The Sand Dog. Sarah Lean

had raised me there because my parents had died.

      The bench was still outside the cottage by the window where Grandfather used to sit in his cap with his walking stick, indigo tattoo on his bare hairy arm: an anchor coiled with the tentacles of a sea monster. When I was little I used to brush at the hairs of his arm, smoothing them down to see the picture clearly; he’d say, ‘It’s the two sides of being a man of the sea, Azi. The anchor for feeling steady while the battle with the monster rages.’

      Two cottages had been pulled down next to Grandfather’s, not long ago, and two were deserted, decaying on the other side. His cottage had walls thick with white paint, which I had always helped him redo every other year. His blue front door was the same bright colour as the scales of paint left on the one I’d found on the sea. After I’d found the passport, I’d started to think about that door. The second sign must be to do with the cottage. Maybe this was where I’d find my birth certificate. That was the last thing that I needed to get a passport, find Grandfather and make him come home.

      A small patch of concrete with crazy-shaped cemented stones, painted white round the edges, lay under the sandy dust at the front of the cottage. A pot with dried weeds was by the door and a key still underneath. I hadn’t been in there since Grandfather had left because Uncle had said I wasn’t allowed to, but now I let myself in and the dog came too.

      I remembered the days when I’d find Grandfather asleep in his chair in the gloom at the back of the room, head rolled forward over his chest, several days’ growth of silver stubble speckling his slack mouth, his shawl slipped to the floor and an empty glass held loosely in his hands. I looked around at the thinness of the life we’d left behind in the cottage. The walls grim with a crust of paint, the swirls of dust on the tiled floor, the gas bottle and rubber tube to the cooker, the space underneath the wooden staircase where I used to sleep. A bright corner of light poured down the stairs from the window in the bedroom and had been my morning alarm clock.