text: “Take it dear. You look like you could use it.” I turned my head away from surveying the calm sea and looked down at the little old lady. She must have sidled noiselessly up alongside me while I was lost in thought, staring out at the monstrous vessel sliding ponderously along the calm waters of the Solent, imagining that it was off on a glorious voyage - more likely it was delivering a load of cargo, cars probably, to the Far East. Her outstretched arm hung horizontally before her, trembling with the weight of the small round pebble grasped within her upturned varicose fingers. Unsure how to react, but not wanted to insult her, I quickly reached out and took it from her. Relieved of its burden, her arm dropped to her side, fingers wrapping now around the handle of her shopping cart, one of those little cloth-covered ones on two wheels that all the elderly people in the supermarkets seem to have. She turned and hobbled off along the promenade towards The Green, cart clattering loudly on the uneven pavers. “Um, excuse me.” She’d gone a few metres before my mind caught up, but I caught up to her in a couple of strides. “Why did you give me this?” I asked. “Looks to me like you need it,” she answered, staring ahead and maintaining her rackety pace. Slowing to match her, I looked down at the stone in my hand, rubbing my thumb over its surface. “I look like a need a rock?” It was a question as much to myself as it was to her, which was good because she seemed not to hear or chose not to answer. We walked silently together past the Squadron, each squinting against the sunset glare shooting off the golden cannons guarding the battlements of the ancient, if diminutive, castle. I continued to stroke the surface of the stone, half expecting understanding to wash over me at any moment, occasionally glancing down at the tiny woman for a clue of some kind. She seemed to have forgotten about me entirely. “Is it a special rock?” I asked, as the high-end sea-front apartments alongside us gave way suddenly to the open expanse of The Green, a hundred-metre stretch of grassy park, pockmarked with concrete benches, and pebbly beach; pebbles that looked to my eye like very close relatives of the one still clutched in my hand. “They’re all special,” she said matter-of-factly, stopping and surveying the expanse of pebbles, white curls of her hair rustling in the breeze blowing softly off the water. “But that one’s the one for you.” She stepped off the path and onto the stones, dragging her cart behind her, barely managing to keep its ricocheting frame the right way up. About halfway to the gently crashing waves she stopped. Leaving the trolley standing alone, she picked her way nimbly in a wide circle across the pebbles, back bent deeply. Her eyes never left the ground and every now and then she would stop, stoop down further and peer intensely at one of the pebbles, picking the occasional one up before discarding it with a clatter amongst its equally unsuitable peers. Standing there watching her work, circle slowly expanding as the light grew more and more golden, I realised that I’d seen her before; right here doing exactly this as I passed by on my way home from the office. Not every evening, but occasionally. Of course, I’d never in my three years walking this commute stopped to watch her; never stood statuesque for ten minutes in the setting sun as the crazy old lady picked up stones on the beach. Why would I? I shook my head and turned away from her; turned for my little flat at the end of the promenade; turned for home. I rolled the pebble over in my hand before slipping it into my pocket. “Make sure you look after it,” her shrill voice called to my back as I walked away. “That one’s been my favourite for longer than I can remember.” \*\*\* “And?” My mom asked. “How are you doing?” She’d called me on FaceTime just a few minutes after I’d walked through the door. We spoke about once a week, sometimes less. I sat on the small couch in the corner of the kitchen slash living room. The wifi was playing up as it sometimes did so we’d turned the video off and were making do with a voice chat. “I don’t know,” I said, “sometimes I just wonder what I’m doing.” “What do you mean?” she asked, concern in her voice. “Just that...I don’t know...just what the point of it all is. Work for instance. It’s not like I enjoy it, or that I’m any good at what I do. I’m surprised they haven’t fired me yet actually.” She clucked at that. She always clucked when I made comments like that. “Oh come on,” she said, “you don’t mean that. Why would they fire you?” I fixed my attention on the pebble in my hand, turning it over and over, inspecting the variations of its grey-blue-brown colouring. It felt coarse against my skin; the etchings of centuries of erosion all over its surface giving it the texture of fine-grained sandpaper. “You’re just having a tough time at the moment,” she continued, oblivious to my inattention. “Just keep your head down and push through, it’ll all be alright soon.” I nodded my head then