She fingered at the small felt purse within her pocket. A scarf wound tightly around her chin and mouth to keep out the bitter cold. The slight salt spray stung at her cheeks and the wind gently pulled her back as she walked slowly along the shore line. The imprints of her footfall made tiny silver pools that flashed in the bright sunlight before a bubbling foam crept up, quickly shrinking down her dark presence against the tooth white afternoon.

He had been insistent that no other material be used. Nothing else would suffice for the delicate task of time collection. Felt, he said, had long possessed the magical properties required for holding together the pieces of a lost past.

She had agonised for days over what size the purse should be, whether or not the felt should be dyed, contain a zip, button or drawer string to pull it closed. How big it should be? Would one piece of time be bigger than the next? Or, once one piece had been found, would it grow and change shape as it linked and connected to other places and faces and memories? And where should this felt be from? He had once talked about the origin of objects having a spiritual connection with their owner, so much so that he had once felt haunted by an old Roma gypsy for stealing a ring from a dusty antique shop.

The felt then, she concluded, should be new, without a previous owner bar that of the animal from which it once grew. Perhaps the wool should be sourced from her local place of birth? Yet the times she needed to find the most were from her days up in the North. The days before the world stopped turning and there was nothing left but for what now lacked within her. The only fragments she could piece together had been a dirty tuft of blonde hair snagged upon a bowed line of barbed wire. Dark soil and wet grass. The feeling her tongue gave as she pushed it back and forth over a loose incisor. The blood bubbles and spittle on the back of her hand as she wiped at her chin. These were pieces she had already collected, that she kept within a small flint stone that they had dislodged from the deep gash within her arm. “You will place the stone within the purse” he said. “It’s the foundation around which you will build your past”.

She finally decided to order herself a ticket up to the old country. It made sense that she should find the purse up there and also be in the very place where her time had been lost. Not long after the incident, she had felt that distance and hindsight would replace what had been stolen. And if it hadn’t been for that distance, she would never have met him: her Soothsayer.  The un-washed and grub smeared old hippie in his blue stained jumper who had taken up squatting residence in the snug of her mother’s old potting shed. With his coarse ginger hair and bright red beard that snarled like a damp fox around his chin, it had been a surprise to find him there one Sunday morning. Crunched over a small gas stove, humming to himself as he scraped a fork along the ridges of a half eaten can of baked beans. “You’ve lost something” he said, spitting orange bits over his bottom lip and squinting up at her calmly. “If you let me stay here tonight, then I will tell you how to find it”.

As the train wound its way around the coast, it came to her that the sea should be where she would start to look. He had prophesized that she would instinctively know where to begin only when her journey had truly begun. A small child smashed his greasy peanut fingers into the arm rest beside her and pointed to the passing ocean that grew darker and threateningly royal the further north that they went. “Shurl” it dribbled. “Shell?” his mother said, “Shurl” he replied knocking off his bobble hat to reveal tufts of soft white hair. Yes, there had been shells she thought. Shells were wound within his hair. She closed her eyes to sleep.

The Green Shed was the name of a small haberdashery tucked away into a winding cobbled street where she found the small felt purse that she now took out of her pocket to examine. The dark colour of red wine, a small string gently pulled to close it together. The old woman behind the counter had snatched at the money given to her before pushing it into a brown paper bag and thrusting it in her direction. “We don’t do returns” she barked before turning back to a small gas heater and rubbing her fingerless gloved hands together.

Returns.

She had returned.

And now she had the tool needed to collect her lost pieces. Her pieces of time. She made her way outside into the biting wind and down to the cliff edge, ready for her climb down to the beach front. Ready to climb down inside herself.