The Mirror World of Melody Black (28 page)

Still, she had told me that I could ring her any time, that she'd like to hear about any new projects I was working on. Probably, she was just being polite, but I decided to take her at her word. And anyway, sending her my new proposal did make a certain amount of sense; in a strange way, it was the long-promised follow-up to what I'd written for her back in May.

‘Lindisfarne?' she repeated, obviously perplexed.

‘Yes, that's right. It would be a series of features about the island, what it's like living on the edge of such a tiny community. City girl finds herself dumped in the middle of nowhere – that would be the angle, I guess.'

‘God, I don't know, Abby . . . It sounds like it would be a difficult sell.'

I shrugged at Colin, who had just come in through the cat-flap. ‘Why don't I just send you something? If you decide not to use it, that's fine. No hard feelings.'

‘No, no – you can't go all that way for nothing.'

It took me a few seconds to grasp what she meant. It seemed I'd been so eager to outline my idea that I'd forgotten to cover the basics.

‘Oh, right. No, no problem there. I'm already here – have been for a couple of weeks now.'

There was a silence.

‘On Lindisfarne?'

‘Yes.'

‘Why?'

‘I'm looking after Miranda Frost's cats. She lives here, but she's in the States teaching for a semester.'

There was another small silence. ‘Okay,
that's
an angle I can work. I mean, it's extremely odd, but that's the point. Send me a thousand words on how this happened and I'll pitch it.'

So that was how ‘The Lindisfarne Gossip' came about. The name was Jess's idea: she thought that every time someone did a search for the Lindisfarne Gospels, we'd pop up as the second option on Google's autocomplete, and this would help bring in a certain amount of traffic. The strategy seems to have worked. The column has been a surprise hit over the autumn, and a couple of weeks ago, I finally made the last payment on my credit card.

The name is also a bit misleading, of course: there's not a lot of gossip to report from Lindisfarne. The islanders have some lottery funding to build a new village hall. No one is very happy about second home ownership. Nothing that's going to set pulses racing back on the mainland. Most of what I've written has been human interest, along with a little bit of history and environment. My only directive from Jess was to ‘keep it quirky', and so far that hasn't been a problem. This is a place with a lot of quirks, and the islanders seem to be enjoying their moment in the spotlight. Since September, I've had no shortage of people wanting to share their stories.

There was a ninety-year-old man in the Crown who told me that he'd wandered over to Lindisfarne one day while hiking the Northumberland coast. That was a couple of decades ago, and he has been here ever since.

‘It was peaceful,' he told me, ‘so I decided to stay.'

The following week, I wrote a piece entitled ‘Mrs Moses', about a woman who had a very strange experience on the causeway one night. She'd been racing back to the island after an Elton John concert, trying to get home before the tide came in, but had been badly delayed by snow and freezing fog. When she finally made it to the coast, it was barely an hour until high tide, and she knew it was far too late to make the crossing. Except, when she drove down to where the water's edge should have been, what greeted her instead was the most beautiful and astonishing sight she'd seen in all her fifty-five years on the planet. There, under the light of a half-moon, was a dry road cutting a valley straight through the water.

‘The sea must have been a foot high on either side,' she told me. ‘It seemed completely impossible – a modern-day miracle.'

So she eased onto the accelerator and drove between the waves.

It was only when her headlights dipped with the dropping seabed that she saw what had happened: on either side of the road, the standing water that pools after the tide recedes had frozen solid; on top of this, a good foot of snow and slush from the road had accumulated to form a thick wall of ice, spanning the whole length of the crossing.

‘But weren't you scared?' I asked her. ‘What if the ice had given way?'

‘No, I knew it wouldn't,' Mrs Moses insisted. ‘It might not have been a miracle in the biblical sense, but there was something watching over me that night. Every so often, the universe offers you a gift, and when that happens, you'd be a fool to refuse it.'

