Tara reads from her book

Tara June Winch: This is called 'Cloud busting' from Swallow the Air.

We go cloud busting, Billy and me, down at the beach, belly up to the big sky.

We make rainbows that pour out from our heads, squinting our eyes into the gathering.

Fairy flossed pincushion clouds explode.

We hold each other's hand; squeeze really hard to build up the biggest, brightest rainbow, and Bang!

Shoot it up to the sky, bursting cloud suds that scatter, escaping into the air alive.

We toss our bodies off the eelgrass-covered dunes and race down to the shore where seaweed beads trace the waterline.

Little bronze teardrops - we bust them too. Bubble-wrapped pennies.

We collect pipis, squirming our heels into the shallow water, digging deeper under the sandy foam.

Reaching down for our prize, we find lantern shells, cockles and sometimes periwinkles, bleached white.

We snatch them up, filling our pockets.

We find shark egg capsules like dried out leather corkscrews and cuttlebones and sand snail skeletons, and branches, petrified to stone.

We find sherbet-coloured coral clumps, sponge tentacles and sea mats, and blue bottles - we bust them with a stick.

We find weed ringlet dolls’ wigs and strings of brown pearls.

I wear them as bracelets.

We get drunk on the salt air and laughter.

We dance, wiggling our bottoms from the dunes' height.

We crash into the surf, we swim, we dive and we tumble.

We empty our lungs and weigh ourselves cross-legged to the seabed.

There we have tea parties underwater. Quickly, before we come up for mouthfuls of air.

I'm not scared of the ocean.

That doesn't come until later.

When we're kids we have no fear,

We get sucked out in the rips.

We swim with the current, like breeding turtles and hidden jelly fish, as we drift out onto the shore.