The late afternoon sunshine glinted off the turquoise water, dazzling her eyes, so that Jessica didn’t immediately notice the bottle rolling steadily on the lip of the tide.
She bent and picked it out of the shallow water, noting the barnacles and the tendrils of seaweed on the amber, salt-mottled glass.
It was clear that the bottle had been in the sea for some time. It was topped with a cork, of the type used for good-quality spirits, and some kind of wax sealant had been wedged in the neck of the bottle, giving added protection to the contents within – a roll of yellowed paper tied with pink ribbon.
There was a message inside! Jessica’s heart leapt with childish excitement.
Such messages had held a fascination for Jessica throughout her childhood. She’d been captivated by stories of bottles washed up on beaches, sometimes as many as 100 years after their launching.
She’d filled her adolescent imaginings with tales of sailors in treacherous seas tossing last desperate declarations of love to those left back on land, and stories of navigators and nautical chart-makers sending out bottles to discover more about the tides in unexplored oceans.
Such stories had encouraged Jessica and her best friend Lizzy to launch their own bottles from Brighton Pier one hot afternoon in August, hoping to find boyfriends. Their 12-year-old bodies flooding with hormones, they’d leant over the railings and flung the bottles, with much ceremony and melodrama, into the English Channel.
Jessica had often thought about those bottles and, for