This was a nice line to finish on, even though I disagreed with the underlying sentiments. In all honesty, I don't think there's a benevolent ‘something' that sees us home safely from Elton John concerts; and I don't think the universe offers us ‘gifts'. I think we make choices – good or bad – and live with the consequences. Which isn't to say that there aren't
moments like the one Mrs Moses described, when decisions suddenly seem easy and obvious, as if we're being pushed in one direction rather than another. But most of the time, I think we have to engineer these moments ourselves. We have to seek them out, instead of waiting for them to fall into our laps.

All this, I suppose, is another way of explaining what I've been doing with my alone time on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne – time that has now run out. In a couple of days, Miranda is returning and I'll be heading back to the mainland. But as for what comes next – that's one decision I've not yet made.

That morning, I woke up just before seven, as I'd done every morning for the past four months. After I'd fed Jasper and Colin, I went to check the weather forecast, which confirmed what I thought I could see from the bedroom window, though it was too dark to be certain. The satellite images showed that the sky was completely clear, and would remain so for the next twenty-four hours at least. There was hardly any wind, and the temperature was high for December: nine Celsius at lunchtime, dropping to around five by the early evening.

The next task was to check the tides. I knew the approximate times, of course – since I knew when Miranda was due back – but with the new idea that was taking shape in my head, I thought it would be wise to note down the specifics. The next low tide, it turned out, was at 10.22, with high tide six and a bit hours later, at 4.39. That meant I had until early afternoon to cross the sand flats, and I knew from talking to the locals that the whole walk shouldn't take more than two hours, even at a tourist's pace.

Miranda had said she'd be back at the cottage by midday, and the agreement had been that I'd leave in the same taxi she arrived in. All in all, it had seemed the obvious plan. Except, when I woke up that morning, I knew straight away that I didn't want to be waiting around until noon – and I didn't feel like being indoors.

I sent her a text at nine o'clock, on the emergency mobile number I wasn't allowed to use:
Hello Miranda. It's Abby. I've decided to walk back to the mainland. I'll phone for a taxi once I get there. The key will be under the plant pot.

After that, I boxed up all my spare clothes and walked down to the post office with them. The box was heavy and cumbersome, so I had to stop a few times to catch my breath, and it took at least twenty minutes to walk the half-mile to the village square. But this seemed the simplest solution. I wasn't going to attempt to hike across the sands with a fifteen-kilogram rucksack on my back.

The box of clothes was addressed to my mother, since I'd decided the previous night that I should go back to her house for at least a couple of days. Time to adjust. Right then, the idea of London – of King's Cross and the Tube at rush hour – felt completely out of the question. Besides, in all honesty, I wasn't sure what in London I'd be going back to. The last time I'd written to Beck, nine days earlier, he hadn't replied, and I'd heard nothing from him since. To be fair, most people would have snapped long before he did.

After I'd helped the man in the post office to manoeuvre my box into the back room, I bought twenty Marlboro, a sandwich and two bottles of Diet Coke. Then, for the last time, I walked back to Miranda's cottage.

It was 9.59 when I left, and 10.18 when I reached the narrow, stone-strewn beach separating the road from the sand flats. I was dressed sensibly for the weather and terrain: Eskimo coat, complete with furry hood, sunglasses, thick jeans, thick socks and the boots I'd bought in Berwick three months earlier. These were not boots in the same sense as the six other pairs of boots I had crammed into a wardrobe in London. They were actual hiking boots – strong, sturdy and with a sole that could grip on an incline. When I'd set out, I'd also been wearing woollen gloves and a scarf, but these were now stowed in my mostly empty rucksack. Once I'd started walking, I got warm pretty quickly.

The sand flats were deserted, as I'd expected them to be on a weekday in winter. The only signs of life out there were a scattering of wading birds pecking at the ground and a dozen more circling in the sky. When I looked straight ahead, all I could see was perfectly flat and uniform sand, stretching on and on to the bluish smudge that marked the rising hills of Northumberland. Aside from that smudge, only the receding line of wooden posts broke the emptiness of the landscape.