remembered she couldn’t see me and verbalised my affirmation, even though I didn’t agree with her. It’s not like she’d understand anyway. I’d tried telling her before in different ways, but it was always the same. Just get through it and things would get better. It’s just a bad patch that I’m going through. I wasn’t so sure though. If it was just a bad patch then it was a very long one and the end was nowhere in sight, not to my eyes at least. I was bored and unmotivated; had been for as long as I could remember. It’s not like things are terrible and I can hardly claim great misfortune or hardship, but I also can’t just perk myself up as some people seem to be able to do; just pretend like everything is hunky-dory and get on with things when they brought me no joy. I have a job sure, even if I can’t remember why I took it. I have the flat. It’s small - compact according to the proud agent - but the view out over the water, full with the comings and goings of maritime vessels, is mesmerising. I’m healthy and have a family who loves me. And yet, I feel like something is missing, or that I’m missing out on something. We spoke about nothing for another ten or so minutes before saying our goodbyes and hanging up. I stood up from the couch and set about making something to eat, slipping the stone back into my pocket, feeling the weight settle against my thigh. It’s not like I was going to change anything right now. After dinner and a few episodes of mindless TV, I left the dishes unwashed in the sink and got ready to go to bed. On the way out of the room, I passed the peace lily that my mom had sent me a few months back, no doubt hoping that having another living entity dependent on me for survival would have some sort of magical effect on my outlook. Instead, I’d ended up with a near-dead houseplant. “Come on little guy,” I said as I walked past, sounding like I was talking to a puppy or a three-week-old baby, “don’t die on me.” I stroked a forlorn leaf and continued on through to the bedroom. Undressing, I put my hand into my pocket to retrieve the pebble. It was warm. Not body-heat warm, but sitting-in-the-sunshine-all-day warm. I held it against my cheek, feeling the heat transfer into my skin. It was comforting. Peculiar, but comforting for some reason. I set it down on the bedside table, telling myself that it was probably some unusually conductive material. Maybe some rocks are just like that. What did I know about rocks? I climbed into bed and fell asleep. \*\*\* In the morning, I went through my regular routine. Alarm rings at seven, hit snooze a couple of times and then roll out of bed and get dressed: jeans, T-shirt and a black zip-up sweater from Patagonia that I’d had for at least the last ten years. Quick breakfast of whatever cereal had caught my eye in Sainsbury’s on the weekend, sitting on the couch and eating while looking through various apps on my phone, always in the same order: e-mail, BBC News, Instagram and then Reddit. By the time I’ve got through all of that, it’s usually eight and time to brush my teeth and start the walk to work. As I opened the front door to leave this morning, I felt a pull in the pit of my stomach, like I’d forgotten something but didn’t know what. I pulled open my bag to check I had my laptop and then patted my pockets to make sure my phone and wallet were there. I had all three. It was as I tapped my right pocket though that I thought of the pebble, which had occupied that space alongside my phone yesterday evening after I left that strange old lady on the beach. I backtracked into my bedroom, picked up the little grey rock off the table beside my bed and dropped it into my pocket. The feeling disappeared. Exiting the bedroom once again, I noticed the lily; the near-dead lily that I had whispered meaningless words of encouragement to last night as if the sound of my voice could somehow bring it back to life. Only it seemed to have worked. Instead of looking dreary and withered, it was lush and verdant, broad green leaves standing tall and and even a couple of white kayak-shaped flowers spearing proudly upwards. I stopped to examine it, running my hands over the smooth leaves. Surely this can’t be the same plant? Time was ticking past though and I needed to get to work. I shook my head, turned away from the miraculous houseplant and shut the door behind me. I was halfway along the promenade when I put my hand into my pocket and felt the pebble, recalling suddenly how strangely warm it had been before I went to sleep yesterday evening. \*\*\* The email arrived in my inbox with a chime at exactly 10:00 AM. I reckon it must have been typed sometime earlier, days earlier perhaps, and then scheduled to go out at this precise time. It was from the head of HR - although the title here was Chief People Officer - and it informed me that my role was, “no longer feasible to maintain given the current commercial environment” and that they were, “sorry to have to let me go.” It went on to tell me that as per my contract I was being given the standard one-month’s notice and was thus expected to perform my duties diligently until May 31st. My first thought was that I’d get to tell my mom I told her so. My second was that I should just go crazy and create a scene worthy of a TV sitcom, throw my laptop against the wall, stride purposefully across the room and hook the manager a sharp one in the jaw. I actually grinned behind my monitor as that played across my mind’s eye. My third was that I shouldn’t be surprised; that this was the email I’d been expecting from the moment Henk, the head of IT, had issued me my laptop on my first day, it had just arrived three years late now that they’d finally realised I had no idea what I was doing and never had. I closed Outlook and double-clicked the Powerpoint icon. Growing up, once I’d matured beyond the childish fascination of becoming Spiderman or the white Power-Ranger I’d still had dreams, albeit more realistic ones. I’d marvelled at the colossal mega-structures on Discovery Channel documentaries and discovered that they were built by civil engineers. At some point I’d moved on to wanting to be a doctor, a surgeon even, saving lives amongst the beeps and whooshes of the operating theatre. Then I’d dreamed of designing Formula One cars. Instead, I’d ended up here, spending most of my time playing Tetris with the shared calendar and craning my neck closer to the screen so that I could be sure the corners of the text boxes in my one-thousandth Powerpoint slide deck lined up perfectly. Really important work. Stuff to be proud of. “We’re off to the Anchor for a drink, you coming?” A voice called from across the open-plan office. Just like that the day had disappeared and I had nothing to show for it except a headache blooming at the base of my neck and seven new, perfectly aligned slides. “Nah,” I shrugged back, slamming my laptop closed. “I’ve got plans tonight I’m afraid.” I didn’t, but this was a recurrent ritual we went through whenever a gang of the team was heading for an after-work drink at one of the local pubs. They’d ask me, knowing that I would decline with a made-up excuse, and I’d turn down the offer, knowing that they didn’t really want me there but felt obliged to ask anyway. I held back a few minutes, giving them enough time to draw a safe distance away from the building, and then headed out for home. And so passed the remaining four weeks of my employment. Looking back I can’t really tell one day apart from another. There was a meeting with Joy, the Chief People Officer, who wanted to conduct an exit interview where she managed to tell me at least five more times how sorry they were that I was leaving as if at some point it had transitioned from their decision to mine. I actually joined the guys at the pub one evening, but swiftly regretted that choice when someone asked me what I was going to get up to now that I was free of this place. I probably said something along the lines of, “oh you know, probably just take a break and see what opportunities come up,” doubting all the while that anything would. Then it was my last day. The only thing that gave it away as anything other than an ordinary day was the cringeworthy farewell party that was half-heartedly thrown in the kitchen at lunchtime. There was a small cake and about one-third of the office decided it was worth leaving their critically time-sensitive work for ten minutes to join in and wish me well for the future. At five o’clock on the dot, having handed my laptop back to Henk from IT, I gave a feeble wave to those few colleagues looking up from their computers and walked out of the door for the last time. The fingers of my right hand ran reassuringly over the surface of the pebble within my pocket. \*\*\* I didn’t see it, I heard it. You wouldn’t think that an object falling out of a tree onto grass makes a noise loud enough to hear from fifty metres away, but it does. It makes a solid thud as it hits the ground, muted slightly depending on the thickness of the grass and dampness of the ground onto which it falls. If it’s a person, you’d expect them to scream as they fall, but she didn’t. There was just the thud. I was walking home past The Green again, just as I’d done every evening since meeting the old lady over a month ago. Just as I’d done nearly every evening for the past three years and every morning in the opposite direction. Now, I was walking it for the final time, backpack full of the few personal knick-knacks I’d collected on my desk in my time in the office: Rubik’s cube, a couple of books, the computer mouse I’d brought in from home, those sorts of things. I hadn’t seen the pebble-picker again, though I’d looked for her, my eyes automatically dancing across the rocky beach as I emerged from the promenade walkway into the open space. She must have gotten a good haul that night she gave her favourite pebble away to me. Behind the grassy embankment that lines the beach, at the far end from where I emerged, there is an ablutions block, bricks coloured green and grey by decades of sea air. You have to cross the road along which I walked to get to it from the beach. The stench of stale urine emanated from within on a warm night like tonight. Behind it, stood an enormous oak tree. Easily two metres across at the base and who knows how high. It was probably older than the Squadron castle and definitely older than the toilet block. I saw her as I walked past the decrepit building, holding my breath against the smell, like we used to do when the school bus drove alongside a graveyard, gasping when the rows of headstones ended suddenly. She must have been ten or twelve years old - I’m terrible at guessing ages - and she was high, high up amongst the limbs climbing fearlessly. It set my heart racing just watching her. I wondered briefly where her parents were and whether they knew that their daughter was so dangerously high in the upper echelons of a monumental tree, but I didn’t stop walking. I did little more than glance at her really. I was just reaching the end of The Green, where the grass ends at the ice-cream hut and the seafront houses pick up their guardianship of the coastline when I heard the thump behind me. I turned reflexively and saw a shape at the base of the tree, a lumpy mound. I looked up into the branches and didn’t see the girl. Two-and-two clicked and I dashed madly over the road, heedless to whether there were any approaching vehicles, sprinted across the grass and collapsed hard on my knees beside her body. I took in all of her in that split-second of arrival, my knees lightly touching the warm cotton of her top at the side of her chest. She was a little thing. Delicate like the finches and sparrows that dart and dive amongst the tight-knit branches of the box hedge and the pink-plumed hydrangea outside my kitchen window. Her blonde hair splayed out in a crown above her head, weaving in and out through the blades of grass. I watched her eyes flutter beneath closed eyelids. Had I not just seen her twenty metres up in the sky amongst the leaves and branches, I would have believed her to be sleeping. Perhaps she’d come down to play a game of solo imagination amongst the bees and squirrels as young children are wont to do and, growing weary in the warmth of the afternoon had nestled into the fragrant grass for a nap. I could have convinced myself of that were it not for the trickle of scarlet blood dripping down her pale cheek from the corner of her mouth and the rasping of her breath. I tore my eyes from her and searched desperately around me for rescue; for somebody to rescue me from the ultimate responsibility for this little human being, this young soul whose life, whose dreams now depended solely on me. Me who had given up on my own dreams and settled for something less. There was nobody else. I felt her breath stop. “Don’t you fucking die on me,” I pleaded. I drove my hand into my pocket in search of my phone. I needed to call an ambulance; should have called one the second I saw her lying there. Closing my fingers around the cool titanium device, the back of my hand brushed against the pebble, it was scorching. I pulled my hand back sharply, keeping a grip on my phone. The back of my hand stung like I’d laid it against a hot pan without noticing. Pushing aside the pain and questions about how the pebble got so hot, I dialled nine-nine-nine and held the phone to my ear. Expecting an immediate answer all I got was a series of monotone beeps stretching infinitely in those couple of seconds. No signal. There never was around here. I dashed the phone to the ground and turned back to her, fraught with the realisation that she had only me. And I had only her. “Please, please, just breathe!” I ignored the heat that flared suddenly against my thigh and tried to remember the first aid course I’d attended in high school - it must have been ten years ago now - and whispered myself through the steps of CPR as I recalled them. “Hands on the sternum.” I placed my right hand over my left at the centre of her chest. Someone would surely walk by any second now and rescue us both. “Come on, you can remember this.” Deep breath. “Fifteen compressions followed by thr-“ Her body leapt as she drew in a breath, back lifting off the flattened grass. Her eyes shot open and stared at me, through me. Fragile chest heaving, she gasped time and time again, never turning her wide unblinking eyes from mine. An eternity passed in the moments it took for her to calm; for both of us to calm. I wrapped my fingers tenderly around her small hand. I felt everything and nothing at the same time, overcome with shock and numb. “Thank you,” she whispered then, her eyes talking as much as her voice. And then she was gone, darting off past the monolithic tree trunk, disappearing behind the toilet block and off up the road. \*\*\* I don’t remember walking home. As I closed the front door behind me I went straight to the toilet and threw up, the terror of brushing so closely up alongside death overcoming me. When I was done, I splashed cold water on my face and brushed my teeth, spearmint not