A countryside mystery for young readers

By Gareth M. Parkes

The mud went on forever, or so it seemed.

Benji had come down to Pagham Harbour at the lowest point of the tide, when the whole wide basin between Selsey and Sidlesham lay open to the sky — silver mud and green eelgrass and threading channels catching the West Sussex light, the water pulled back so far that the harbour looked less like a harbour than a country of its own, waiting to be walked. Sea lavender stood in faded mauve drifts along the marsh edge. Out over the flats, a scattering of brent geese fed with their heads down, newly arrived from somewhere far north and cold, the way they arrived every autumn without fail.

Benji's red collar caught the low light as he picked his way along the boardwalk at the reserve's edge, nose working the salt air.

He almost missed her.

A patch of weed at the base of the boardwalk had moved — not with the wind, which had dropped to nothing, but with something underneath it. Benji stopped and looked closer.

A crab. Small, and strange to look at — not the dark, glossy green he'd have expected, but pale and soft, almost translucent at the edges, tucked into the weed as if she were trying to become part of it.

"Please don't," she said, before he'd done anything at all. "I know how I look. Please don't."

"I wasn't going to," Benji said gently. "My name is Benji Booboos."

The crab was quiet for a moment, watching him with eyes on their small stalks. Then, carefully: "Samphire."

"Are you hurt?" Benji asked.

"No," Samphire said. And then, because the truth was clearly pressing to get out: "I'm soft. I moulted this morning, and I don't know this part of the harbour, and the tide's going to turn in an hour, and I have nowhere to be small in."

It took Benji a moment to understand.

"You shed your shell," he said slowly.

"Everyone does, if they mean to grow," Samphire said, with the particular patience of someone explaining something for what felt like the hundredth time, though it was probably the first. "You can't grow inside armour that already fits. So you leave it. All of it — the old shell splits down the back and you simply walk out of yourself, and for a few days you're this—" she gestured at her own pale, unfinished-looking body with something between embarrassment and defiance "—until the new shell hardens around you."

"That sounds frightening," Benji said.

"It's necessary," Samphire said. "It isn't the same thing." She said it, Benji thought, like someone who had decided the distinction mattered and intended to keep believing it. "Ordinarily I'd have done it somewhere I knew. Under the old boat timbers by Selsey Bill, where my family has always sheltered — crabbers have worked those waters longer than anyone can properly remember, and the wrecked hull's been there almost as long, and I know every gap in it blind." She looked out at the unfamiliar mud stretching in every direction. "But the tide carried me east in the night, before I'd finished, and I came out of my old shell here instead. Somewhere I don't know at all."