgetting the smell.

Or the sense, clearing away a mug that leaves a ring on the kitchen table, of Cathy having only stepped away for a moment.

Cathy had an icebreaker she used with her first years: an exercise to get them thinking about the nature of language. Her students were asked to communicate the danger of excavating nuclear waste to people living millennia in the future. Its deadly half-life, Cathy explained, might outlast language, if not humanity. Their task was to think beyond translation. To shed language. To communicate that—and here, Isla imagines Cathy might have flicked to a slide with the aggressive words, but when she spoke about it with Isla at the kitchen table, she pulled up the text on her phone—

THIS PLACE IS A MESSAGE AND PART OF A SYSTEM OF MESSAGES.
THIS PLACE IS NOT A PLACE OF HONOUR.
NOTHING VALUED IS HERE.
WHAT IS HERE WAS DANGEROUS AND REPULSIVE TO US.

Cathy waxed lyrical to Isla after these lectures, about nuclear religion and atomic priesthoods, colour-changing plants and glowing ray-cats, and how these would need to be encoded in myth, fairy tale, poetry, writing, and art to survive. She enjoyed listening to Cathy pontificate the same way she likes hearing Anya speak about her art, inhabiting, for a moment, a world of brushstrokes and layers and hidden meaning. The kind of abstractions and shades of grey Isla shrinks from.

Logic would have had Isla answer the solicitor’s call this morning rather than letting her phone buzz, face down, as she’s done for the past fortnight. Instead, she clammed up at Anya’s tentative suggestion that she answer the call, drove to work, and then came here as if to confront the cottage.

Answering would mean signing the cottage away to the state, a further swell of legalities and mind-numbing bureaucracy, dismantling her mother’s museum piece by piece and figuring out what to do with it once it’s in boxes. Their cramped flat already overflows with their combined accumulation of hand-me-downs, Anya’s art, and the wealth of books between them. The furniture waiting, like them, for a bigger space.

Isla understands enough of her mother and her idiom of signs and symbols to know that the museum’s contents aren’t “just stuff” as Cathy was told, in as many words, by the heritage museums and local library she petitioned before taking it upon herself to preserve Skelford’s memory. That the museum was her last attempt to save a sinking, shrinking island and everything beyond it. To leave some trace of herself, some fingerprint Isla can only see herself smudging.

She washes the used mug with Cathy’s floral dish soap, puts it away in the cupboard next to her own. She has a text from Anya asking after her. No way of parsing what’s on her mind into sentences.

If grief has a half-life, then Isla’s is nuclear and will live beyond her, beyond language.

She responds to Anya’s message, anyway, hoping the outstretched hand will be enough.

At mum’s. Join me?

Isla draws the front room curtains, turning the sofa cushions to small pats of butter.

Everything in this house is turning yellow, Cathy had said the last time Isla visited. The books, the cloths in the drawers. Even I’m starting to yellow at the edges.

It was the kind of statement she’d become prone to as she aged, fixating on the minor details, the minutia of life. Isla imagined her settling on the next inconsequential thing, small as a frayed string, and pulling until it unravelled: the yellowing tablecloths and wonky bird feeders, the clutter of her museum that has spilled from her office onto the shelves and surfaces of the spare room—Isla’s childhood bedroom—where she leaves Anya sleeping.

Anya arrived, after Isla’s message, with an overnight bag and a boot full of flat-packed boxes she didn’t allude to, nor did she mention that Isla hasn’t visited the cottage, since…

Cathy’s efforts to record everything had taken on a frantic edge as her thoughts grew scattered, catalysed by a recurring dream that her cottage was flooding. In the dream, she had to keep moving the furniture upstairs, one piece at a time, as the waters rose. Sometimes there were no stairs. At the time, she’d been possessed by combing through the historical tomes lining her shelves for mentions of the long spit of land that once projected from the headland: a long-sunken part of Spurnsea she felt held clues for today, for the future, like nuclear warnings encoded in time.

Isla retrieves the boxes. Builds a small mountain of cardboard in the office corner until she can delay the task of deconstructing it no longer.

