I knew that someone would come eventually, that my release from Detention would create some ripples. However, judging by the age of the young man who stood on the step of my small seaside cottage, those ripples weren't huge. He explained who he was and what he wanted, but I knew what he was here for. He wanted a story with human interest, something to pull at the heartstrings. I knew because, almost ten years ago to the day, that is exactly what I had set out looking for.

I was a hack, an ageing, drunken, overweight hack, but I knew a good story when I heard it. And this one had that front page smell all over it. The story had first broken in a local paper, before going national, three years previously. A child had been found naked and bedraggled sitting on the rocks of the shore humming to herself. The old couple who found her thought she was one of the children from the caravan park up the road, a holiday maker who had gotten herself lost, but it was soon clear that there was more to it.

The police were called and then the social workers. For a few months there was a flurry of interest in the press. Who was the child? Where did she come from? What had happened to her? How could her parents do this and what could be done to prevent this from ever happening again?

At first, the authorities had made every effort to find the girl's parents. But when no developments were forthcoming, they soon lost interest and the child and the events that surrounded her gradually faded from the limelight. As time went by, it seemed clear that the girl had been abandoned. It was assumed that she had been stripped to prevent her clothes being used to identify herand, worse still, it was thought that her parents had left her on the freezing cold beach to die of exposure or wander into the sea and drown.

It had been quite a scandal at the time, and hundreds of people had come forward to adopt the child. But the courts had dragged their heals over what was to become of her and--with a police investigation still pending--it had taken three years for them to decide whether she was to be sent to a normaal home. This was why I was there, at the children's home; at the Center. They had finally been given permission to appeal for adoptive parents for the child.

Not that they now held out much hope. The Centres warden--he preferred to be called ‘surrogate carer’--told me that the girl had numerous social problems, and was apparently educcationally sub normal. She refused to wear clothes and it was a daily battle to get her in them and then to keep them on her. She'd had no understanding of toilet training when she had been delivered to them and even now was fearful of the toilet. She became disruptive when bathed, splashing and thrashing as if she were having a fit, and screaming blue murder when the attendants tried to remove her from the tub. She bit the other children, she alienated herself from them, she couldn't read or write, and showed no knowledge of either letters or numbers. She refused to eat certain foods and would simply play with others and she would spend most of her days standing and staring out of the window.

As we walked along the dull grey green corridors the warden felt the obvious urge to try and 'sell' the story to me. He didn't realize that, to me, she was just the next story, the next paycheque and the mortgage paid again this month.

"It's sad really," he said. "She's a bright enough creature, but she hasn't said a recognisable word since the time she came here."

I nodded and added a 'hmmm' here and there to let him know I was really listening, but I couldn't help but feel uncomfortable in the place. The windows were sealed over with a fine mesh. I didn't know if it was to prevent the patients from escaping or from harming themselves, but it made the place feel more like a prison than a children's home.

But then, I told myself. This is no ordinary children's home. It's for children with severe behavioural or learning disabilities.

I tried not to let that get to me; to be the all-caring, Eco-friendly, politically correct person that we all want to be, but it just gave me the creeps. To tell the truth I was more than a little nervous before I entered the place. I had experience of disturbed children and--helpless or not--after the third time one has bitten you and drawn blood you end up being wary of them.

As we walked, I saw a little boy, about five standing in the corner smacking his head against the wall. He was wearing some sort of helmet and, when a nurse came across him, she just turned him around and sent him on his way with a gentle pat on his back. I couldn't help but feel that he would just wander along until he reached the next wall.

The corridors echoed with strange shrieks and cries, gibbering and wails and many tiny pale faces pressed against the safety glass panels in the doors. We turned up into another dismal corridor and I heard it for the first time: a sound that made me want to laugh and cry all at once; a sound that made my heart feel that it was so full that it was breaking.

Someone was singing.

I stopped dead in my tracks and cocked my head so that I could hear it more fully and try and work out just where it was coming from.

"It’s her," the Warden--sorry the surrogate carer--said and I gaped at him in amazement. "She hasn't said a single word since she came here, but she sings like that almost everyday."

It was beautiful to hear. It wasn't a song as you or I would ever sing it, but phrases of sounds--somehow human--but at the same time unearthly. The only time I have ever heard anything like it was during the evening when my pregnant and dreadfully New Age sister made me sit and listen to whale song with her.

The child's room was typical of the building, the same drab, grey-green walls, the furniture, the sort of cheap tubular stuff you find in all these authoritarian buildings. A space had been left in the centre and the staff had done their best to cheer it up by painting a giant snakes and ladders board in garish colours. Here and there toys lay scattered about and abandoned and several books lay spread-eagled, spine up in a random scattering.

