Friday morning. Danny and I are sitting cross-legged on the grass near his tent, helping his little sister and Rosie and other kids from the campsite make paper lanterns, ready for the party tomorrow night. Sally calls it Lantern Night: she does it every year, in late August, and everyone from the island joins in. People make food, and bring drink, and there’s a procession across the island from the campsite to Beady Pool, with everyone carrying lanterns: hand-made, old-fashioned lanterns with real candles in them, hung from hooks on sticks.
So here we are, Danny and me, trying to bend wire into spiral lantern shapes, only it’s much more difficult than it looks and most of ours are a bit wonky. Maddie and Lisa’s are much neater. We help tear the sheets of coloured tissue paper to stick over the wire. Where you overlap layers of paper you get different colours: that’s the idea, anyway. In reality everyone gets glue all over them, and the tissue sticks in all the wrong places, and gets torn, and we keep losing bits as the wind blows, so that the field is littered with coloured paper. Hattie and Rosie have soon had enough. We send them off to pick up the litter, but they don’t want to do that either, so Danny and me end up doing everything.
Afterwards, we help Lisa and Maddie carry the finished lanterns up to the farm to keep them safe.
‘They look beautiful!’ Sally beams. ‘Stick them in the barn till tomorrow. I’ve put the box of nightlights in there, ready.’
‘Seen Matt?’ Lisa asks me, as we troop back down to the field.
I shake my head. I haven’t seen him for days. I’ve been keeping my distance. It’s easier like that.
‘Izzy will be back this afternoon,’ I say. ‘Perhaps he’s gone to meet her.’
Danny and I walk across Wind Down to the maze carved into the turf on the clifftop. He waits while I run round it, clockwise, to the middle and then back again, like I used to do with Joe. Together we climb up the huge outcrop of wind-carved boulders at the far end of the downs, till we are way up high. We look back across the island towards the Sound.
‘No sign yet,’ I say.
The wind buffets us. We lean into it, to see if it can hold us up. The crossing will be rough again today.
‘We could go and wait on the wall,’ I say.
‘If you want. When’s it due?’
‘Who knows? The ferry’s always late when the weather’s like this.’
‘Or we could fish?’ Danny looks vaguely hopeful.
‘You can. Not me.’
I hop down, boulder by boulder, and Danny follows.
We pick blackberries from the hedges round the small fields in the middle of the island. They’ve plumped out after all the rain, sweet and glossy.
Above the jetty, we sit on the wall to wait for the Spirit to come back from Main Island.
‘This is where I first saw Samphire,’ I tell Danny.
I’ve told him lots, the last few days. I even told him about me swimming that night, by myself: everything except about Joe swimming with me, holding me up when I was too tired to swim any more. He was cross for ages. ‘It’s too dangerous,’ he said. ‘How could you? Imagine if something had happened to you.’
‘Are you still worried about your mum and dad?’ he asks.
‘Not so much now, not after the letter. But it will be a bit weird, seeing them again.’
‘I can’t imagine it,’ Danny says.
‘You don’t need to. Your parents are, like, rock solid. Anyone can see that.’
‘We haven’t had anything . . . anything really bad happen, though, in our family. Like you, I mean. You don’t know what would happen, then,’ Danny says.
‘I reckon they’d still be rock solid. They care too much about you and Hattie. It’s obvious.’
‘Your parents care about you, Freya! The two things don’t go together, silly!’
‘It was the silences I couldn’t stand,’ I say. ‘The not knowing.’
‘Maybe they didn’t know either. Maybe there wasn’t anything they could tell you, before.’
I slide off the wall and hunt around for an old can or something for us to aim at, like we always used to do, last summer, waiting here. We each collect a pile of stones.
Danny’s first shot goes way off.
‘Rubbish throw!’
‘You do better, then.’
My stone falls short. I try again, a near miss. I’ve got better at aiming, since last year. Next go, though, Danny hits the can clean off the rock. He goes over to put it back.
‘Hey! Boat’s coming,’ he calls back.
My belly gives a lurch. Any minute now.
The farm tractor-trailer trundles down the lane towards the jetty, Huw at the wheel, ready to take bags and gear back to the farm. He doesn’t seem to notice us.
‘Can you see them yet?’ Danny says.
The Spirit chugs across the grey-blue water of the Sound, leaving a spiral of white wake and a cloud of gulls behind.
I’ve a lump in my throat.
