It’s much harder going now; I can’t see far enough ahead to find the path easily. I have to guess where to step, find myself sliding between huge rocks, slipping into patches of bog. The stench of marsh gas is everywhere. I keep remembering fragments of stories about people sucked down and suffocating in thick mud . . . the poems about the sacrificial corpses . . . I work out that the trick is to step on the clumps of reeds; if you look carefully you can see the gleam of moonlight reflected off the bog water in between. All the time, the sea’s creeping closer, splashing on to rocks: it must be nearly high tide.
I slip, lose my balance, cry out. I’m up to one knee in stinking black mud. Stupid. This is stupid now. Just go back. Hot tears on my cheeks. I stop for a moment, sit down on the edge of one of the boulders so I can catch my breath, wipe the mud off my jeans and shoe. My heart’s thudding.
I make myself look up, up to the open sky. Don’t give up, I tell myself, and sitting there, my back against the rock, one foot wet and slimy with mud, I find I’m staring at the stars and thinking of Sam again. The real Sam I glimpsed, who no one else seemed to recognise. What would he have made of a place like this? Skies like this? Doesn’t he deserve a second chance? Maybe Finn was wrong about him.
I hear something. The crunch of feet on shingle.
I freeze. Someone’s out there, just below my rocky outcrop. How long have they been there? Who is it?
My palms are clammy. I wait. Can they see me? I peer into the dark at the silhouette.
Can it be? I let my eyes adjust to the dim light. And yes – I’m sure of it now – it really is Finn. He’s crouching down, picking up stones on the scrap of beach. I watch him for a while, even though it seems wrong – but how do I suddenly let him know I’m here, now, without scaring him half to death? And then I start wondering if he’s hoping to be found, secretly wishing for someone to come looking for him, to bring him home, like me when I was little, too well hidden in a game of hide-and-seek, longing for Bonnie or Hannah to find me at last.
I shift slightly on my rocky perch and a dislodged stone rolls away, drops on to the beach below. The sound makes Finn stop in his tracks.
‘Finn?’ I call softly. ‘It’s me. Kate.’
He swings round, sees me above him. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’
‘Looking for you, of course. Everyone is. They’re all worried about you, for some reason.’
He doesn’t say anything for a while. He hunkers down on the pebbles, as if it’s perfectly normal to be beachcombing along the tideline in the dark.
I wait. I’m shivering.
‘How come you knew I’d be here?’ he asks.
‘I didn’t,’ I say. ‘But I had this hunch, about the ringing stone . . . You told me about it once.’
He looks towards me, but I can’t see his expression from up here.
‘So very clever, Kate,’ he says. He stands up and stretches out his back as if it’s aching.
‘Why are they worried?’ he says, as if the thought had genuinely not occurred to him. ‘I’m surprised they even noticed.’
‘Joy and Alex notice everything,’ I say. ‘Of course, they would notice you hadn’t come home all day. Isla’s been anxious too.’
‘Hah!’
‘Seriously. It was Isla who told me you hadn’t come back all day. And she and her dad have gone to the Manse to help look for you. So, you have to come back with me now.’ I make myself sound more forceful than I really feel.
He carries on scooping up stones, letting them go. A noise a bit like jangling coins: that thing Dad does when he’s nervous.
‘What have you been doing all this time, anyway?’ I ask.
‘Thinking,’ Finn says. ‘Making plans.’
‘In the dark.’
‘Yes. While it is properly dark, as opposed to lit up by three hundred turbines.’
‘And?’
‘I’ve worked it out. What we need to do.’
I realise I’m so cold my teeth are chattering. ‘Can we talk about it on the way back?’ I say.
‘All right. But not before you’ve actually seen the ringing stone,’ Finn says.
I humour him. ‘OK. Show me the stone. Then we’re going back. And you can tell me your plan.’ I climb down on to the pebbles.
He steps forward and puts his arms right round me.
It takes me completely by surprise.
He mumbles something into my hair I can’t hear.
‘What?’ I say, speaking into his jumper. It feels so very lovely, being held close. I wish we could stay like that, his arms tight round me, for a long, long time. And maybe he feels the same. We both sigh deeply, as if we are finally relaxing and letting go.
‘That’s better,’ Finn says into my hair.
‘Yes,’ I mumble back, my face still squashed into his chest.
It really does feel better. Surprisingly so.
