Morning. I wake up earlier than usual because it’s so light. Not moonlight filling the square of window now but sun, and a blue sky with big clouds. From the bed I can see straight out of the low window: a square of sea and beach, framed by the window like a picture. The beach is really close: just a few metres in front of the house beyond the grass and the track.
Slowly it dawns on me that the sound I’ve been hearing all night, the rushing sound when we got out of the taxi, is the sound of the sea. Waves, rolling in, one after another. Watching them makes my head spin after a while, because it’s never-ending. It’s rough today – white-capped waves all the way out to the horizon.
I get up and go downstairs, use the bathroom, check the fridge but it’s empty except for a carton of milk and some leftover cheese sandwiches from the journey, all squashed and disgusting. No one’s up yet: Mum and Dad’s bedroom door is shut. I listen: no raised voices. No sounds at all. I open all the kitchen cupboards and find tea bags and tins of soup and a bag of dry oats but that’s about it. I make tea to take upstairs with me.
My room is so light and bright I’ll never get back to sleep. I get dressed instead: jeans, T-shirt, jumper. It’s bound to be cold outside. I check my phone but there’s no signal. I stuff it in my pocket. I’ll walk till I find a place where it works.
The wind’s stronger than I expect: it whips the door back and makes it bang. Three sheep stop and stare at me as I walk over the grass to the track: there are sheep everywhere, not fenced in or anything, wandering all over the road and the grass. They run away, bleating, as I get near.
The track runs down to the road, and beyond that is the sea. The road follows the curve of the island. The tide’s going out, revealing sand, wet pebbles, heaps of seaweed.
I jump down on to the nearest bit of beach. My feet sink in the sand. White, fine sand made of ground shells. I leave a trail of footprints: the first ones on clean washed sand. Like being the first person to walk on fresh snow. I pull my hood up and walk further along. Little brown birds fly off in front of me.
Phone’s still not got a signal.
Now what? It’s too cold to stay outside, and I’m starving.
I walk back towards the house. It’s harder work, against the wind. Facing this way I can see the cluster of white houses which is the village. Except it’s not really. There’s only one shop, still shut. Sheep. And that’s it.
The way Mum talked, you’d think it was going to be some kind of island paradise. She and Dad had their honeymoon here. Lots of holidays before I was born, when my sisters were little, and some when I was there too, apparently, and we were all so happy . . .
One last go, she said to Dad, the night before we left. If we can’t make things work there, we’ll know that’s it. The end of the line. I wasn’t supposed to hear, but the living room door was open and I was standing at the top of the stairs and I couldn’t help it, and now the horrible words are stuck in my head for ever . . .
I pick up a handful of damp pebbles from the beach and fling them so they spray against the road. I yell into the wind.
A red post van goes by. The bloke driving it waves at me and grins. Like he thinks he knows me, or something. Like it’s normal to be yelling and throwing stuff before breakfast.
I turn away. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
The wind makes my eyes sting with tears.
Dad’s found a pair of binoculars and he’s staring out of the window with them. Mum’s making breakfast. ‘Porridge,’ she says. ‘Want some?’
‘What else is there?’ I say.
‘Nothing, I’m afraid. The shop won’t be open yet, so we’re having to make do for now.’ She glances nervously at Dad, as if she feels bad about there being nothing nicer for their first holiday breakfast, as if it’s all her fault or something. I can’t stand that. So I make an effort and eat her porridge and don’t moan.
‘What’s it like out?’ Mum says, with that hopeful look she has when she’s trying to make things OK. ‘Nice to have an early walk.’
‘It’s freezing,’ I say. ‘My phone doesn’t work.’
Mum laughs. ‘Well, that’s one of the things I love about this place. No phones, no internet. Being cut off from all that.’
‘It’s not funny!’ I say. ‘How am I supposed to talk to my friends? Why didn’t you say about that before we came?’
But I don’t want to argue with her, I really don’t. So I shut up and have another cup of tea.
Dad’s checking his own phone.
Mum watches him, anxious. She doesn’t say anything for a while. She washes the bowls and mugs and I wipe the table.
‘We’ll get sorted out this morning: get some food in and make ourselves comfortable in the house,’ Mum says. ‘Later let’s go out together and explore this side of the island. I fancy a long walk along a beach. The weather’s clearing, I think.’
Dad’s staring out of the window. Why doesn’t he say something nice to Mum? Say anything, for that matter? It’s as if he’s always thinking about something else.
The clouds have lifted. Now I can see a whole new layer to the view that wasn’t visible before: other islands, one behind another, faint on the horizon.
At least the house is OK, I suppose. You could lie on the leather sofa and stare at the view and read and watch telly and stuff. There are DVDs and a pile of magazines and shelves of books, like someone’s proper home instead of a holiday house. But four weeks, on a tiny island, with Mum and Dad trying to save their marriage and nothing, absolutely nothing, for me to do?
‘I can’t believe you made me come here!’ I blurt out.
Dad looks at me. ‘What else did you expect us to do?’ he says. ‘We were hardly going to leave you behind all by yourself for four weeks. You’re fifteen, Kate. You’re still a child. And after all the – the terrible business with that boy –’
‘Stop right there!’ Mum says, more fiercely than I’ve heard her for ages. ‘Don’t drag that up now.’