‘I’ll leave you to it,’ Danny says. ‘You won’t want me hanging around.’
Dear, thoughtful Danny. How could I ever have thought he looked so much like Joe? OK, he’s got the same sort of hair, same sort of clothes, but that’s about it. Now I’ve got to know him, I can see how different to Joe he really is. How much he is himself.
I hang back, waiting for everyone to get off the boat, and for Huw and Matt to load the bags on to the trailers. Izzy sees me and waves. Mum and Dad are the last to get off. They carry their own small bags. They stand on the steps where the boat has tied up, waiting. Huw and Matt change places: Huw goes down into the boat to help Dave, and Matt climbs up into the driver’s seat on the tractor. Izzy squashes in next to him, already laughing. Matt starts the tractor engine. Huw and Dave untie the boat and cast off, chugging away again over the water.
I watch it all unfolding, waiting for the moment when everyone will have gone but us.
Every arrival on the island is like a kind of new beginning.
Mum and Dad, side by side, stand on an empty quay.
I walk slowly down to meet them.
Gramps comes downstairs for supper. There’s roast lamb, and summer pudding made with raspberries and redcurrants from the garden and the handfuls of blackberries we picked from the hedge next to the lighthouse garden, on our way back from the jetty. It’s a family meal, a kind of muted celebration.
We talk about what to do, for Joe’s day. One year since his accident. We are beginning to talk about him, all of us, at last.
‘What about something in the church?’ Evie says, as she passes round the potatoes. ‘Not religious, but a sort of gathering where we can have readings, and talk about our memories, and have flowers and music.’
‘Too like a funeral,’ Mum says. ‘We don’t want all that again.’
Gramps and Dad are quiet while Mum and Evie bat ideas back and forth.
‘No fussing,’ Gramps says, eventually. His hand shakes, spilling peas from his fork on to the tablecloth. ‘No arrangements and busyness.’
‘Perhaps we shouldn’t do anything, after all,’ Mum says. ‘Joe’s in our hearts all the time, anyway. We think about him every day, all of us. It’s not as if we need anything special to remind us of him.’
‘Sometimes it helps,’ Evie says, ‘to mark the stages. The passing of time.’
‘I think it should be outside,’ I say. ‘At the beach. Candles, floating out on the sea, and we each just think about Joe, in our own way.’
Mum nods, and then Evie.
‘Sounds lovely. Simple.’
‘That’s decided, then.’
The house feels full again. Mum and Dad tramp up and downstairs. They put their bags and coats and shoes in Joe’s room. From the doorway I see Evie has moved things round: there’s a cream cover on the bed; the shells and things have been cleared off the shelf. It smells different, already.
Later, Mum comes and sits on the edge of my bed. I’ve been lying there, writing in my notebook about the day. It’s just beginning to get dark.
‘Don’t you want the light on?’ she says.
‘Not yet.’
‘You look amazing, you know?’ she says. ‘I can’t stop looking at you! You’ve grown up, these few weeks of summer.’
She fiddles with the edge of my blue skirt. ‘Where did this come from? It’s so pretty. It’s not one of Evie’s, is it?’
‘No. Izzy gave me a pile of clothes she didn’t want any more. But this is the only thing I really like.’
‘Izzy who we met earlier, on the boat?’
‘Her. Yes.’
I show Mum the other clothes, hanging on the hook on the back of my door. Mum takes the orangey-pink dress off its hanger and holds it against herself. Her face is pale above the bright colour, her hair a faded brown, shorter than before.
‘Have it,’ I say. ‘It looks nice. They are magic clothes, anyway. You should see what happens if you put it on.’
Mum smiles. ‘What kind of magic?’ she asks. ‘I thought you’d grown out of all that sort of thing, these days.’
‘Change and transformation. That kind of magic.’
‘Did you get my letter?’ Mum asks. ‘I thought you might write back.’
‘I tried. I couldn’t get the words right. But I liked getting yours.’
‘Good.’
We’re both quiet.
‘Were you writing, when I came in?’
‘Yes.’
‘Your notebook? With the blue cover?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you write about Joe, ever?’
‘Sometimes. This summer, last summer.’
‘Will you show me?’
‘Sometime. Perhaps.’
The soft light outside fades to dusk.
‘It’ll be better, from now on,’ Mum says. She reaches out, takes my hand in hers, holds it tight.
We sit close together like that in the darkening room. I lean into her, rest my head against her. She strokes my hair, over and over, gentle as breathing.