‘Thank you,’ he says, finally letting go and stepping back. ‘For bothering. For coming to look for me. The way you pay attention and listen to things. It’s good, that.’
I could be embarrassed, but I choose not to be. It’s such a relief to find he’s all right; so kind of normal. Finn’s sort of normal, I mean. We don’t kiss or anything. I know it’s Isla he wants really, not me, and this is just friendship. But it’s the real kind, and I know it will last. The thought makes me happy.
‘Come on, then,’ he says. ‘I’ll show you the stone. It isn’t far.’
‘Good,’ I say. ‘I’m exhausted. I’ve been walking for ever, it seems like.’
He takes my hand and leads me along the beach and up between rocks, weaving in and out, over boulders and across a series of small streams – fresh water springs, Finn says – in a small sloping field above the sea.
The stone doesn’t look anything special, except for the cup-shaped marks, and I’d never have noticed those in the dark. We run our hands over the dents to feel the shapes worn away by the hands of people who lived here thousands of years ago.
‘The story is,’ Finn says, ‘that if this stone breaks in two the island will be lost. It will sink beneath the sea.’ He cups his hands around mine for a second. ‘I suppose it might, if sea levels carry on rising. Global warming and all that.’
It’s one of the arguments for wind energy: the need to stop using the fossil fuels that are warming the planet. It’s one of the reasons why the wind farm idea is so confusing, because Finn knows that we have to do something about energy: we can’t go on burning fossil fuels, guzzling oil or gas like we all do, as if it doesn’t matter.
‘So,’ he says. ‘My plan. Maybe we can’t stop the wind farm. But if they do go ahead and build it, we have to make sure it’s much, much further out at sea. At least thirty-five miles or so away from the island.’
‘Really?’ I say.
‘I still think it’s a huge, expensive mistake, mind. I’ve been thinking about it over and over, all day, trying to work out what case to make. And finally, when I was just sitting here this evening watching the divers, it came to me. Like a sudden gift. The whole thing. I’ve worked it all out.’ His face looks so different: animated, his eyes shining.
‘So, what have the divers got to do with it? What are they diving for, exactly? Is there sunken treasure: a wreck? Or pearls, or what?’
He laughs. ‘Not people divers. Birds. Great northern divers. They spend the winter here – but they’re very rare, a protected species, so we can make a case for the sea around the island needing to be protected on environmental grounds. There are rare corncrakes too, and all the migrating birds. There are laws about this stuff already. SPAs. Special protected areas. We’ll have to get all the facts together but I am sure we can make a case. I don’t know why we didn’t think of it before.’
I like how he says we. He assumes I’m on his side.
I really try to pay attention to everything he’s explaining, but I’m so tired, so cold, it’s all I can do to stay standing upright.
‘That’s great, Finn,’ I say eventually. ‘Now can we go back?’
‘Make the stone ring,’ he says. He hands me one of the pebbles from the beach. ‘Just hit it against the stone.’
He laughs at my feeble attempt. ‘Again, but much harder!’
With a bit of imagination, maybe it does sound like a bell ringing out. A soft, muffled bell. But it would be the same with any two stones, wouldn’t it? I don’t tell him that. Maybe there is something special about it, after all. Because something’s changed in Finn, anyone can see that.
We walk back along the cliff the way we came. When the path’s wide enough for us to be side by side, he turns to look at me. His face is pale in the moonlight. ‘I disappeared once before. For five days, from boarding school. Last year. That must be why they were all worrying about me today. Just so you know.’
‘Why on earth didn’t you tell me that before?’
He shrugs. ‘It’s over and done with. That’s why. In the past. I want to forget about all that now.’
I’m too tired to argue. I link my arm with his, and we walk slowly back, stepping over stones, finding the clumps of sedge and reeds over the marshy places. I feel the warmth of his side against mine, and when we have to climb over the boulders to get back on to the narrow footpath he places his hand in the small of my back, to help me up. In my exhausted state, almost sleepwalking now, I let myself wonder what it would be like, to be properly close to Finn, to be the person he tells the really important stuff to. I can almost imagine, in my dreaming state of mind, how it would be. Something more than friendship . . .
It seems such a very long way back, but at last we’re at the edge of the bay, and on to the single-track road, and there’s a car – headlights – the taxi, I see now, slowing down and stopping. The door’s opening and Alex is running towards us, calling Finn’s name.