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Looking up, they saw above them fish swimming through the sky and heard the sound of a supermarket trolley being dragged along the pebble beach. It was a metal sound and not pleasant. It was hot and the sea was quiet and the tide was gentle. The water was an inviting colour of blue and the sun was milky white in the lonely sky. A cloud with sharp contours came across at unnatural speed and blurred the brilliance of the beating sun and cast odd shadows across the beach head. There was a series of red metal structures nearby that stood as siblings waiting in line for the dentist. The things were very big and hard looking. They lifted themselves upwards but the seaweed had wrapped around their body and enveloped them whole. It was slippery and they felt themselves being coerced towards the water’s edge. Looking to the side, they saw three other people: the old person pushing the supermarket trolley back and forth across the pebbles; a person in scuba diving gear taking great steps towards the placid water; someone dressed up in their finest clothes with high heel shoes that kept sinking deep into the sand near the shoreline. The old man was smoking a pipe and whorls of purple smoke beckoned themselves into the sea air. The fish in the air had turned into soaring gulls and their voices were now recorded echoes of ancestral past playing on loop. They looked up at the screaming birds and saw that they had formed a pattern in the sky that spelled the word: HERITAGE. They wondered aloud what this might mean, and then felt the slippery pull of the seaweed again, tugging them ever closer to the water.

In the water, they felt an immediate splinter of bone aching pain. Then a searing heat hit them. And then the seaweed loosened and fell away from their body like hair being sheared in one stroke from a resistant sheep. They moved their hands across their body which had been a moment ago encased in a slimy protective skein. Now it was gone, and so too were their clothes. They floated without effort on their back and let the strange movements of the tide take them as they pleased.

The gulls had dispersed, and the peculiar cloud formation and dissipated, too, and the only thing in the sky now was the great big orb that was the sun. All of a sudden, the tranquility of the scene was disturbed and between their legs rose the scuba diver. They lifted off their goggles and pulled out the thing that was in their mouth and said:

“I’m sucking on this thing and it just won’t work very well.”

The person looked very stern and cross.

The person then looked dead into their eyes and said, with no emotion or particular intonation of note: “remember the things that are left unsaid.”

The diver then disappeared and left them in a state of confusion. The sun spun a few times on its axis and stretched itself into an oval. The water grew hot then cold. And the gulls reappeared in the sky above. They looked behind them and saw that there was no longer a coastline and that they had drifted so far that the only thing that they could see was an endless vision of water.

“What did that person mean,” they thought.

Then they realised: the most important thing in life is not the actions we take, or the things we think are real, or the things we pretend we see or know, or the things we say and do, but rather, the things that are left unsaid.