Desperation always has a sour smell. Sarah had noticed it on other people, and sometimes (alas) on herself: it was sharp, with an undertow of sweetish decay. If it was a wine, you’d say that the grapes were growing a little near the railway, or that they had had more than a passing acquaintance with goats. But it wasn’t a wine. Nor was it blood or sweat, exactly.

Where did desperation come from, how did it saturate your clothes? Why would no amount of scrubbing remove it from your skin? Sarah considered the origins of desperation. It was like looking for the source of the Nile: further away than you anticipated, and more muddy too. In the end, she came to the conclusion that desperation came from excess: from too much loneliness, too much desire. A little was well and good: but how much was too much?

It had to do with the intensity of her need, and of her desire to be loved. Overcome that, and all might be well. Accordingly Sarah looked around for something to hang her thoughts on. A discipline. She fumbled in her pocket and found four stones, garnered from walks. One was a hag-stone, with a hole worn away by the sea: one was jasper, much prized by the Romans: one was speckled like a thrush’s egg: one was just ordinary. Bunte Steine.

Sarah sat down and laid them by her left hand. One by one, she picked them up. The hag-stone made her think of the sea. The tide flowed forward and back, gaining a hour, losing an hour. The sun sparkled on it. She became the water: the rip-tide, the ebb, the flow. She moved the pebble from her left to her right hand, and then put in on the ground. The red stone made her think of a flower: it was seed, it was bud, it was bloom, it was faded, it was seed once more. She moved it to join the sea-pebble on the right. The speckled stone lay like an egg in the sun: it was yolk, it was bone, it was feather, it was flight, it slept in the sand. And the final stone made her think about space: without bounds, warm, impersonal. Nothing to be afraid of. Hush. Hush.

There the four pebbles lay. Sarah felt that her desperation had gone. She wondered if there was some bigger pebble somewhere  that was invisible. And then she realised with a shock that even if there was, it did not matter. Not at all.