This Northern Sky (23 page)

Authors: Julia Green

BOOK: This Northern Sky

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I watch Finn’s face light up as he tells them about the great northern divers, and the special protected status, and our plans to fight back. Tim joins in: he says he can imagine a fantastic island broadcast project about listening to the sounds of the Hebrides.
It’s really going to happen
, I think.
And I’m a tiny part of it too. Standing up for something good. Making a difference
.

I help Mum get the casseroles and potatoes out of the oven, just as Isla turns up with her dad. Fiona arrives soon after, her arms full of bottles of champagne. ‘Never seen so many people in this room before!’ she tells Mum, who immediately starts apologising.

‘Stop that!’ Fiona says. ‘It’s a lovely thing to bring people together. And what a wonderful spread.’ She knows most people already, of course, but she’s surprised that we have made so many friends this summer.

Just as it’s beginning to get dark, I wander out through the French doors on to the little garden at the side of the house.

Bonnie follows me outside. ‘Let’s light the candles,’ she says. One by one she lights the candles in the small coloured glasses which we arranged earlier in a line down the centre of the wooden garden table.

‘So pretty,’ she says. She turns and hugs me suddenly. ‘Oh, Kate! It must have been awful for you, all alone with Mum and Dad, and all this stuff going on.’

‘Horrible,’ I say. ‘Yes, but not all the time. There have been amazing things happening. I’ve met all these lovely people. I’ve fallen in love with the island. We’re going to come back to this house next summer, Mum and me. You and Hannah should come too.’

‘Do you think they’ll get back together again?’ Bonnie asks. ‘Won’t Dad realise he’s made a terrible mistake?’

‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I don’t understand any of it. I guess it’s too complicated. And they don’t tell us what’s really going on.’

I tell her about the wild geese poem that Dad recited to me, our first day on the island. ‘I think he was telling me how lonely he felt,’ I say. ‘But I still don’t understand why.’

Bonnie’s quiet for ages. The candles flicker, but they stay alight. The sky over the sea has turned an extraordinary colour: dark turquoise fading into green, and as the sun goes down it throws its path of gold across the water. The light changes all the time. The sun sinks behind the islands and the blue-green of the sky deepens and darkens to navy and blue-black. We see the first stars appear.

‘And are you really all right?’ Bonnie asks.

I nod.

‘That boy’s nice. Finn.’

I smile.

‘He watches you,’ Bonnie says. ‘He likes you, I can tell.’

‘Oh, Bonnie!’ I say. ‘Not you too. We’re friends. There’s someone else he likes more.’

Bonnie makes a funny
hmmm
sound, as if she isn’t convinced. ‘Well,’ she says. ‘It’s the best way to start, as
friends
, in any case. It’s much more likely to work out, if you know each other really well first.’

Hannah opens the French doors. ‘Come back in and be sociable, you two,’ she calls. ‘Food’s ready.’

Bonnie goes to join her.

I walk round the outside of the house and in through the front door to pick up Dad’s camera from the coat hook. I go back out through the gate, over the grass, across the road and down on to the beach.

The tide’s going down. I perch the camera on a rock to keep it steady, and I take a whole sequence of photographs of the starlit sky. The bright planet. The rising moon.

I imagine sending the pictures to Sam:
this is what it was like
.

I turn my back to the sea to look up at the white square of the house, the windows all lit up, the shadows of people as they move round the rooms, and the light from the candles flickering in the garden. How warm and inviting it looks: our house full of friends, family, conversation. It’s exactly how a house should be.

The sound of voices drifts over, carried on the wind, and mixes with the rasp of waves rolling shingle and the cry of seabirds flying low across the water to their roost on the black rocks.

Here we all are, on this small blue planet as it slowly turns, spinning through space, infinitely precious.

Also by Julia Green

Bringing the Summer

Breathing Underwater

Drawing with Light

Blue Moon

Baby Blue

Hunter’s Heart

Bloomsbury Publishing, London, New Delhi, New York and Sydney

First published in Great Britain in July 2013 by

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP