It looks like the end of the world out here, or the beginning. Mud, waters, and the tide stirring them - that's all. Air moving past your face in a desperate, soughing rush - salt, and brackish seaweed spat out by the sea, brown and bubbly, hooked round slimy rocks so you can hardly tell vegetable from mineral any more. Everything grey-bronze, slippery and shining wet.
That day, a row boat was drawn up at the edge of the water, you could only tell it was on water rather than land because it jerked restively against its rope, grey and oozing like the rest. Further up the mud two sail boats leant together for support. Nothing moves of its own volition, only swerves in the sea, flaps in the wind. The flapping, slapping noise intensifies as the wind heightens, and the masts across the river ring out like bells.
Over by the row boat something else flaps, something whiter than all the rest - not gleaming white, but discernibly pale. The movement catches his eye, the solitary dog walker. Sixty two, widowed last year, up early, trying to flee a hangover, blow it away in the salt air. He comes closer, curious, and his dog raises its head from the enticing smell of dead crab it was investigating, and bounds over, oddly skittish. He notices that, because his dog is old, and rarely excited now.
The man draws closer, close enough to see over the rim of the vessel, to see in. The white is her sleeve, her trailing lace sleeve. The rest of her lies there, held in the womb-like hug of the boat's wooden ribs, her long white dress bundled around her, her face radiant to the sky. Her eyes still open. Her left hand across her breast, with its useless armoury of rings. Do you take her, til death you do part?
The man goes down on his corduroy knees and it isn't in pure shock. He feels the cold mud kissing his knee caps as he stares at her. In his befuddled state - he shouldn't have finished the bottle, he knew that, it still sat on his bedside table reproachfully, the other table empty ten months now - he feels he wants to push her out to sea, alight perhaps, a Viking bride to Valhalla. She is very blonde. But of course he can't. He takes one last look at her beautiful, dead face, calls his old dog away from sniffing her hand, and retraces his steps to the phone box on the hard. He calls them in.
And then, then it all begins.