Thea’s voice. ‘The tide’s running in fast. It’s getting too deep to stand. Why aren’t Isla and Finn back with some help?’
A car comes slowly along the road behind the dunes. Its headlights reflect off the pale grass, light up the sky. But the car carries on round the sweep of the bay. The lights fade into the distance.
The sea’s crashing on to the rocks at the edge of the beach, sending up plumes of spray. It sounds louder than ever.
‘OK,’ Tim says. His voice carries clearly across the sand. He sounds totally sober now: serious and focused. ‘One final lift and push, to see whether we can release the wheels.’
‘It’s shifting a bit,’ Thea shouts. ‘The water is actually lifting the jeep.’
I watch it all as if through a distant lens, as if I’m not actually on the beach with them at all, as if I’m watching a scene in some film unfolding before me.
No one notices that I’m not helping. Everyone’s attention is on getting the jeep out of the sea.
They finally manage to drag it on to the wet sand at the edge of the water.
Tim tries to turn the engine. Absolutely nothing happens, of course. Not a sound or a flicker of life.
‘How the hell am I going to explain this to your parents?’ Tim says to Piers.
‘A bit late to be wondering about that.’
Everyone else has gone totally quiet.
‘How high will the tide come up?’ Thea asks.
‘Higher than this,’ Piers says. ‘So we need to move the jeep further up the beach somehow.’
‘We should get warmed up first,’ Thea says. ‘I’m totally freezing, we all are. We’ve got a bit of time, haven’t we? Enough so we can change out of wet clothes.’
Someone piles more wood on the fire. Piers and Jamie find the camping stove that Joy stashed in one of the boxes for an emergency and Piers sets up a pan of water for hot drinks. Thea finds blankets too. She passes one to me. ‘Are you OK, Kate?’
I nod. I’m still shivering.
‘We should put up the tent,’ Clara says.
‘No need,’ Jamie says. ‘It’s not going to rain. The sky is clear.’
I look up. For the first time for hours, it seems.
‘Someone’s coming at last!’ Tim says. ‘See?’
Headlights arc across the sky, lighting up the dune-grass next to the beach road. The car comes nearer. It slows, turns off the road and bumps down the track to the beach. Another jeep.
Tim walks over to greet Isla and Finn as they jump out.
He shakes hands with the driver.
‘This is Rob,’ Isla says. ‘He works with my dad sometimes.’
The man looks amused, rather than angry. ‘Been having fun and games, I hear,’ he says.
Tim doesn’t speak.
‘Well, you got her out of the sea,’ Rob says. ‘That’s the hard work done. Pretty impressive. I can tow her further up the beach for you.’
‘Thanks,’ Piers says.
‘Then we’d best wait till the morning, to let her dry out a bit before we see the damage. But your luck’s in; I’ve a mate who’s a mechanic. He’ll sort you out, if anyone can.’
Tim looks terrible now he’s realised the full extent of what he’s done. Everyone’s thinking about Alex and Joy.
Piers helps tie the rope and Tim climbs in to steer as Rob tows the jeep up the sand. It only takes a minute.
Thea stirs chocolate powder into the boiling water, and pours it into cups. Jamie produces another bottle of whisky. ‘A shot of this will warm us up.’
‘Not for me, thanks all the same,’ Rob says. ‘Seeing as I’m driving.’ He laughs, but Tim looks mortified.
‘You chose the right night for a bit of a party,’ Rob says. ‘Not often we get such a clear one as this.’
‘It’s Tim’s birthday,’ Thea explains. ‘We should cut the cakes,’ she says. ‘We forgot all about them earlier.’
‘I’ll leave you to it,’ Rob says. ‘It’s late. I need to be up early in the morning. I’ll tell my mate to call round sometime tomorrow, sort you out.’
No one knows quite what to say to Tim. He’s very quiet.
Isla goes to sit next to him after a while. Finn’s watching every move she makes.
‘Mackie’s a good mechanic,’ she says. ‘He’ll have all the spare parts at the garage. He’ll know what to do.’
Tim carries on sitting with his head bowed. He doesn’t even look at her.
‘OK. Cake.’ Thea says brightly. ‘And candles for you, Tim.’
‘Is it still Tim’s birthday?’ Clara asks. ‘Isn’t it way after midnight?’
‘I suppose,’ Thea says. ‘But we’re still doing the candles. And singing.’
‘Kate, you light them, seeing as you made the cake.’ Piers chucks a box of matches in my direction.
Hearing my own name makes me jump. I’d somehow thought I’d become totally invisible. No one asks me why I didn’t help, or what I’ve been doing all this time.
