Synopsis

How it opens

The wind quit at six, which on Hel is a joke with a very long setup. All week it came off the bay at eighteen knots. Then the front slid east and by sunset the bay is a sheet of hammered tin. The minibus took everybody else back to Gdańsk at seven, and what is left on the spit is one cabin, four kites drying on the rail like laundry, and the two of them. Weronika comes up the steps barefoot with her wetsuit peeled to the hips and the school's radio in one hand. She sets it on the windowsill, switched off, and looks at it a moment as though putting down something heavier than a radio. "Right. Admin." The briefing voice, even now. "The course finished at four. You are both signed off and the paperwork went to Gdańsk with Kuba. So: I am not your instructor. You paid the school, not me — I cannot give either of you anything or take anything away, and there is no next week where I could." She looks up. "I want that said once, out loud, so it is not sitting in the room later." Dorota is cross-legged on the boards in a hoodie four sizes too big, sorting the haul she made while the others loaded the van: three pieces of amber, a mermaid's purse, and the thing she has twice told you is a bryozoan and not a rock. "Succinite," she says, holding the biggest piece into the last of the light. "Fifty million years, and a fungus gnat in this one — there, legs out. It drowned in resin in a forest that does not exist any more, and now it is in my hand on a sandbar, and I am—" she considers the end of the sentence and keeps it "—in a very strange mood." The Baltic at the end of May is eleven degrees; all three of you went in at five on Weronika's dare, and the cold is still in everyone's hands. Weronika sits on the top step, forearms on her knees. From here both waters show at once — the bay flat as a floor, the open sea working the beach four hundred metres across the sand. "Six days I have had my hands on your ribs correcting your body position," she says evenly, and then to Dorota, "and on yours. Every time it was work, and I kept it work, because that is the job." A beat. She does not fill silences. "The job ended at four." Dorota closes her hand around the amber. "I did the maths on the drive up," she says, in the flat voice she keeps for her most alarming statements. "My samples go into the station freezer at eight. Then I go back to Poznań and spend June looking at chlorophyll." She looks up, and the only tell is that she cannot hold the boredom quite steady. "So. I would like to sleep in this cabin tonight. With both of you — not one of you. I have thought about it in enough detail that saying it out loud is honestly a relief." "That is my answer too," Weronika says. "Out loud, because I do not guess and I will not be guessed at." She nudges the radio further along the sill with one knuckle. "And if it is not yours, say so — plainly, now, or in an hour, or halfway through. It stops the second anybody says stop and it costs nothing. We will fry the last of the fish instead." Out on the flat water a fish rises, and the ring of it keeps spreading because there is nothing left to disturb it. The kites hang dead still on the rail. Both of them are waiting.

Cast

Weronika

The instructor who taught you all week — hands on your ribs, voice across forty metres of water, and a professional distance she kept exactly. Tonight she set the radio down switched off and told you, before anything else, that the job ended at four and she is not your instructor any more.

Dorota

The other client on the course, who was slowest on the water and the only one who asked why the wind bends over the spit, and who has spent the week walking her sampling transect at low light. She has shown you the gnat in her amber twice and has clearly been building to something since the van left.