They mean Sam, of course. Unsuitable Sam with his brilliant mind and reckless behaviour: too old for me, too complicated, too dangerous. You could have died, Dad said. How could we ever trust him, after that? How could you?
In any case, Sam will hardly be desperate to see me, will he? Not with me being a witness and everything . . . So Mum and Dad needn’t worry any more. Not about me, at least.
‘You go for your stupid walk,’ I say. ‘I’m not coming.’
But I do go out, later. I walk away from the village down the single-track road and come across a huge beach of white sand with a fringe of grey-green grass. I walk along the sand, and after a while I find this rock shaped like a kind of bowl, big enough to lie in. It’s the perfect shape and size so I can stretch right out, my head held by the curve of stone, my feet resting on the bottom lip. The rock is warm from the sun. I lie there, cradled in stone, trying not to think too much about Mum and Dad, all the stuff going on. The words they don’t say. The undercurrents of anger and the clipped conversations and the way they look at each other.
Suppose this really is the last holiday we have together?
I let my mind drift off in all the space and light. I have never seen so much sky. The tide’s coming in. Waves splash on the rocks further down, tug and grind and pound, a rhythm of sound. I close my eyes.
It might be OK, the waves say, and my heartbeat steadies at last.
I take a deep breath in.
Let it out.
Repeat.
I stay there for ages, eyes shut.
Perhaps I actually do go to sleep. Something makes me jolt – as if I’m falling. A new sound, not waves or wind or seabirds – a pattern of feet on sand and rock. I open my eyes. A boy – about sixteen or seventeen – is running along the shore. He doesn’t see me. He’s playing some sort of game, it looks like: he hops, left foot, right foot, both feet together. He misses his footing for a second, slips, and pebbles spill and scatter from his pockets: a clatter of stone on stone. He laughs, picks up the pebbles and stuffs them back in his jeans’ pockets, runs on.
Once he’s disappeared round the curve of the bay, I ease myself out of my stone bed. My legs are stiff from lying still for so long. I cross the strip of grass and wild flowers at the top of the beach, start walking back towards the house.
Almost there.
Mum and Dad are standing side by side in the small front garden. They’re not touching. Not speaking either. You could fit a third person in the space between them.
Mum’s seen me. She waves.
Dad puts his hands in his pockets, goes back into the house.
Have they been arguing again? I can’t tell from here.
Mum walks the short distance to meet me.
‘Isn’t it lovely?’ she says. ‘Is it coming back to you now? Did you remember the beach?’
‘Not really,’ I say. The truth is, I don’t remember any of it.
Mum sighs. ‘All those wonderful summers when you were little and we were so happy all together, but you don’t remember?’
‘Bonnie and Hannah do,’ I say. ‘They were that much older.’
Mum looks sad. ‘And yet neither of them would come this time.’
‘They’re busy with their own lives now,’ I say. ‘You know that.’
‘Well,’ Mum says too brightly. ‘Dad’s been to the one and only shop already and stocked up. He’s making supper tonight. He insisted.’
My mind flips into overdrive again. Dad – cooking and shopping? Anyone else would think how lovely, how kind: Dad’s making an effort. But I’ve already clocked the fact that next to the shop is a public telephone box. In my mind, I see Dad talking softly into the mouthpiece of the old-fashioned phone in the red kiosk, half turning to check no one is watching him. It’s like a scene in a bad film on telly: the stupid clichéd image of an affair.
I don’t know any of this for sure.
I’m just guessing.
I’m not supposed to take sides, Bonnie says. Mum and Dad both love us; it’s not about us.
Mum and I stop at the gate and we both turn at the same time towards the sea.
We just stand there for a while without saying anything.
‘It won’t get properly dark till really late, and in hardly any time at all it will be dawn again,’ Mum says, ‘because we are so far north.’
The air feels cool and thin. We’re a very long way from home. For a second, I like this sense of being at an edge, remote and out of reach. It keeps Dad safe, and away from anyone else; closer to Mum. Maybe Mum’s right. Maybe that is all that’s needed. Four weeks of them being together, no one getting in the way. I can leave them to it . . .
Except, what am I going to do?
A flock of black and white birds fly low across the bay making a high piping sound. That boy is coming back along the top of the beach. He looks up and waves as if he knows us and keeps on running.
Mum waves back. ‘He’ll be one of the lads from the Manse, I expect,’ she says to me. ‘The big house we saw as the ferry came in, that used to belong to the church.’
‘What, he lives there?’
‘Only in the holidays. He’ll be away at school in England somewhere, I imagine, like his brothers used to be. Twin boys, Bonnie’s age, I think. Funny, I’d forgotten all about them. But he looks just like one of the twins.’
I can’t imagine anyone choosing to live here for real: it’s so far from the mainland, so difficult to get to. All that’s here is a few houses, and farms, I suppose, seeing as there are sheep and cows wandering all over the place. Beaches, yes, but nothing else.
Mum’s still talking. ‘They used to have house-parties at the Manse. Their rich friends came and stayed all summer. It looked such fun . . . you know, lots of games on the beach and barbecues and boats and things like that.’
I watch the boy as he runs on. He looks OK. I think of Sam, back home. Not now, don’t think about him now. But the ache in my heart won’t go away so easily.