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too soft to fight, too rooted to the spot. He wouldn’t try to threaten them. He’d be tongue-tied. They’d possess more words than him. He wouldn’t even use his fists. The flesh-on-flesh of fists was far too intimate. But robbing them would be the simplest thing, if he were armed.
    The man searched the scrubland near the track for something hard and heavy. A broken branch might do. A length of driftwood. A strip of fencing. There was a piece of displaced builder’s granite in the undergrowth. Pink, grey and white, an untender joint of veal, with gristle silica. It fitted in his hand. The perfect friend. He tested its power and rehearsed what he could do with it, swinging his arm, with the granite weighted in his palm, chopping at the unresisting substance of the wind, and cursing at his spectral enemies, the rich, the old, the educated and the loved, the fed, the wordy and the well-laced, whom his shadow boxing made as thin and helpless as the air.
    He took deep, energizing breaths, like a weight-lifter, to inflate himself: squat, thrust and strike. He punched the air – a prize-fighter, a champion already, the hero of an unmade film – and smacked the granite down on his thigh to feel how dangerous and bold it made him. The first blood to be drawn would be his own. He was the vanquisher and the comrade of pain. Even so, despite the self-inflicted bruises, it would not be easy to be truly enraged by the man and woman until he was closer. Then, prompted by some detail of their clothes or faces, he would find the fury to engage with them, to embrace them with his energy. He could be (he’d done this twice before) as unembarrassed and as open with his violence as, say, a fox or rook would be. A lion. They took such careless pleasure in their savagery. So would he.
    By the time he had left the track and set off to stalk and rob them, the couple had dropped out of sight amongst the dunes. He could no longer see the man’s grey head or spot the woman’s flapping scarf. But he had noted roughly where they’d disappeared and all his hunting senses were provoked. He’d not have trouble finding them, he thought. He ran along the shore at first, looking for an easy way into the dunes.
    Baritone Bay was not a bay in any geographic sense. Besides its honorary name, it had only the sand and salt dunes of a bay. The sea had not scooped out a wide-mouthed recess in the coast, an arc of beach, two headlands standing sentinel. Instead, the grey-black coast protruded here into the sea, like a delta. Here was an oddity, well worth a visit for students of earth sciences if unattractive for the rest of us, a tidejutter almost an hour’s walk from end to end, twenty minutes deep and protected from the haulage of the sea by a horseshoe of submerged rocks a hundred metres from the shore, which broke the power of the waves and left the dunes impervious to everything but the stormiest weather. The coast at Baritone Bay, naïvely unaware that water was more powerful than earth, had scooped out a wide-mouthed recess in the sea.
    The bay, of course, was subject – famously – to the wind. There was a constant drift of air that ran along the coast, west–east, so that the dunes were sculpted and aligned like resting seals. Most days the dunes would hum as the wind hugged scarp and dip across the bay. Sometimes there’d be a timpani of scratching lissom stems or the rattle of a sea thorn or a lisping
a cappella
from the waves. But nothing sang. No crooning baritone, so ecstatically described by guidebooks as ‘the operatic coast’. It took clear weather, temperatures near but above 16° centigrade, moist but contracting sand, a consistent and exact westerly, and the catalyst of something moving for the dunes to sing their single aria. There was clear weather that afternoon, fine and sunny, with a hugging offshore breeze, but the temperatures were rising still and the wind was misdirected by ten degrees at least. Nothing – not even an