Cathy’s notes are neat despite her rare bouts of lucidity, unpredictable as the coast’s erosion. Isla pictures her sitting at her desk in those moments, cataloguing each artefact in her looping script. She’s created an inventory in a bound journal of the museum’s items, which Isla flicks through. The index is in two parts, one listing the items lining the office shelves and the surfaces of the cottage, another of immaterial artefacts—recipes and customs, sayings, fishermen’s superstitions and wives’ tales, playground rhymes and rituals.

Isla flicks to a page detailing cures for warts and whooping cough; a ritual for finding a future love and for undoing a spell of bad luck at sea; recipes for pepper cake and caudle and witch cake—a note attaching the latter to a pale, star-shaped fossil of cake hanging from the office door. For protection from witches, Cathy has written under the recipe she must have followed herself, given the star’s singed edges.

The meticulous index streamlines Isla’s task, at least. She fills one box with a shelf of fossils, shells and hagstones, a strip of leather from a climmer’s harness, a bundle containing a model egg and bread loaf, a salt sachet, and a box of matches (to be given to a newborn baby, Cathy’s index note explains). Another four with books and photos—Cathy’s own photography of Spurnsea and of its last residents beside their houses, and the clippings she’s gathered from locals and newspapers. Above a shelf of maps is a collage made from a series of ordinance survey maps, depicting Spurnsea’s long talon shrinking to a stub over the decades.

The island’s shape changing.

Anya finds her sat among the half-packed boxes of books and journals. A tapestry of Spurnsea in extracts, a message to be pieced together. What amounts to clutter.

‘I think I’ll talk to Jean,’ Isla says when Anya rests a hand on her head in greeting.

Anya responds with a slight ruffle of her hair. ‘I’ll put the kettle on.’

Jean, Cathy’s neighbour by virtue of distance, lives a mile up the road. She visited Cathy on the weekends and when the weather was too rough for Isla to make the drive.

She opens the door to Isla before she can knock. ‘I thought I saw your car go past,’ she says, enveloping Isla in a hug. ‘How’ve you been, love?’

Isla raises her shoulders in the embrace. Enough for Jean, who releases her.

‘She’d be proud of you, taking all this on. Seeing it’s preserved. God knows what my sons will do with…’ Jean’s face falls as Isla sniffles.

‘Do you want it?’ Isla asks. ‘Her museum?’

‘Oh, love,’ Jean repeats. She pats Isla’s arm. ‘I’ve not got the space.’

‘Right—of course.’

‘It’s yours, anyway,’ Jean continues.

Isla nods. ‘I should…Anya will be…’

Jean reaches out an arm, turning the gesture into an understanding wave as Isla steps away.

She walks the long way back, along the cliffside, where tufts of marram grass will obscure her from Jean’s view. Let her defer returning to the sea of half-packed boxes, the calls she needs to make—is poised to, if only to shrug the boulder of responsibility onto someone else’s shoulders. Leave it all in the state’s hands.

When it became clear the village was a sinking skip, other residents had taken whatever inland accommodation was offered as part of Spurnsea’s managed retreat. They left when the tide took the first few caravans along with the cliff’s edge, the first—though Cathy was quick to argue this claim—step in Spurnsea’s slow erasure. Only the hardy or optimistic clung on to see the road into the village lost to a landslip which forced them to drive, until it was repaired, along the old railway line that once connected Spurnsea to inland towns. By then, only the foolhardy—Cathy—and the seabirds remained.

Isla skirts the overhung cliffside, the low dunes of sand before the houses that are still boarded up and standing. Inhabited, she imagines, by the kittiwakes, curlews, razorbills and guillemots displaced from their own cliffside homes. Many of the houses are skeletons, picked bare for copper and bricks and spare parts before the sea could waste them.

A curlew’s swooping siren pierces the sea’s monotone. Isla searches for its curved beak among marram and wildflowers. It’s a bird she looks for more than any other, since Cathy dug up a legend that foretold that Spurnsea would fall into the sea when the last curlew left the headland.

When Isla was young, Cathy’s way of participating in the village was to instigate a summer festival that celebrated the climmers: men and women who would descend from the far cliffsides on crude harnesses to collect seabirds’ eggs. With the practice long since outlawed and the cliff having lost its sturdy brow, Cathy’s concession to realism was to dangle a salvaged mannequin over the south cliff in the old climming harness acquired from a former resident.