My hands are still shaking. I find it hard to light all the little candles at the same time: they keep going out.
‘Everyone get closer,’ Thea says. ‘Make a human windbreak.’
Eventually I manage to light all twenty-three candles, and they stay alight for a few seconds. Long enough, anyway.
‘Ahhh. Perfect,’ Isla says. ‘It’s really pretty, Kate.’
Tim blows the candles out and everyone sings. Except me; I still don’t trust my voice to come out right.
Everyone’s getting sleepy. After a while, Jamie and Piers unpack the sleeping bags and blankets. People arrange themselves around the fire. The wood is glowing, red hot, but the flames have died down now.
‘I’ll keep it going all night,’ Jamie promises.
We lie on our backs, staring at the amazing sky: a blanket pinned with a million stars. The Milky Way is a bright silver band.
‘This is the best month for shooting stars,’ Finn says. ‘August, there are always loads. The Perseid meteor shower . . .’
He shifts his sleeping bag closer to mine. ‘You OK, Kate?’ he whispers.
I nod. I swallow hard. The night sky is so beautiful, and my heart so full, but still I cannot speak.
He reaches out for my hand and squeezes it tight, and lets it go.
‘You’ll be fine,’ he says, as if he’s known all along that something is wrong. ‘Keep watching for falling stars.’
But I have to close my eyes tight, to stop the tears from coming.
When I open them next and look round, I see that Isla has moved her sleeping bag closer to Tim. They’re lying close enough to be almost touching. Perhaps they are: I can’t tell from here, in the dark.
Finn’s still gazing at the stars.
The fire shifts and stirs. Embers fall to white ash. I snuggle deeper into the sleeping bag.
Thea and Piers are talking quietly to each other, their murmuring voices merging with the sound of the sea. The sound is comforting.
I’m warm at last, tired, almost asleep . . .
‘What’s that?’
‘What?’
Voices: Tim’s, and Isla’s, muffled and sleepy. For a second, I am confused. I blink in the darkness, slowly coming to. The fire’s burned so low for a second I think it’s gone out. Tim stirs it with a stick, adds a log. White ash falls and glows.
Isla sits up. ‘Oh my God! Look, Tim.’
A shooting star?
But it’s something even more amazing. Not stars, or a full moon, or anything I have ever seen before except in pictures.
The sky is rippling with a weird kind of light. Like a billowing curtain, shifting through shades of green, and silver, and white. A huge veil, moving and swaying in the northern sky.
‘What is it? What’s happening?’ Jamie and Piers are awake too now, sitting up, stumbling out of their sleeping bags to get a better view. ‘Sunrise? Already?’
‘It’s the Northern Lights,’ Isla says. ‘How extraordinary.’
Everyone’s wide awake now.
The light flows like water, like wind made visible, like nothing I have ever seen before. It fades, and brightens, and for a second disappears, then comes back, wild and rippling and dancing.
‘Oh my God!’ Clara says.
‘Awesome.’
‘I can’t believe it!’
Is it possible? Are we really looking at the Northern Lights, here, on a beach in the Hebrides, in the middle of an August night?
Isla says that it is perfectly possible. That it happens once every eleven years or so. ‘It’s to do with solar energy or something.’
‘The aurora borealis,’ Tim says.
The air’s alive and breathing: a sound like hissing, or whispering, or the crackling of a fire . . .
Can you really hear light?
‘The music of the heavens,’ Thea says. ‘That’s astonishing!’
‘The Finnish word for the aurora means fox fires,’ Finn whispers. ‘The Sami people believe it’s caused by a fox running across the frozen fields of the north, its tail sweeping the snow and sending up light.
‘And in Inuit legend, the lights are the torches of skydweller spirits, guiding the feet of new arrivals – spirits of the newly dead. The whistling noise is the voices of the spirits trying to communicate with the people of the earth. You’re supposed to answer in whispers.’
Clara giggles.
‘I’ve seen it once before,’ Isla says, ‘when I was five or six. And my dad remembers being carried from his bed as a child, out into the field, to watch the Northern Lights.’
We watch and listen in silence for a long time.
The lights fade, and disappear completely.
We wait.
Just an ordinary night sky now.
Though there is nothing ordinary about it. So many stars, planets. A satellite, tracking round. More stars. The vast and beautiful universe.
It comes to me, like a revelation: Sam’s photo.
The miracle of it.
That’s what he wanted me to see.
A night bird calls. Someone murmurs in their sleep.
Already, there’s light in the eastern sky. It won’t be long till dawn.