It was idyllic, that summer before the Great War.  Wilf had been romancing a young lady from the village by the name of Sylvia.  Oh, she was beautiful alright, with honey-coloured hair swept away from her face and loosely pinned at the top of her perfect velveteen neck.  He loved to just gaze at her during endless, warm days in the top meadow overlooking the strawberry fields which stretched endlessly out across the Hampshire countryside. 

When he thinks of Sylvia now, he thinks of strawberries.  Of laughing as they snuck into a corner of one of the vast farms, filling their pockets with the stray berries at the very edge of the field – they had been missed by the pickers and were so wonderfully ripe that they would stain their fingers and clothes. 

He had gone away two months later, his fingers and clothes becoming stained instead with the blood of his friends and family.  For four long years, thoughts of Sylvia, and of Hampshire, and of strawberries had insulated his mind from the horrors all around him. 

And he lays now, in the top meadow overlooking his own strawberry fields, thinking of the summer before he became a man.  And he gazes at Sylvia, her greying hair swept away from her face and loosely pinned at the top of her perfect, perfect neck.  And he is thankful for strawberries.

She screamed, her waist upwards out of the sunroof, waving her arms in greeting as the broken down old amusement park staggered jaggedly into view on the horizon.  Her boyfriend, at the wheel, had heard endless stories of how as teenager she had come to the grand opening with her parents, returning each year until the storm engulfed her favourite holiday destination.  This was his graduation gift to her before they left the area and headed together into the real world of jobs and adulthood.

She screamed, running through the warped wooden entranceway, whirling around to catch the look of mirrored joy on his face.  It didn’t matter that the decaying old place was crumbling around them, the relics of childhood totems grimacing and gruesome where they lay; she sat in the mud-crusted dodgems, body jerking as she zoomed towards and crashed into the phantom cars driven by faces freshly resurrected from her past.

She screamed, arriving in the shadow of the giant wooden rollercoaster which had been the grand attraction in better days.  The surge of fear and excitement flooded back through her, sending her body taut with anticipation.  She climbed the steps of the creeping hill two at a time, the sun-bleached wood creaking its hoary greeting at the unfamiliarity of it all.

She reached the top, gazing awestruck at the battered ruins below.  “Take my picture!” she squealed, taking a step back to the railings.

She screamed.  And then she was gone.

A trying day for the constabulary came to a close with the passing of a train.  A fugitive, tracked for several hours after taking a child from an addled, distracted parent in a park had led them some fourteen miles across fields and through woods.  The child had been found safe, abandoned and exhausted in an old barn midway through the search, but the man still needed to be captured and returned to custody. 

For Jeffrey Sutton, the inexperienced officer who had been duped into allowing the man to escape early this morning during an otherwise unremarkable courthouse supervision, the search and apprehension was not a matter of duty but a desperate need to restore his pride. 

And he had stood face-to-face with the man at the edge of a wood, his colleagues a few moments behind.  He had activated the panic button on his radio but could not bring himself to approach.  He had retreated into the cover of the trees.  For a moment the man had goaded him, urging him to attempt capture.  He had been frightened.  Distracted by the sound of the oncoming strength in numbers, the man had not noticed the train.

And now, in his sweat-soaked bed, Jeffrey lay rigid with fear.  The man he had seen killed with his own eyes was standing, unharmed, by his window.  He stared, goading the young policeman into action.  Jeffrey felt his stomach drop away from him, his breath tight in his heavy lungs.  He fought it, gasping and grabbing at his sheets until finally, desperately, he awoke.

“Again” he snarled, hitting his fist hard off the bar, sending the barmaid’s eyes rolling to the heavens.  He’d been here since he barged past her when she unlocked the doors at 7am, rattling with a different energy than the usual night-shift workers clocking off and taking a few drinks to smooth the edge off the struggle for daylight slumber. 

Nor did he seem to be a beggar; he was too well dressed and besides, the gardai wouldn’t be moving on the street sleepers for another hour yet.  Those who’d had a good day yesterday might come into the early house to kill time until the office crowd picked up but they rarely showed up before eight o’clock.

