Small mountain outline on a forearm

Thirty years back, Ada Penhallow came out to this bay with a theodolite strapped to a barrow and a cough she wouldn't admit to. The council wanted the hill on the chart before the new towers went up along the front. She climbed the scrub, sighted the ridge, and wrote one peak in her ledger. Then the wind shifted, and when she looked again from the sand there were two, with a notch cut between them like a bitten loaf.

She said nothing. She walked the beach from dawn to the second bell, measuring each angle twice, and every time the sun came round the notch was still there, as if the hill had grown a second head to argue with her. By the third evening she had a row of tall flats behind her and a sea going grey, and she drew both peaks, because a lie in a survey is a thing that drowns people.

The chart went to the harbour office folded in four. Nobody checked it. The boats still steer by the two sisters, and the fishermen say you can only see the gap when you have decided something you cannot take back. Ada never saw the finished pier. She took the ledger home and kept the drawing pinned above the stove.

So when you ask me which peak is the real one, I tell you both. Now give me that crisp before the gull has it.