It hangs in her shed now.

It’s hard to imagine a person rappelling from the last walkable stretch of the headland Isla’s reached, further than she’s willing to walk towards the cliff’s edge. Behind her, the stone cottage blinks with light, not near enough for her to distinguish Anya’s silhouette.

The bay ahead is a jagged bite in the outcropping headland, one the sea has gouged of shape and substance, leaving crumbling slopes of mud and sand and silt where there was once a beach. Cathy had puzzled over its etymology when first compiling her history of Spurnsea. The “spurn”, she decided, descended from the Old Norse “spiorn”, meaning spur or point, and referred to the scrap of land that once projected from Spurnsea, reached miles beyond the talon now buried to its hilt beneath the sand and tide. Isla always imagined its name came from the other meaning of spurn, as if the sea itself were spurned, bitter that the headland evaded its grasp and that people dared to settle there, defiant.

It makes sense to her. While the towns further up and down the coast lay claim to tales of mermaids and mermen, Spurnsea claims the devil. When constructing its headland, legend has it the devil plucked a haddock from the sea instead of his dropped hammer, and that the two dark spots either side of a haddock’s head are the lingering prints of his fingers.

Isla’s never clung to anything hard enough to leave a mark. Scarcely feels like she has a finger pressed to the earth, most days.

Anya is in the office when she returns, sealing the boxes she found Isla among yesterday.

‘Is something burning?’ Isla asks.

Anya stands, smiling. ‘Look.’ Isla follows her through to the lounge, where a fire crackles behind the grate. She flops Cathy’s index open between them where they sit on the sofa, opening it on a page titled Customs. She runs a finger down the Home subcategory, where Cathy explains that it was customary, in some homes, to light a fire before moving out and to burn the embers of the fire in one’s new home to bring good luck. ‘I thought we could…’ Anya trails off. She closes the book, facing Isla. ‘What did she say?’

Isla shakes her head. Swallows thickly. ‘No space for it.’

Anya squeezes her leg. The fire pops, flinging a burning ember at the grate, the soft camomile scent replaced by woodsmoke.

‘I’ll sell it,’ Isla says, nodding with the decision.

She un-pockets her phone before she can dwell on it, responds to one of the trail of missed calls from the solicitor.

‘Miss Wilson? We’ve been trying to reach you.’
Isla apologises. ‘I’ve decided. I’d like to—how would I go about selling the property?’

The flames are more captivating than the solicitor’s meandering spiel about surveyors and legalities. ‘…Likelihood is that it will be deconstructed,’ he’s saying when her focus returns.

‘Deconstructed?’

‘Well, as the property isn’t tenable…’ he continues, and Isla can see the surveyors with clipboards, the inevitable conclusion, the cottage gutted and flattened like the surrounding houses as she watches from a distance. Demolished. The line crackles. ‘Hello?’

She’s stood up, unconsciously. Anya looks between Isla and the ongoing call on her screen as the solicitor repeats himself tinnily.

Isla hangs up, sitting back beside Anya. Stokes the spitting flames.

They spend another night in the cottage, burning through what’s left of Cathy’s woodstore while they parcel each room, scour the house clean around the skeleton crew of furniture and unwieldy cultural artefacts they leave to gather dust.

Isla makes a meal of what’s left in the cupboards, sweeps the hearth. Calls the solicitors with another apology.

When they’ve pulled the plug on the cottage, locked the doors and stacked their cars with precarious boxes, Isla watches a flock of gulls rise in the remaining strip of rear-view window. They’ll unload the boxes when they get home. Slide them under beds and tables and into cupboards, unpack and squeeze the journals and books onto their shelves and hang Cathy’s pictures beside their own, the witch cake at the threshold.

Isla will recall the day Anya first moved in. How seeing their possessions mingle felt like an ending as much as a beginning.

She’ll build a crude fire in the disused fireplace, and they’ll cough at the smoke that floods the space when they relight the embers from Cathy’s hearth.

The cottage will be Isla’s, until the sea claims it. Until the last curlew lifts from Spurnsea’s headland.

Until then, let what remains stay standing at its windblown edge. Let it be a message.