It’s the first thing I see when I open my eyes the next morning, on the window sill where I left it last night. In the daylight the bead looks plainer and less magical, but I know how rare and special it is. All these years of looking and I’ve never found one. It seems remarkable that it should somehow just be bundled up in the wetsuit like that. Did it wash in with me on a wave, somehow caught up in the wetsuit? Or had the tide already left it on the sand and by some trick of luck, some accident, I picked it up with my towel and wet things as I left the beach last night?
I turn it over in my palm. Hundreds of years old, and it’s landed here, in my hand. I rub it with a corner of the sheet, shining the green glass till it’s almost good as new. The gold spiral is inside the glass, somehow. Perhaps Izzy will make it into a new necklace for me.
Instinctively, my hand goes up to my neck. There’s no necklace there. The string must have broken when I was swimming last night. My talisman necklace has gone for ever, lost to the sea.
Some things get lost, others return. That is how it is: the way of things.
A squall of rain spatters the window. The fine weather’s broken, like Gramps said it would. There’ll be no more swimming today.
‘It’s chilly,’ Evie says when I finally come downstairs for some breakfast. ‘I’m going to make us a fire, even though it’s midsummer!’
She goes to the shed to find wood, and an axe. Just too late, I remember the wetsuit dumped there last night in a sandy, dripping heap.
I find her hauling it out on to the lawn. ‘Such a mess, Freya! Honestly! How long has this been here?’
‘Only yesterday. I was going to wash it out and I forgot. Sorry.’
Evie’s got tears in her eyes. ‘It’s Joe’s. Just for a snap second I thought Joe was still here.’
I put my arms round her, and we stand together in the shed, both thinking about Joe. But something’s different for me now, after last night. Some of the sadness has shifted.
Evie sniffs. ‘I’m glad you’re using it. It’s a good thing. We can’t go on like this for ever, not touching his things. He isn’t here any more, not in the same way, at least. Because in another way he’s always here. Everywhere. I see him. Hear him. We all do, don’t we?’
‘Yes.’ It’s such a relief, to hear Evie say that.
Evie disentangles herself. ‘Which is why it would be a very good thing if your mother would get herself here and face up to it once and for all.’ She sounds almost cross.
I don’t say anything.
‘Give it a good rinse, and hang it up. Does it fit?’
‘Nearly,’ I say. ‘Good enough.’
‘That’ll save us a few quid, then!’ She tries to laugh, but it comes out more like a sob.
‘Shall I chop some kindling?’ I say. It was Joe’s job, before.
‘Yes.’ Evie takes the basket from the hook and fills it with logs to take back in. ‘Careful with the axe. Use the chopping block.’
The rain carries on all day. Mid-afternoon, Danny turns up at the door, dripping wet. Evie asks him in. We’ve both been sitting by the fire for ages, reading. Gramps is still sleeping, upstairs. It’s good to have a visitor.
‘How was the gig-race?’ I ask Danny.
‘Fun,’ he says. His hair’s gone longer and straighter in the rain. His eyes look extra bright. ‘We lost. Second to last.’
‘We always do,’ I say. ‘Did you go to the pub, after?’
‘For a little while. It got a bit rowdy. I missed you not being there.’
I smile.
‘The fire’s nice. We’re freezing in the tent, and there’s no space. So Mum and Dad and Hattie have gone to Main Island. There’s nothing to do when it rains, is there?’
‘Suppose not. Sometimes Sally opens up one of the barns, for table tennis and stuff.’
Danny kicks off his trainers and they steam gently in front of the fire.
‘Want to play a game? Evie and Gramps have loads. Funny old ones, mostly. Like an ancient version of Trivial Pursuit. You won’t know any of the answers.’
We rummage through the drawer, getting out board games like Sorry! and Scrabble and some old quiz. We find a compendium with Ludo and Snakes and Ladders and Housey Housey, and play each one, laughing loads and cheating like mad. At the bottom of the drawer there’s the box of Cluedo I last played with Joe. Danny hauls it out and begins to set out the pieces.
‘Matt and Huw both got hammered, last night,’ Danny says. ‘They were arguing about Izzy.’
‘What about her?’
‘I dunno. Huw said something about her Matt didn’t like.’
‘Huw should keep his nose out,’ I say. ‘Stop messing things up for people.’
Danny looks at me. ‘Sorry.’
‘It’s OK. Why doesn’t he get his own girlfriend? He’s good-looking enough.’
‘More than Matt?’
I feel myself blush. Keep my head down. ‘Pass me the dice, then, Danny.’
