This island is small, neatly shaped. Its cliffs are high as towers and streaked with white from the roosting birds. These cliffs echo with bird calls and to look up at them from a rocking boat is to feel tiny, and cold. Feathers come down and settle by your feet. They drift on the water like dreams.

      There aren’t many trees, on this island. Nor are there many houses, but there are some; they all have missing tiles, damp window frames and peeling paint. Their names are blunt: Wind Rising, or Crest. Calor gas bottles stand by back doors.

      There is litter on the beaches. The wheel-arches of cars are brown with rust.

      Strands of grey fleece shake on wire.

      There is a lighthouse, too. It stands at the north end of the island and swings its slow, pale beam over the fields, the bedroom walls and the night-time sea.

      Let us call it Parla. Names do not matter, as they never truly do in the tales I know. What matters are the people themselves – the souls who have lived on this island and how they have felt on its sand and rocks. Many generations of firm, resolute people have mended their nets here, or pressed their knees onto sheep as they’ve sheared them. The men have caught gannets for eating; women have gathered seaweed at low tide, with baskets strapped to their backs and their skirts hitched up. They have fed their children kale and sour milk, sang their sea songs, and they’ve lived in fear of God and the waves. That was years ago. But there are still photos – blurred, soft-edged.

      Now, the Parlans live by other means – sheep, tourists, sponge cakes, crafts that they sell on the internet and send to the mainland in protective wrap. One woman knits teacosies and baby clothes; another paints in an attic room with skylights that close themselves suddenly in the gusty, north-westerly winds. No-one eats gannets these days. But they still have their own vegetable patches, and still reach for eggs under downy behinds. They still stand on the headland from time to time with their arms held out, and let their coats fill up with the wind. They still drink too much, or some do. They know the moon’s cycle as their forefathers did.

      And the sea. They still know the sea or as much as any human can. It is part of them, in their blood; it shapes their lives as the sea shapes a stone over the months and years. Some cannot sleep inland. They cannot be where there aren’t sea sounds – for Parla is never, ever quiet. Even in calm weather there is the lap lap lap against the quayside or the clack of mussel shells as the water rises over them. At Tap Hole, when the tide is rough or at its highest, the sea sprays through the single hole in its roof – a puff and a splattering, like a whale’s breath. Near the harbour, there are cliffs which are curved to make a bowl of water so that the sea is trapped, or nearly; it says stash, stash, as it tries to get out. The water here is weedy. There is an oily shine to the sea, at The Stash – and rubbish. Once, a rubber duck – and no-one knew why. A well-travelled duck, they called it. George Moss took it back for his son and it sits by their bath, even now.

      The youngest Bright daughter – in her mid-sixties – remembers the single wave that rose up against the lighthouse one winter, when she was a girl. It smacked against the lantern’s glass. It struck the tower with such a deep, thundering boom that she had felt it inside her – under her ribs. She’d held the wall, in fear. It woke something in her, that shuddering wave – a womanly knowledge that she both wanted and was scared of, but had no name for. She knows it all much better, now.

      Maybe that’s the sea telling stories of its own. Like me it has a lust for them; it cannot stop saying listen to this … Listen to me … After all, think of the tales it has – the deaths, the near-deaths, the curious lives. Even now, as I am telling this, there is the handclap of a wave that falls back into itself and the gentle hiss that follows. Soon, a sprawled, moon-blue jellyfish will rise to the surface and give two slow clenches. Against the black water, it will glow.

      Before he died, Tom Bundy said I have never known silence. Never. He had been born in the fields at Wind Rising. Each hour of his life had had the sea in it. His early death did, too.

      * * *

      Can you hear it? The water? It breathes, as you breathe.

      I want you to hear the whole island – as it is now, at this very moment. There is the sea’s stirring, always. But also, there are many sounds on Parla which are more than the waves, more than stones being moved by them. The sheep bleat, throatily. A wooden gate squeaks open. There are tiny bells on a piece of string which dance, and call out sing-sing-sing. In a house with herbs on its windowsill a kettle is boiling – its metal lid is starting to rattle, and there are footsteps coming to it and a woman is saying I’m here, I’m here … to the kettle, as if the kettle understands her. She lifts it up with a tea-towel; there is the sound of a mug filling up. Elsewhere, a dog scratches its ear. On the quayside, a child crouches; she watches a crab creep in a red plastic bucket, tapping the sides with its claws. The old pig farm, empty now, creaks in the late afternoon sun. There is also washing on a clothesline – four pillowcases which snap at themselves, and a pair of striped socks. The line itself bounces in the breeze – up and down.

      There is the tick-tick of computer keys.

      A