I hug her, patting her back. ‘You wouldn’t have it any other way.’
She rolls her eyes because I’m right. She might be battling the physical effects of being a new mum but she’s head-over-heels in love with the Elvis-haired child.
‘Time for me to go home,’ I say. ‘I need to get back over the hill before dark.’
She squeezes me hard. ‘Happy New Year, Clee,’ she says. ‘I’m so glad you stayed.’
‘Thank God I can knit,’ I say. ‘Your mother wouldn’t have let me otherwise.’
‘Don’t big yourself up too much there now,’ she says. ‘I saw that scarf, remember.’
We laugh, and I kiss and Happy-New-Year-hug my way slowly out of the busy pub, shrugging into my coat, meeting Brianne’s eyes last. She gives me the briefest of nods, her job done.
‘Hello, beautiful lodge,’ I say, pleased to see the glow of the fire still alive in the hearth. I’ve a Christmas tree too; Ailsa and Julia lugged it over the hill as a surprise a couple of days before Christmas, along with a box they’d put on the bar in the Salvation Arms for people to donate a decoration or so. I cried, of course. Being decent human beings seems to come easy to these islanders. Dolores sent a spare string of lights and Carmen wrapped a vintage silver star in newspaper to go on the top.
I haven’t missed London at all. The idea of rammed shopping streets and packed bars does nothing for me these days. I missed seeing my folks over Christmas, my mum especially, but on the whole it’s cathartic spending my days and nights alone here.
I make coffee, standing at the kitchen sink to watch the beach as I wait for the kettle to boil. I add a slosh of New Year’s Eve whiskey to my coffee and take it to the sofa with my squares blanket and the brown paper package from America.
I haven’t moved a muscle for the last hour. My coffee has gone cold and my face is damp with tears. Mack has sent me an album of our time together, an intimate record of us. The table set for breakfast for two, a jar of wild flowers beside the milk jug. Empty whiskey glasses on the coffee table by the dwindling fire. Our boots lined up beside the door. The infamous chalk line, his holdall on one side, my suitcase on the other. The roofline of the porch picked out by borrowed vintage rainbow bulbs on my birthday. My white dress hung ready to wear. And me. Image after image of me, some of them too personal to ever show anyone else. On the porch steps with a blanket wrapped around my shoulders, coffee cradled between my hands. A black-and-white shot sitting up naked in bed, the sheet around my hips. I don’t think of myself as beautiful, but he’s made me beautiful in these photos. I linger over them all, taking the time to remember the circumstance of each one, the things we said to each other. He turned his lens on me so often I grew used to it, unselfconscious. I knew, probably, that I’d get to see the pictures one day, that I’d look back and remember him, remember us. It’s the most precious gift anyone has ever given me.
There are only two pictures of us together. Mack turned his lens towards us once in bed, his arm outstretched. My head is resting on his shoulder, the white sheet tucked under my armpit, his fingers curved around my upper arm. In one shot we’re both looking directly into the lens, sex-drenched, and in the other my eyes are closed, his head turned away from the lens to press a kiss against my forehead. Love-drenched. I put the album back in its padded envelope. I don’t know when I’ll ever feel able to look at it again.
There’s an invitation tucked into the back to his exhibition at the end of February. I trace the bold black letters of his name slowly with my fingertip, thinking.
It’s five minutes to midnight on the last day of what has turned out to be the defining year of my life. I’m sitting on the boulder at the top of Wailing Hill, layered up because it’s freezing, a hip flask of whiskey in my pocket, but I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else in the world. I’ve come to sit up here with my thoughts, to let the year that’s gone by blow away on the wind and to catch the scent of the new one as it arrives from the east.
I whisper hello to Jupiter, wondering if Mack can see it too. He’s been heavy on my mind this evening. Looking through those photographs has brought him so near I can almost see the outline of him walking along the shoreline, his camera loose around his neck.
‘You know what?’ I speak out loud because I’m someone who talks to Jupiter now, clearly. ‘It’s okay. It’s okay to say it. I loved Mack Sullivan in the most sudden, spectacular, sexual, spiritual, protective, primal way imaginable, and for a little while he loved me back in all the same ways. It was proper human magic.’ I take a slug of whiskey, shuddering as it goes down.