The child, looking painfully thin and pale against the window, stood in the corner. She didn't acknowledge our entry to the room; she simply stood there and stared forlornly outwards. I was struck with the look of her. She had that fragile radiance one sees all too often in children who are faced with a struggle for their very lives. She was swamped by the cream pyjamas that she wore, her tiny pale hands and feet almost lost in the holes. Her face was quite flat, with wide plains for her cheeks that were sallow in colour. Her nose was tiny, barely formed and above it she had huge, dark brown eyes, above all this was hair, sable I think they'd call the colour if you asked for it in a salon. Lustrous and brown, it fell across her forehead and swept down her back.

She looked so sad that I wanted to run right over and cuddle her, and when she turned and looked directly at me, the feeling got a hundred times worse. I felt drawn into those enormous eyes, saw a spark of intelligence there and also somehow communication. I felt somehow that she was trying to tell me something, something in a language I couldn't hope to understand. I asked the questions I needed to ask and took some pictures of the pathetic creature with my camera.

They were the standard fare: the child standing at the window; the one from behind, with her looking out to the east. The warden placed some toys on the floor and managed to get her half interested in them for another. The some of the staff crowded around her for yet more shots. I reviewed each of them with distaste. They were not right, the child appeared lost in them, insignificant as if she were just part of the background.

I knew that the warden was hoping that these images, which would probably be circulated around most of the major weekend newspapers and magazines would, to put it rather unkindly, sell the child. However, this was only of secondary interest to me, I wanted these images and this story to give me a national by-line and the pictures that had been taken so far were just not going to do that.

I pulled my notes out of my case, and flipped through the clippings of the original story, checking the images that had been used at the time. Several were close up shots, she was younger then, but it was easy to see the same wide flat cheeks and huge brown eyes. One image, poignant and strange, was of the child, clutched at the breast of a young and attractive policewoman. But the most powerful images were those that had been arranged when an appeal was launched to find the child's parents. Most of these had been taken on a single day, when the police staged a reconstruction of the events leading up to her discovery. The forlorn figure, her face luminescent, standing on the beach, hands firmly held by two burly policemen, with the dark expanse of the sea behind her, was the type of picture to make this story top notch.

Only these images, or rather images like them, would have the powerful effect the story needed. I explained my idea to the Warden, and at first he seemed a little less than pleased. I argued that those original photos had caused the story to be so popular. I Reminded him that, when they had been printed people from all over the world had written in offering the girl a home. Others had sent donations of toys clothing and money. And when I put it to him that it was his job 'to make her this popular again', he'd had to agree.

He offered to take me to the local beach, just a ten minutes drive away, but I declined. This had to be done right if it was going to be done at all. He disappeared for a few minutes, leaving me alone with the girl, who just stared at me silently and made me feel as if someone with big boots was stomping about inside my head. Then he returned with a smile on his face. He had spoken to 'those in charge' and they had agreed to the request. Of course in these days of child security, we would have to be accompanied with a female nurse. After all you can't have two men look after a child now, no matter how normal and respectable they might be.

So it was settled and, as he made the arrangements I slurped up tasty and expensive filter coffee. It took longer than I wanted to arrange everything and, by the time the warden had finished, it was late afternoon. Considering the drive we had to reach the beach, there was no way we would get the pictures done in one day. I phoned my editor, and cajoled him into thinking that it was all worth it (despite my already over stretched expense account). We reached the Eastern coast at around ten thirty in the evening, and headed for the fair-sized seaside town that was to be our overnight base.

After her initial excitement at both being outside the confines of the children's home, and actually riding in a car, the child had settled down. For several hours she had sat crushed up against the rear window, gazing out at the rapidly changing scenery. Eventually she fell into a sound sleep. I felt a little guilty that we would have to wake her, she looked so peaceful, so calm, and with those huge brown eyes closed she didn't look half as frightening. The nurse didn't feel the same way obviously because, when we pulled up at the seafront boarding house, rather than carrying the sleeping child up to the room, she woke her.

All hell broke loose.

The car was dark, and under the orange glow of the streetlights and neon signposts, the child obviously had no idea where she was. She instantly began keening, in her tiny high pitched cry, thrashing her head and struggling with the catch of the seat belt harness. The nurse leant in and tried to calm her, and got back handed for getting in the way. The warden cooed to the child as he struggled to get her free and, the moment that she was released, she squirmed under his outstretched arms and was out of the car before he had even extracted his upper body from its confines. An instrant later, she was off--running across the road between two cars before any of us could react.

I dashed after her, narrowly avoiding a collision, and I heard a young driver’s assortment of graphic descriptions of my parentage over my laboured breathing. The child was running alongside the concrete sea wall, her shoulder brushing against it, as if she was searching for a break in the structure and would at any moment be off onto the blackened beach beyond. I caught up with her using the last ounces of my effort to heave myself into a kind of running lunge, catching her by the shoulders and sweeping her up into my arms. She struggled and wailed, but I held on, I could see the warden and the nurse, hopping up and down on the other side of the street, waiting for a break in the traffic to come across and take her away from me.

