Ammonite

You go at low tide after a storm. That's the whole trick. The cliffs come down a bit in the weather and the sea sorts what's fallen and if you're there before the crowds and the dog walkers, sometimes, on the wet grey shingle, there's a curl. Beth came with me in February. She's thirty. She's a solicitor in Exeter and she's got a good coat now and a phone that never stops, and the last time she came to Charmouth with me she was nine and had a red bucket and cried when the tide came in over her wellies. "I don't know why I said yes to this," she said, in the car park at seven in the morning. "Because you wanted to." "Because you asked in that voice." We walked east. Slowly. I'm seventy-eight and the shingle isn't what it was, or I'm not. The trick to seeing them is to stop looking. You let your eyes go soft and the fossil's a different shape from everything around it, a spiral in a world of lumps, and your eye catches on it before your brain does. I told her that when she was nine. "You told me that when I was nine." "It's still true." Forty minutes. Nothing. A lot of grey. Then she stopped. "Grandad." She was looking at something by her boot. She didn't pick it up. She'd remembered that too. A little one, Promicroceras probably, the size of a two-pence piece, cleaned by the sea to a bright gold, sitting on the shingle like it had been put there. She picked it up. She turned it over. I watched her face do the thing it did when she was nine, before the solicitor and the coat and the phone, a sort of opening. "It's gold." "Pyrite. They go like that here." "How old?" "About a hundred and ninety million years." "Right," she said. "Right. Okay." Neither of us said anything for a bit. The tide was on the turn and I thought: that's the one. That's the one she'll keep on the windowsill. I'll be gone and it'll be on a windowsill in Exeter and she'll pick it up sometimes, and I don't need to say any of that, so I didn't. "Come on," I said. "Tide." "Grandad, I'm thirty, I can see the tide." "Then you'll know we've got twenty minutes." We got back to the car with fifteen. She's coming again in March. She asked, not me.