said my grandmother, staring out to sea, her cardigan tucked into very beige trousers.

"What do you mean?" I asked her.

She screwed her eyes up.

"Oh, you know," she said.

I had a bag of chips in my lap, which made the tops of my legs warm. We were in Whitby, overlooking the harbour.

"Like piranhas?" I said.

She nodded.

"Crocodiles?"

She tilted her head, smiled.

"Yes. Just like that."

My grandmother looked tired. She looked tired from a disease I couldn't pronounce.

"But there are also good things from water, right?" I said, eating a chip. "Like dolphins. Like cod."

I knew how much my grandmother loved cod and chips, so this was surely the winner.

She laughed. She pushed her hands down to her knees. She did it so hard it was like she was trying to push her knees right out of their sockets.

I put my hand on her hand. It was so cold.

"No," she said, eventually. "That's not right. Those things are taken from water; they don't come from water. We take cod to eat. We take dolphins to ogle at in aquariums. Name one good thing that comes from water."

I thought about this for a while. We sat on the bench, freezing. I couldn't eat the rest of my chips, and a dense roke was coming off the North Sea.

My grandmother would die in three days.

I honestly couldn't think of anything good coming from water.

.