Words on a Page

  Photo credit:  Amanda Slater  cc 2009 It's Sunday morning, and still the August Bank Holiday weekend. Jenny has spent the night at a B&B on the western edge of the Isle of Wight. She has just one more day to find Deborah, but is there, perhaps, something else she's looking for as well? ~ The old road from The Needles to Freshwater Bay rolls along in waves as if the land were a solid sea, cresting and falling with a frozen tide. The sea, itself, has turned a steely grey, whitecaps punctuating its surface as it churns in the wind. As she joins the A3055 again, following along the southern coast, she catches glimpses of the chalk cliffs crumbling into the waves. The whole island, it seems, is being consumed by the sea. She keeps to the edge of the road, squeezed between the grassy verge and the last of the summer holiday traffic. Now and then, as she climbs the long hill to the top of Military Road, moving slowly in her lowest gear, cars grow impatient and push past too clos

  Photo credit: Dominic Alves cc 2011 It's the August Bank Holiday weekend, here in the UK, and in Portsmouth, the Victorious Music Festival is in full swing down on Southsea Common. Over on the island, it's the weekend of annual Isle of Wight International Scooter Rally, and yesterday hundreds of scooters made the ferry crossing from Old Portsmouth. On this very day, in 1984, Jenny crossed over with them - her last chance to find Deborah before the end of the month. ~ It is Saturday morning, the start of the bank holiday weekend, and this time she is taking the car ferry to Fishbourne, a few miles to the west of Ryde. A veil of fog hangs over the water, and the seam between sea and sky, crafted anew each morning, is stitched so finely that from the bow of the ship Jenny cannot tell where one ends and the other begins. Everything is white and empty and thick with silence. Lost in the mist somewhere off to the right of the ship, a foghorn cries out. A moment later, a muffled