This Northern Sky Page 13

  The ache inside my heart is almost unbearable tonight.

  I’ve walked a long way: three miles at least, because I’ve come to the turn in the road where I waited for Finn and Isla that time before, when we went out on the bikes. Without even thinking about it I take the fork up to the white cottage. Her dad’s van is parked outside, a pile of lobster pots stacked neatly by the side of the house. The wind’s stronger up here: it whistles through the telephone wires, blows a trail of sand across the tarmac and on to the grass. A light’s on inside the cottage.

  I knock at the door. I can hear a man’s voice calling out, feet coming downstairs. The door swings open and Isla’s there, her hair wild round her face, her eyes blazing.

  ‘Is he back? Is there news?’ Her voice is tight with worry.

  ‘Who?’

  Disappointment floods her face.

  ‘Who are you talking about? What’s happened?’ I ask.

  ‘Finn. He hasn’t come back. They’ve been out looking for him. I thought you must have come to tell me he’s safe.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about it,’ I say.

  ‘It’s been nearly eleven hours. It’s getting dark. There’s another storm blowing in . . . it’s dangerous walking along the rocks in the dark, when the tide’s up. Joy has an instinct about these things. I’m surprised they didn’t phone you –’

  ‘There’s no phone at our house.’

  ‘You must have been the last person to see him, early this morning. Did he say anything? Where he was going?’

  ‘Just that he was going to walk along to the next beach. He wanted to be by himself. He often does that, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Was he upset? Think, Kate. It’s really important.’

  ‘He was quite calm, I think . . . He listened to me, mostly, talking about things. He was nice to me.’

  But he was upset about you, Isla, being with Tim –

  ‘I suppose he was a bit preoccupied.’ I take a deep breath. This is difficult to say. ‘I suppose it might have been hard for him to see you and Tim getting together last night. Swimming together this morning.’

  A blast of wind brings the first drops of rain.

  ‘You’d better come in,’ Isla says.

  In the hall light I see her face better: embarrassed, red. She doesn’t like me, I think. She blames me for something, though I can’t imagine what.

  Her father steps out of the kitchen, drying his hands on a towel. ‘Any news?’

  She shakes her head.

  ‘You must be Kate,’ he says. He shakes my hand. ‘Heard about you.’

  ‘I’ll phone Joy again,’ Isla says. ‘It’s been a while since we talked. Anything might have happened by now.’

  I wait in the hall while she takes the phone and sits down on a chair to make the call. There are framed black and white photos hung along the wall and up the stairs: boats, and people. Old photos of island houses with thatched roofs and thick walls. A boy holding a large tabby cat. A group of fishermen. A younger version of Isla with hair in plaits, freckles, sitting on the top of a gate with a kite in her hands. No pictures of her mum, I notice. No sign of her. I realise for the first time that she’s never referred to her mother at all.

  The worry note in Isla’s voice gets stronger.

  I can hear another voice at the end of the line: its rising tone but not the actual words. Isla’s changes, becomes reassuring. ‘He’ll be fine. He needed some time alone, that’s all. Kate’s here. Yes. She said.’

  My own heartbeat quickens: I can’t help it, as if worry is contagious or something. Because it seems a bit ridiculous to me, as if they are all massively overreacting. Unless there’s something they all know about Finn. Something I don’t know.

  Isla puts her hand over the mouthpiece and turns to me. ‘What were you talking about with Finn? You said he just listened.’

  My turn to go red. ‘About me, and a boy called Sam. And about a car accident I was in. But nothing too terrible, honestly. And Finn was very calm and wise. He didn’t seem upset by it. Not at all.’

  She goes back to her call. I’m trying to hear both sides of the conversation but it’s impossible. She just says things like yes, no, I don’t think so. Just friends. Yes.

  The clock on the wall ticks round. Ten fifteen. Dusk outside. Wind rattling the door.

  ‘What was he wearing?’ Isla’s asking me.

  I try to remember. ‘Jeans. Black T-shirt. Grey top, I think, tied round his waist. Boots.’

  But no coat. No waterproofs . . .

  He knows this island as well as anybody. There are plenty of places to take shelter. That ruined house where I waited for the rain to stop. Old barns. Boathouses. The old chapel. He’s probably called in on someone; been invited in for supper, just forgotten to let anyone know. They are usually all so relaxed and casual about time at the Manse that I’m surprised they even noticed that Finn hadn’t come home. There must be something else. There has to be. Otherwise, it doesn’t add up.

  Isla puts the phone back. Her dad comes into the hall again. ‘Well?’ he asks.

  ‘No, he still isn’t back.’ She frowns. ‘Where might he go? Any ideas, Kate?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. You know him much better than I do, Isla.’

  ‘Yes.’ She sounds irritated. Or maybe afraid.

  Her dad reaches for his coat, picks up his keys from the hall table. ‘We’ll go over to the Manse,’ he says. ‘See where they’ve looked already. Give them a hand. We can drop you off on the way, Kate. It’s getting late.’

