Model descriptive compositions

The market sprawled across the square like a dropped blanket, stalls overlapping at every edge, the canvas roofs catching the low September sun in uneven flashes of orange. Even from the top of the steps, I could hear it before I could see it properly - a thousand overlapping noises stitched together: the slap of fish on wet slate, the hiss of oil, a radio two stalls over stuttering between stations, and underneath it all the low mutter of haggling.

Nearer the centre, the colours thickened. Pomegranates were stacked in trembling red pyramids; courgettes lay in polished green rows as if they had been buffed for a portrait. A woman in a mustard cardigan was picking through peppers with the careful attention of a jeweller, lifting each one to the light before rejecting it with a small, final shake of her head.

The fisherman was the one I kept coming back to. His hands were the colour of soaked rope, thick-knuckled and careful, and a crescent of silver scale was stuck to his thumbnail, catching the light whenever he gestured. He scooped mackerel from the ice with a kind of tired tenderness, as if each one were an apology he was handing over in silver paper.

I walked out through the far edge of the square as the stalls began folding themselves up for the evening. The dropped blanket was being quietly gathered in, corner by corner, leaving the cobblestones darker where the crates had stood. A single pomegranate seed glowed in the gutter - the last bright full-stop of the afternoon.

The beach was a room with the furniture pushed back against the walls. The tide had gone out so far that the sand stretched out in glistening, ribbed plains where only the wind and a few arguing gulls were left to move. The air tasted of rust and old weather.

Nothing had been forgotten here, exactly, but nothing had been taken away either. A single plastic bucket, pale blue, its handle snapped, sat upright in the dimple where a child must have left it that morning. A length of orange fishing line was winding itself slowly round a piece of driftwood as if it had somewhere to be.

The rock pools held the only colour. Bend down, and each one was a stained-glass window set into the flat sand: orange anemones half-open in the warm water, the slow, considered scribble of a hermit crab, a strand of emerald weed tilting with the current as if listening for something underground.

The tide would come back. It always did. For now, though, the beach kept its empty room to itself, and when I turned to leave, my footprints were already filling with bright, slow water - the tide closing the door behind me, politely, one step at a time.

My grandmother’s kitchen was always warmer than the rest of the house, even in August. The heat came from the old gas stove, which purred constantly and smelled faintly of sulphur, and from the tiled walls, which held on to every summer’s worth of sunlight and gave it back slowly throughout the year.

There was a clock above the sink with a face like a dinner plate. It lost five minutes every day and nobody had ever bothered to fix it, so the kitchen ran on its own quiet, incorrect time. When I was small I believed, half-seriously, that the clock was doing it on purpose to keep us there a little longer.

Under the table, the lino was patterned with faint blue anchors that had worn away to ghosts where our feet had always rested. I remember running my fingers along the grain of the wood underneath, finding the place where I had once carved a wobbly M with a fork and been spanked for it - the scar still there, softened now, almost affectionate.

She is gone now, and the kitchen has been painted a colour I don’t recognise. But when I am tired, or hungry, or homesick in a city that is not mine, I can still put my hand under an imaginary table and find that small, stubborn M waiting for me - and the clock, five minutes slow, keeping its patient, wrong time.