He definitely wasn’t a tourist with his unmistakable Dublin accent.  She supposed the woman who put the ring on his finger might have tossed him out in a row and he’d taken comfort in one of the whores in the street behind.  Maybe it was the other way around.

She hadn’t a clue who he was or what brought him here but she recognised the type.  She knew well enough to watch the flicker of anger behind his eyes lest it ignite to full fury.

“Again” he called across.  For now, at least, she kept pouring.

A marriage which had screamed taut with the unrelenting neurosis of denied betrayal had sent Frances fleeing to a remote coastal location in the north-east of England.  There she found solace in a tiny wind-battered cottage behind the beach where she would stand for hours at the brittle, ancient, scuffed windows staring out at the sea, wondering if she would ever gain the courage to walk in at incoming tide to let the rising waters take her from her misery and heartbreak.

Each day, at around the same time, a man would venture onto the beach.  Regardless of the weather, he would walk, shrug-shouldered with his eyes fixed on the sand.  He never followed the same path, as other walkers were prone to do, sometimes for minutes and sometimes for hours.  His walk would always end when he stooped down to pick something up and he would hurry away in the direction he had come from.  He was a collector of something, but she could only speculate on what he was looking for.  She wondered if she avoided her fate because she had come to depend on this strange familiarity from the stranger.

One day, she waited for the stoop and followed him.  He snaked back up through the steep lane before coming to a small church.  She found shelter in the vestry and watched him from afar until after a long while he left.  She walked over, then, to an immaculate grave.  It was covered in hundreds of tiny, smooth pebbles of sea glass of every colour she had ever seen.  Her eyes finally raised to the stone, neatly but humbly inscribed:

HERE LIES ELEANOR HARFORD, BELOVED WIFE OF NIGEL, LOVER OF THE SEA

Her breath caught in her throat as she saw the extent of her only local friend Nigel’s devotion.  Each day he brought the sea to his wife.  Each day for almost six years he had feathered her resting-place with the brightest and most beautiful tributes it would offer up.

Once the automated door opened, she walked up to the small reinforced glass window and handed over a docket with her reference number on.  The pucker-faced young woman in the booth said nothing but shuffled off into the back and returned in her own good time with a large padded envelope.  She motioned to a different window and shoved the package through the void beneath which her visitor accepted silently.  A mixture of fear and anticipation coursed through her, but she wanted to be alone when she opened it. 

Outside, she felt around in her pocket and pulled out an envelope containing her money.  She counted it again to be sure.  $258.32.  If she went to her parents’ home tomorrow she’d have enough for a decent motel this evening.  It would give her some time to get her head together.  To think.

She needed to think.  She needed the space.  To think.

The motel she chose exceeded her expectations.  It was a huge room with a double bed, separate bathroom and wonderfully large window overlooking the empty pool and parking lot.  She spent an hour just gazing at it. At the people walking around out there.

And there it was, ready to be opened.  Her package.  She needed to see what was inside, but only to discard it.  It was her life before; a junkie’s, murderer’s life.  She was done with it.

Toby had been gazing out of his window at the garden for hours, ignoring his homework.  He was heartsick; could think only of beauty and romance and his one true love.  Flowers seemed an appropriate opening gift.  He snuck down to the kitchen, past his snoring overweight father, can of beer precariously perched on the beige velour sofa arm.  His mother would notice and commence squawking at any moment – time was of the essence if he wanted to avoid the drama. 

He took three sheets of kitchen towel and folded them back on each other so he had one thick, multilayered square for his collection.  He’d have to be stealthy and this was the only way.

His planning upstairs had paid off and he was able to quickly go from flower to flower, plucking the most beautiful assortment of petals and heads.  He gently placed them between the layers of the sheet and, when he was finished, he carefully carried his inconspicuous little parcel back to his room. 