A few seconds before and I would have been glad, she was kicking hell out of my shins. But then suddenly I wasn't, her crying became lower, and she reached out towards the entrance to the pier, opening and closing her tiny pale hand in that classic, world-encompassing gesture children use when they want something. Suddenly I understood and she understood I understood, because she stopped kicking me. I looked back at the nurse and the warden.

And I turned my back on them and headed for the pier.

I heard them shout behind me but I just kept walking and I just kept getting quicker. As I began to jog, the child began to laugh. I felt some sort of madness come over me as if it had leached from the child into me. And I held her close as I made it onto the pier and began to run.

I ran past people who refused to look into my eyes. I ran past vendors and arcades and then past covered benches, inhabited by couples making the most of the darkness. Soon there was no one to be seen at all. It was much darker here, the strings of lights had bulbs missing and there were areas that had no illumination at all. I finally stopped when I pressed up against the rusted metal railing that marked very end of the construction.

For a few seconds I just huffed and puffed, the child nuzzling quietly against my chest, as if she sensed my need to recover. I couldn't make out the sea in the darkness, but I could hear it, and gradually it seemed to surround and fill my senses. I could smell its dank, muddy depths; feel its delicate breath on my cheeks. I could feel it moving amongst the pier's supports causing the decking to creak and flex beneath me. It absorbed me, held me captive in its magick and I stood there, holding her to me tightly, waiting for something to happen.

Then she began to sing.

My heart ached at the strange notes and harmonies. Her song rolled and pitched like the very waves themselves and, with each passing moment, it grew in intensity. Then suddenly she was silent, and I felt as if my heart was going to break. The sound of the waves was all that could be heard, nothing more, not even my breathing and then off in the distance I heard it, the answering call. Rolling in with the waves it came, the same heartbreaking song, but quite clearly sung by a different voice. The child reacted to it instantly, laughing and squirming in my arms, but I held her tight, so tight that she couldn't get away.

The singing became louder, and first one voice, then another and another voice joined that strange unearthly chorus. Closer and closer they came; louder and more heartbreaking. And more frantic became the struggles of the girl. More voices joined. Then almost drowned out by this inhuman chorus, another noise, more distracting, the sound of running feet and I realised that it was the warden and the nurse.

Why were they screaming for me to stop? Did they think I would hurt this child, this magical being? The voices were so close now; that I held the child tight to my body and leaned over the rust encased ornamental iron railing. I could see them down there moving in the water, rolling in the surf, their huge dark eyes glinting in the reflected lights, gazing up at me. I knew what I had to do, and when I loosened the hold of my arms, the child leaned back against them and gazed up into my eyes. She smiled and reached up and touched the tear that was trickling down my face, then she leapt forward like a wild beast and clamped her arms around me, snuggling in tight to my neck.

I looked over my shoulder to see the warden and nurse coming for her, they would drag her back to that green walled hell hole and she would die there. I knew that now. I turned back around towards the sea, and I knew that her family was waiting down there for her and I let her go. I sent her plunging down into the waves and whatever waited for her. I heard the screams from behind me and the rush of feet as people crowded in, but I did not turn around.

I watched them surround her, brushing against her body and rolling in the surf in delight. I watched her change; I watched them all change; but through it all those huge dark eyes were the same. By the time the others got to the rail it was almost over, they were almost all complete in the transformation, an arm remained here, a human like face there. One, I remember, seemed to keep its human like legs till the very last second. But what I had seen was gone; all the others could see was a confusion of bodies, the bodies of sleek fat seals.

So that is what I told the young man on the step of my cottage. They saw what they wanted to see, they saw a wasted, fat, hack journalist, throw a defenceless, damaged child into the sea to drown. Though I know that some people must have also seen those human forms down there in the waves and heard that unearthly singing, they denied it. Of course they had a trial, but they never found a body, and I maintained I didn't know what happened.

In the end I was sent to a 'special' hospital and to be honest, by the time the trail was over I needed it. When I got out, I came here, I had no choice really, I have to live by the sea now.

When I saw the question in the young reporter's eyes I simply told him to 'Come with me'. And we walked out along the shore, past the rock pools and the driftwood piles out onto the promontory where the seals crowded round and at last, as the sun edged toward the horizon.

They began to sing.

A story that haunted me twice, this roughly-told tale of transformation demanded purchase depite its failings. Story-strength and imagination sometimes heals or mitigates writing ills for me; just as superb writing can sometimes elevate weak story. Your opinions?