  There’s no room to argue. Isla climbs into the back of the van and I go in the front seat next to her dad. The van stinks of fish, salt water, the sharp, clean smell of metal.

  It’s properly dark now, and the clouds make it darker still. We rattle down the track, back along the coast road next to the dunes towards the village. The telephone kiosk is illuminated: a box of light in the dark. The silhouette of a man talking animatedly into the phone is in plain view. My heart sinks. Dad.

  Isla’s father brakes and pulls up on the grass. ‘There you go, Kate. Get some sleep. We’ll let you know if there’s any news about the lad.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I say.

  He pulls the van door behind me and it clicks firmly shut. It’s clear to me that I’ve been dismissed. Not needed. Not wanted. Islanders, closing ranks.

  I watch the van drive down through the village, over the cattle grid, past the telecom mast and the shop, and the red tail lights fade into the darkness. I can’t bear to go inside the house where Mum will be waiting, alone. Dad still hasn’t seen me luckily: he’s too intent on whoever he’s talking to. Her, I guess: the woman. So instead of walking in, I go straight past the house, cutting across the grass and behind the shop to rejoin the road the other side.

  Keep walking.

  The west wind is sweeping the heavy clouds over the island and away. The rain will fall elsewhere this time. Every so often there’s a clear patch of sky, enough to glimpse stars, planets, a slice of moon.

  Where would Finn go, if he was wanting to hide? Somewhere special to him, that felt safe.

  Collay, I think. That island where we collected cockles.

  The idea of him rowing across the water in the dark, in the wind, makes me sick to my stomach. He wouldn’t be so stupid. Would he? Please not . . . But, of course, he might have gone over while it was still light, and then the tide would have come in and he would have had to stay there. That would explain everything.

  Surely someone would have thought of that already; checked if the boat was missing?

  I keep walking into the dark.

  I should have gone with him, this morning. I nearly did. If he’d looked as if he’d wanted me to, I would have. But maybe that’s the whole point. When people can’t reach out, that might be when they need you most. You have to be brave enough to push past the closed-off facade . . .

  This morning! It seems impossible that this is still the same day.

  In my head I suddenly hear
Finn’s voice, as loud and clear as if he were standing in front of me. The ringing stone. That first time we ran along the beach together, me huffing and sweating and out of breath. A special place, that’s been there for thousands of years. And it seems more and more possible, the more I think about it. It’s too far from the road for anyone in a car or jeep to have seen him. You’d have to clamber along the rocky shoreline, take a path across fields, along the cliff . . . I try to remember details from the map on the wall in the museum.

  Now I’ve got a purpose, a place to head to, I feel much more confident. I convince myself that I’ll be the one to find him, when no one else has. Perhaps Isla doesn’t know him as well as she thinks she does. It’s as if I’m being guided by some sort of animal instinct. Thinking the way Finn might. I try to remember more. Past the ruined house, and the field of black cattle, along past the Iron Age fort, called a broch, and the Neolithic cairns . . .

  The sound of the sea crashing on to the sand is louder at night. Most of the birds have already roosted, but every so often I hear the lonely call of a curlew or something, echoing across the bay. The light at the end of the pier blinks on, off, on. It shines out across the heaving water. I pull my collar up and put my hands deep in my pockets. The temperature’s dropped. Just as well I am walking fast.

  It seems as if it’s all I’ve done for weeks now: walking. You’d think I’d know this small island like the back of my hand, but I still don’t and everything looks different at night. At the church, I take the left fork that takes me across the island at its narrowest point. Not a single car passes me the whole way. The scattered houses are all in darkness, as if everyone is asleep.

  At last the ruined house looms ahead, and beyond that, North Bay. The sea is calm this side of the island, out of the wind. I take the narrow path that runs above the beach, round the coast. It’s so dark and silent that I feel I must walk as quietly as I can too, but even so, I startle a bird and it rises up squawking, flapping its big wings as it wheels away.

  The clouds are clearing: the patches of starlit sky get bigger, and when the path comes out on to the cliff I glimpse the moon again: a bright silver crescent, already higher in the sky.

  I have to pick my way between boulders; the path seems to peter out altogether in places, and then I come out on to a broad spread of cropped grass divided in two by a running stream, a wooden bridge across, and a single house: a traditional one with deep walls and a tarred roof. The windows are shuttered. Imagine living here.

  I keep going. The rocks are craggy ahead, dark shapes against the sky: the cairns, possibly, or the outline of the broch. No signposts or anything to help. All I want now is to find him, for it all to be OK. And then sleep.

  But it begins to feel ridiculous, the chances of him being out here. Why was I so confident before?

  And what if . . . what exactly might I find, if I do find him? Dark thoughts, conjured up by the darkness, swarm in my mind.

  Twenty-three

  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 attenti
on 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.