Once safely within, he took down his thick hardbacked library collection of pre-Raphaelite poems and pressed the flowers, kitchen towel and all, between the pages ready for the morning.  He would arrange them nicely in the morning.

He lay back on his bed, sighing happily.  Peter would love this.

Something very odd was going on at the weekly WI coffee morning and craft sale at Faversham town hall.  The extremely proper Mabel Thorogood was uncharacteristically eating marmalade directly from the pot with a plastic cafeteria spoon and had stuck the small fabric circle from the top of the jar to her forehead.  Betty Calthorpe couldn’t tear her eyes away from the sight of it, nor stop laughing.  Her jasmine tea had gone cold but she was drinking it anyway. 

Over on the stage, Edna Flupstein had taken to the old, out of tune piano and was working her way through her alcoholic Jewish grandmother’s litany of folk songs, kicking her legs out wildly in time to the rather wayward rhythm.  Her husband Ernest, as always, offered devoted encouragement by clapping along as enthusiastically as his emphysema would allow. 

The new Vicar, Reverend Standhope, looked rather concerned.  He had allowed the hall to be used by some hippy conservationist group the previous night and feared that they had done something terrible to these elderly people.  He wondered if he should telephone the local constable but before he was able to, the local community-watch co-ordinator Edith Presley (Elvis’s secret wife, she would explain) danced over to him.

“Edith, I think something terrible has happened.  I think the hippies must have left some drugs here last night and they have been accidentally taken by the WI ladies.”

Edith smiled gently, her voice all mock-outrage.  “Oh they had drugs alright. I’m the one who confiscated them.”

And then she winked.

Dora carefully arranged her photographs on the makeshift sideboard she had built from old fruit crates.  They were of better days, capturing her moments in the 1920s as a silent movie star before the world changed and her broad Tennessee accent wasn’t deemed ladylike enough for the talkies.  She’d fought hard, winning a few character roles but her beauty had been as hard to overcome as her voice.  She moved around a lot now, a small wheelie case containing her life, finding shelter in the abandoned and decaying studios and theatres which littered tinseltown – her town.

Henry and his friends swaggered along the avenue, looking for trouble.  They knew him as H though, even since he’d shown up at their community centre dressed in his hood uniform and had fought his way to the top of the pecking order.  Boredom had driven him from his parents’ Bel Air compound into a trust-funded bungalow in Koreatown from where he earned his pocket money with shady deals and local protection rackets. 

Dora found a small space on the floor where the dust wasn’t too bad.  She made her bed fastidiously as always and added several layers to keep out the chill.  She looked over at her pictures, gave them a smile and settled down for the night.

H and his friends marched on.  The owner of the old VHS plant had failed repeatedly to respond to his demands for anti-vandalism protection money, claiming poverty of all things.  H sneered at the thought of his insolence as he entered through a side door, found a pile of old fruit crates and dropped a flaming rag.  That’d send him a message he wouldn’t forget in a hurry.

Bring Your Daughter to Work Day was a stressful time for Jackeline, the anchor of the local news station and small time celebrity.  She had a reputation to uphold for glamour and she had been panicking about being publicly associated with her overweight, sad-looking daughter for weeks.  She had put her on a detox but the little bugger must have been getting food from somewhere and she suspected the saggy old housekeeper she’d hired when her husband began to get a little too interested in the au pair.  Sure, old apronface was no threat to her marriage but if she continued feeding the little brat they’d have to consider homeschool.  She simply couldn’t let the parents see what a wreck her child was becoming.

She went to the nursery to inspect the damage.  There, squeezed into a pink velour designer tracksuit, was the offending object, playing quietly with some silly little realistic-sized doll.  She would have to throw those out and get her some proper skinny dolls to aspire to.  No wonder she ate so much, she just didn’t have a clue what the right shape was for a woman.

Exasperated, she called her agent. 

“Johnnie, darling,” she drawled “I need a little favour.  Have you got any little girls?  I’m thinking blonde, maybe curly haired – like an angel… uh huh… yes… six years old. Just for a day. Perfect.”