This Northern Sky by Julia Green Read Free Book Online Page A

all the way out to the islands. They look further away this evening: grey, low on the horizon under a grey sky. The sea looks grey too, with white flecks on the waves. The tide’s coming back in; the waves break in long smooth lines along the beach, spreading out over the sand in shallow white froth. A break in the cloud lets a ray of sunlight through, catching the water and turning it silver.
     
    It’s late when I hear Mum and Dad come back in. They talk in soft voices; I can’t hear what they’re saying but Mum laughs. Good. Doors open and close. It goes quiet again. I relax back into sleep.
    Much later, I wake in the pitch dark to the sound of the wind battering the house so hard that everything’s shaking. The sea is roaring. Rain spatters against the skylights. The storm lasts all night: every time I wake, the wind seems louder, howling and crying as if it’s a wild animal that wants to be let in.

Eight
    By morning the rain has stopped and the sky is clearing. I get out of bed and go downstairs: no one else is up. There’s no sound from Mum and Dad’s room. That’s hopeful, I guess. I make tea and toast, then put on my boots and step outside. I set off up the road away from the village, no real plan. The air smells clean, rain-washed.
    I’m zinging with energy. It’s as if the night storm has cleared something in me too. I’ve suddenly come to life again: my senses awake in a different way. I know this sounds weird, but it’s as if the colour has come back in: brighter, sharper. I’m seeing everything more vividly as I walk along, like a film, except that I am in the film and I can hear and smell as well as see it all. A dazzling patch of sunlight on sea; a flock of geese grazing along the grass next to a shining stretch of puddle on the field; small brown birds flitting from one fence post to another. The geese start honking and all take off in flight, necks outstretched, wings slowly beating together.
    The island is almost flat just here, and there’s this huge overarching sky, clouds moving fast, light changing every second, bringing different things into focus, like a spotlight. A white house; the sweep of pale sand; the grassy dunes, a line of telegraph poles; the gleaming ribbon of wet road.
    A small red fishing boat is making its way out of the old harbour, pitching and dropping as it ploughs through the waves. I think about what Finn said, about going out in his boat to get cockles. Will he remember?
    I stop at a fork in the road. Which way?
    A brown hare races across the field to the left: I go that way. The road curves round, over a small hill and then back down the other side, to a part of the island I haven’t seen before. There are houses scattered along the road, none of them close together. Everywhere you look, in fact, there are small white houses, tucked in corners of fields, or against a bank. Crofters, I suppose. I try to remember what Alex was saying about them yesterday, on the beach. Something about the land being divided up into crofts and each one having a mixture of different kinds of ground: fertile bits and less fertile, and an area of peat bank, all shared out fairly. I should have listened more carefully.
    I try to imagine what it might be like, to love a particular place as much as Finn seems to. I’ve always lived in the suburbs, in a sort of non-place: mostly housing estates, long straight roads hemmed in by brick and concrete and glass buildings. Shops, garages, warehouses, takeaway places, cafés, pubs. Roads full of traffic – that roaring sound always in the background, of cars, and sirens; planes overhead – the sky scored by vapour trails. There’s the park near Sam’s nan’s house, where we used to go sometimes, our special tree . . .
    What will Sam be doing today? He hasn’t phoned or texted once. I don’t even know where he’s living, now his nan won’t let him stay at her place overnight . . .
    Is he angry?
    Is he missing me?
    Does he think about me at