My heart isn’t in the game. Danny’s isn’t either. He keeps looking at me, and I can kind of guess why; it’s obvious really. Everything would be so much simpler if I liked him like that too, instead of Matt. But I’m beginning to understand it doesn’t work like that. You’re not really in control, not with this falling-for-people stuff. You don’t plan who you’re going to fall in love with. It’s all random – chance accidents of time and place. People are always falling in love with the wrong person, aren’t they?
I don’t mean I’m actually in love with Matt. It’s just . . . well . . . it’s hopeless. He’s in a different league. And he and Izzy belong together. And I like Danny loads as a friend, just not anything more.
Evie brings us homemade scones. She’s obviously just loving having a boy around the house again. She goes back into the kitchen and sings along to the radio. She hasn’t done that in ages. She wants him to stay for supper, but Danny says he’s got to get back. His parents don’t know where he is.
‘Bring them all. They could have a meal here and dry out!’
But Danny’s gone shy again. He stutters, ‘No, thank you.’
‘He’s such a nice boy,’ Evie says, as he goes out the door. He probably heard her. She probably meant him to. ‘Was I very embarrassing, Freya?’
‘Yes, of course!’ I say, but I laugh, too.
When Evie takes a tray of supper up to Gramps I go with her and we sit on his bed. We tell him about our day. He listens and smiles, but he doesn’t say much.
‘I’m tired out,’ he says. ‘I’ll be better in the morning. Tomorrow’s a new day.’
It’s still raining, quietly. I stand at the open back door, looking out on the sodden lawn. A blackbird’s tugging up an earthworm from the damp earth beneath the apple tree. High in the branches, a thrush sings. I know it’s a thrush because it sings every phrase three times, and Gramps taught me that. His bees will be tucked up snug in the hive this evening. I wonder whether Evie’s told them about him being ill. You’re supposed to tell the bees everything that happens in a family. He’s ill, and it’s raining, and I’m lonely tonight, but I don’t feel terrible like I have done before. There’s a kernel of hope growing inside me, little by little, that one day I will feel happiness again. Little bits of happiness, because it’s in my nature to be happy. And no one is happy all the time. It’s only ever in bits.
‘Close that door, Freya!’ Evie calls, but she comes to stand beside me in the open doorway and puts her arms round my shoulders. We watch the rain together. A flurry of wind shakes the tree and a shower of tiny green apples fall on the grass.
‘It’s been a strange sort of day,’ she says. ‘Gramps says the rain will blow out to sea again tonight and it’ll be fine again by the weekend.’
He’s usually right, is Gramps. Fine weather for the holiday weekend, then, and for Dad’s journey over, and Izzy’s return.
‘I’ll run you a bath, if you like,’ Evie says. ‘You look tired out. Too much sitting around doing nothing!’
‘I’m all right.’
I think of last night, swimming. If she knew!
Upstairs, getting into bed after my bath, I slide out my phone from where I left it under my notebook. There’s a message. Two messages, in fact.
Message 1. Sorry I was out. See you soon? Missing you. Love Mum xx
She still hasn’t got the hang of texting. She spends ages spelling out the words and putting in punctuation and everything.
Message 2 is from Miranda. RU OK? Lv M
Nothing from Sam, then.
I stare at the black letters on the little screen, as if they might suddenly all jumble up and rearrange themselves into a different message, from someone else.
I feel strangely flat. Disappointed, I suppose.
So that’s that, then? The End.
Huw was right. Sam’s not going to help. Even if I phoned again, got to talk to her, there wouldn’t be any point. I finally get it: what could she possibly tell me that would make any difference, now?
Wind batters a wet branch of climbing rose against the window glass. In the distance the black rocks of the Bird islands are silhouetted against the dark grey sky. The Bird islands are where Joe’s body finally washed up, smashed against the rocks. I make myself think about it. Face it. His skull was cracked, the autopsy report said, but that might have happened long before he reached the rocks. It’s just possible he hit his head on the boom as it swung round when the dinghy hit the full force of the wind out in the bay, and the blow was enough to knock him unconscious, so he couldn’t swim when the boat capsized.
The islands are uninhabited except by hundreds of sea-birds: gannets and skuas and guillemots, even puffins, some years. You can take a boat trip out to see them after the nesting season is over. To begin with, I couldn’t bear to think about it: his limp body turned over and over by the waves, smashing up against the rock face. But it was just his body, like a hollow shell; the real Joe wasn’t there any more. The real Joe had broken free, like one of the sea-birds wheeling high in the wind.