quite erasing the bile in the back of my throat. The sun was just setting now and the still evening air felt stifling inside my tiny living room so I opened the sliding glass door and sat down on the step at the edge of the small deck that fronted my flat, staring out over the small garden at a behemoth drifting up the Solent, container load bound to Southampton. The breeze off the sea was fresh and I soaked it in, closing my eyes and giving myself up into its care, trying not to focus on my adrenalin thoughts. When my heart had quieted marginally, I opened them again and a brown hydrangea at the bottom of the garden, part of the barrier separating the border of the property from the sidewalk alongside the seafront road, caught my eye. I thought suddenly of the lily inside my hallway. The lily that had been teetering on the edge of death that night four weeks ago and was then so vividly alive the next morning; was still alive now. My mind skipped from the lily to the pebble, still cradled in my right pocket, and I lifted my hand in front of my face. On the backside there was a deep red mark, like I’d brushed it up against a boiling pan and removed it too late. It looked like it would blister. I knew that my thigh would be sporting an identical mark. An idea blinked into existence. A ridiculous idea. I reached my scorched hand into my pocket and closed my fingers around the cool stone, withdrawing it and regarding it in front of me, balancing it precariously on the tips of my fingers. It was just an ordinary beach pebble. There were at least a million of them on the short stretch of rocky beach before me. But what if it wasn’t ordinary? I stood and walked to the end of the garden, gripping the rock tightly now and holding it slightly ahead of me as if I might need to let go of it suddenly and needed to be able to spring backwards away from it lest it strike out at me. When I reached the hydrangea, I could see the full extent of its situation. Like my peace lily a month ago, it seemed to be on its last legs, brittle brown leaves crumbling in the gusting wind. I crouched down, putting my face alongside one of the large dry flower heads. “Come on,” I whispered, wondering what my neighbours would think if they saw me murmuring to a dying plant. “You don’t need to die.” I’m not sure what I expected to happen, but the plant gave no indication that it had heard me at all, simply fluttering in the energetic breeze. The rock for its part sat unchanged and unchanging within my grasp, as cool and rough as any sane person would expect it to be. I let out a rush of held breath and chuckled, chastising myself for thinking anything so absurd. I grasped one of the hydrangea’s brown leaves and began to crinkle it, feeling the crisp crackle as it shattered between my fingers. I remembered then that I had touched my dying lily that night a month ago, not to destroy it, but to encourage it, to stroke it reassuringly. My chest felt empty then as I dropped the disintegrated leaf onto the grass below and reached out for another. The leaf I chose was brown like all the others, but there were a few remaining flecks of green, bastions of chlorophyll standing resolute against the onslaught of decay. I held the delicate leaf between my fingertips like I might hold a child’s hand; like I’d held her little hand as she lay on the grass. “You can do it,” I whispered. “Don’t give up.” Heat bloomed in my right hand, nearly enough to for me to drop the pebble inside, but I kept my grip, feeling the heat as it developed a pulse in tune with my own. It was intense, but bearable, not the searing heat I had felt earlier when I told the girl to breathe. I remained unmoving, isolated from the world around me as the stone slowly cooled, its uncanny warmth dissipating into my fingers and up my arm until it was cool once again and I was calm once again. I released the leaf then and stood to make my way back inside. There was not a doubt in my mind that when I looked out at the sea across the garden tomorrow morning, I would find the hydrangea in perfect health. \*\*\* “Was I right? Was it the one for you?” She didn’t look at me as she asked, but stayed stooped over, keenly inspecting a particularly large, grey-blue pebble; turning it over with clack to examine the underside. I didn’t think she’d heard me approach. “It was,” I answered, bending to pick up the stone when she nodded her satisfaction that it met her criteria, wobbling a crooked finger instructively at it before stepping carefully away to examine a new one. It was far heavier than the one she’d given me that day on the promenade. I picked my way across the short distance to her cart, opened the cover and peered inside at the contents. She’d been busy for a while before I’d arrived, it was almost three-quarters full of pebbles. Large ones, tiny ones, perfectly round ones and oddly shaped ones. And each one perfect. “Things will be different now you know,” she said to me. I looked at her and smiled and said, “I hope so.” And not only did I hope, I believed.