DING DING DING

It’s a pleasant walk in the sun along a long, long stone pier, the lighthouse at the end waiting for you, the sea a dark blue chaos of wavelets, and the possibility of dolphins once you reach the end, sleek backs arching in and out of the water in joyful play.br> As you get further out you start to pass the occasional fisherman sat on an upturned crate or camping stool, watching the line disappearing out into nothing, thinking fishermen thoughts. Then there’s a ding ding ding of a small bicycle bell behind you. You make sure you walk in a straight line, as it does sound like a tiny bell, so it’s probably some small child wobbling along with a determined expression and parents not far behind.
You hear the rattle of wheels across the cobbles, and it looks like you’re right: small pink bike, strips of bright coloured foil on the handlebars streaming in the sea breeze, a little figure in a big pink helmet, head down with the effort, and ding, ding, ding.
br> So you smile, and think of when your children were first learning to ride, and then as it passes the little figure lifts its head and turns its head and under the helmet, where the face should be, there is nothing.br> Nothing at all.br> The rider rides on towards the end of the pier and the bell goes ding ding ding and you both say that can’t have been, even though you know it was. You walk on to the end of the pier, terrified of what you might find there but desperate to know if you saw what you saw, and you reach the steps up to the lighthouse round. You climb with an empty heart, and sick feeling in your gut, but you walk around and there’s nothing there but men staring out to sea, lost in their own escape from the land. br> You walk around the lighthouse twice, and then stop and look at each other. There is no where the bike and its rider could have gone. You walk back slowly and you talk of overwork and the light of the sea and optical illusions and after a while you laugh, but you don’t sleep well for weeks afterwards, and you still sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and think: did I just hear a bell? And sometimes, if you are honest with yourself, you know that you did.br>