Although it was low tide, the sand I stepped out onto could not be described as dry. It was like the sand right at the edge of the sea – dark, compacted and sodden. It was quite yielding, too – more in some places than others, for reasons I couldn't work out. Before I'd even walked to the second marker-post, there were a couple of points where my boot squelched an inch or more into the ground.

This was the first indication that the environment wasn't quite as uniform as it appeared to be from the shore, and as I walked on, this fact became increasingly evident. The falling tide had left little pools of water here and there, suggesting there must have been small, localized variations in the lie of the land, otherwise undetectable. Then, on two occasions, I came across channels of running water blocking my path. They weren't very deep or wide, but I still had to deviate from the route set out by the posts so that I could find a sensible place to cross; and when I did, the water flowed almost up to my bootlaces.

On the far bank of the second channel, the sand was covered with tiny white shells, thousands and thousands of them, stretching ahead like an elaborately patterned carpet. I've no idea why they had clustered like that, on this particular area of sand – whether by blind chance or according to some obscure underlying principle – but they seemed to go on and on for ever. They crunched underfoot like broken glass, and for a long time this was the only sound I heard. The wind was barely a whisper, and, behind me, the occasional rush of traffic on the causeway had already faded to nothing.

After an hour or so, I reached the first refuge point, and there, I stopped for a break. Although I'd grown accustomed to walking everywhere on Lindisfarne, the soft ground of the sand flats was more tiring than I was used to, and I thought it would be nice to take the weight off my feet for a short while. I knew I still had plenty of time before my route started to flood, so there was no need to rush on yet. Besides, I wanted to take a better look at the refuge point, which prior to now I'd only seen at a distance, from the causeway.

It was hard to guess when it had been put there. It looked as old as a storybook shipwreck; but, then, anything built out here, among the salt and the sand and the water, would probably start to look like that in a matter of months, if not weeks. The rounded stilts that supported the four corners were identical to the marker-posts – a little more than a hand's span in diameter and darkly water-stained to a height a few inches above my head. In one corner was the ladder, rising about twelve feet to the platform that perched safely above the highest waves at high tide. After a short hesitation, I climbed up.

It wasn't a difficult climb, even with my rucksack. The planks that formed the rungs of the ladder had been spaced about a foot apart, and at the top were iron handrails affixed to the chest-high fence that enclosed the platform. I eased myself through the narrow entrance point, then removed my rucksack and set it down in the opposite corner.

The platform was a perfect square, about eight feet by eight feet, formed by ten wooden boards in varying states of disrepair. There was lichen growing on most of them, and a couple had started to rot and splinter. But the floor still seemed solid enough underfoot. There was very little give in the boards, and I assumed that someone, somewhere must have had the periodic job of ensuring the structure was fit for purpose. In any event, it didn't seem in imminent danger of collapse.

Once I'd satisfied myself of this, I stood at each side of the platform in turn and took in the panorama. It was hard to gauge distances across such an empty and almost featureless landscape, but I thought I must be somewhere very close to the middle of the sand flats. Looking ahead from this height, I could just make out the point where the marker-posts appeared to end; and looking back, I could likewise see the sliver of grey where the road met the beach on the curve of the headland. The mainland was off to the right, perhaps less than a mile away, and on my left was a mulchy saltwater marsh, stretching back to the causeway and the pale sand dunes beyond.

Having taken all this in, and having reassured myself that I didn't have so far left to walk, I sat down next to my rucksack, in the corner opposite the entrance point. I ate my sandwiches and then smoked a cigarette, using the empty food packaging as an ashtray. I didn't want to leave any mess behind.

I'm not sure when I decided to stay, or even if I did decide, as such. I suppose if I did make a decision, it was made through conscious inaction rather than action.

Midday came and went, and I told myself that I'd wait another fifteen minutes, smoke one more cigarette, and then get up. Then, very quickly, it was twelve thirty and I was aware that if I left things much longer, I'd be hard pressed to finish my walk. I could actually see the water pushing in at this point; what had started as a narrow trickle in the middle distance was now a swelling river, running faster and broader with every passing minute. And still I did nothing other than watch.