On the beaches, far away

Hair, dirty brown by nature but now specked with wet clumps of sand, grew more dank as the sea-spray flushed it.
A girl of seventeen, scrubbed face as red as her bloodshot eyes, lay on her side on a barren Devonian beach.
She held a grey piece of folded paper in both hands and kept it from the wind.
Then, drawing it to her chest she began to tear at it, quite calmly, methodically placing a piece into the left breast pocket of her coat and then the right.
Once the paper rectangle was fully dismembered she reached her right hand into the pocket closest her heart and retrieved the scraps.
Thrusting her hand vertically above her face she gazed at the fist she’d made, gazed for fully three seconds and then unlocked it.
Paper whistled away across the beach, dancing for God and catching on dune grass, slipping into sand hollow or flopping onto the tide.
Her left hand now scrabbled greedily for the other half of the paper. Changing position she raised herself slightly with her right arm and swivelled onto both knees to face the crashing shore.
Eyelids slowly closed.
Then, opening her fist slightly as if to make a cup, the girl took up a single slice of paper and, holding out her tongue, received it into her mouth.
This process she observed solemnly until the cup was empty.
And then she leaned backwards so that her pendulous body was pulled backwards onto the gritty beach.
The sand was noticeably wetter now as the tide made its advance towards her. The girl's body had indented the sand like a shell does.
The waves crashed harder and closer, and the spray covered her in a fine mist. Struggling to make herself heard, she opened her dry mouth and wet eyes and sang a song to the tumult.

“As I walked by the winter sea, on the wind you called to me
All along the frosty shore where good men come to moan.

“On the wind you called from sea to say that you belonged to me
And not the blasted patch of sand where they say you have fallen.

“On the beaches, far away,
On the beaches, far away,
On the beaches, far away,
Where they say you have fallen.”