Called me Julia and gave me a big hug, crying into my hair. Glowered at Evie as though she were intruding. Called her Rex. Who were these people he had taken us for? He swept us into the room. Quite bare. Just a bed, desk and chair, and wardrobe. The chair was set askew, the desk cluttered. I saw that he’d made some strange little object out of what looked like tiddlywinks sellotaped together. He grabbed it, then presented it to me with a sort of bow. Thank you, I said. He’d been working on it for months, apparently. I made appreciative noises. Evie peered over at it, and, addressing me as Julia, asked if I had ever seen such a beautiful timepiece! No, I murmured, choking back the urge to laugh. Mr Rafferty said it was his wedding gift to me. He looked into my eyes and squeezed my hands. His gaze made me think of the near-human look you see in pictures of chimpanzees sometimes.
After, me and Evie went to the pub. She told me she planned to travel to Easdale, a tiny island off the West Coast of Scotland, for a few days, to stay in a friend’s cottage. Asked me to join her.
So I said, Why not?
It’s only now, writing this, that I’m wondering why I said yes. Sometimes I don’t know what I think until I write about it in my diary. Like that reed. Oh! Now I remember. Something from our night together. Early in the morning, asking Evie, pestering Evie, to tell me about the swallow from the story, why he had delayed his journey. Eventually she mumbles, Fell in love. I pester some more then she says, Reed. The swallow fell in love with a reed. This silent, graceful thing just blown about in the wind. It never even noticed him. And now something that Evie said in the bar that night comes back to me. A vessel of silence. More emptiness, I think. There’s got to be a link between that and keeping this diary. There’s got to be a link between that and saying yes to invitations made by near- strangers.
20 June
We drove here in a single night. I don’t know why she wanted to drive at night, but she did, and that was the plan, and I was just bumming a ride so what could I say? The others were already on their way to Oxford when she pulled up in her dad’s Morris Minor. Dusk had just fallen, the sky was that fairytale blue. A few stars starting to poke through. I slung my bag in the back and myself in the front. I was bad driving company, just dozing off in the front seat and twitching awake at intervals to fiddle about with the radio. It made her wince. She is sensitive to sound. Vibrates a bit like a violin string depending on what’s playing. Rock got her all taut like she was overstrung. I left on some jazz until the lights of a combine harvester flashing across us woke me up. And I thought harvesting was daylight work, such a city girl am I! I found something beautiful and classical, and she seemed to slacken, and her eyes went dreamy and a little less, well, pebbly looking. We listened together to this sad noble music which I thought was Mozart, but the only Mozart I knew was jolly stuff. This got quieter and quieter, or rather, fewer and fewer instruments played, until there was only this lonely violin. Towards the end, Evie lifted a hand from the wheel and then brought it down, as if wielding a conductor’s baton, in time with the final note. But there was no final note. Or rather, the note she was anticipating was not played. She had got it wrong. We both laughed. But of course I didn’t really miss that last note, she said. What do you mean? Well, everyone thinks that music begins and ends with the first and last notes. And it doesn’t? No. Music begins and ends with silence, she said.
The radio announcer was explaining how Haydn had come to write the symphony. Evie was about to speak. I told her to shush cos I wanted to listen and she gives me this funny look. You like stories, don’t you? she said. Who doesn’t?
Woke up to Oban at sunrise. Drove up to Ellanbeich where Evie turned off the engine and slumped over the wheel like we’d crashed. Exhaustion. Slept for a couple of hours then stood on the dock by our bags, waiting for the first ferry, drinking bitter black coffee from styrofoam cups. Just the smell of it when you’re wrung out with tiredness! And the smell mixing in with old fish and wet rope and the slapping waves … We’re at the cottage now. My room is right at the top, under the eaves. Ha! So why come here? To get away from him, from the others, to be taken somewhere I’ve never been before? We’ll sleep a little and then explore.
21 June
Not writing so much as dragging my pen across the page. Out here the salt air comes at you from everywhere, this being an island and a tiny one at that. It leaches your energy and turns your blood to porridge. Eyelids at halfmast. All I want to do is sleep. But I have to write about today. After the tour, it’s no surprise I’m exhausted. But this air! By the time we came back this afternoon we were sleepwalking. Maybe the air made us mad. Maybe we were dreaming. I would pinch myself but there are scratch marks from the bushes. And the light! So late here and so light. It won’t leave us alone. Maddening and magical and not like daylight but like night with the darkness leached out of it.
We started off fresh enough. A clear morning, like a kid’s crayon drawing, green lawn, blue sky, white cottage, red roof, yellow gorse. We ran outside, down the springy grass to the path. Two dogs came, a sheepdog and a black labrador. Dogs sometimes look like they feel an excess of joy, so much it confuses them and they almost seem in pain with it. The sheepdog and the lab bounded on ahead, looking back every now and then to make sure we were following, as though they’d arranged to take us on a tour. We let them. They took us through tangles of wildflowers, over hillocks and hummocks and down to the rocks, where the air became damper and saltier as we approached the sea, turning, eventually, to seaspray. Then we could get no closer as the waves got high and snatched at the rocks and whatever might be on them and we shouted and laughed and scrabbled back to a safe distance as fast as we could. She is clumsy, I’ve noticed, and looks like a puppet when she runs. Not a puppet, no, one of those Victorian children’s toys, paper figures with jointed limbs that swivel stiffly. The dogs wandered off, and with them went Evie’s energy. Before, with the dogs, she had run with me, not saying much, just laughing, almost hysterically, harder and harder, as if her laugh was something funny which made her laugh even more. But now she was quiet. With the dogs gone she seemed to feel more alone with me. We came inland a little, into the open, where there was nothing else to focus on except each other. Whenever I made some comment, she only mumbled. When I looked at her, she turned her eyes away, seemed to struggle not to turn her head away. She’s the shyest person I’ve ever met. There was something about her nervousness which provoked me. We came to an abandoned quarry which had been flooded. We stood on the edge and looked down. Sunbeams reaching right into the water. Up went my dress, down went my knickers, off came my shoes. Come on! I said to Evie. She couldn’t look at me. She shuffled around, trying to unhook her bra under her t-shirt and slip off her knickers under her skirt. I leaped out over the edge. Water so cold, it stung. She asked me what the water was like. Refreshing! (teeth chattering). In she jumped and up she came, gasping and laughing. We swam. The ruins of a roman bath. Water slate blue, smooth, calm, shadowy. The walls sheer rock flecked with gold. When I got tired of swimming I started on Evie. She’s easy to tease. I ducked down underwater and she started thrashing around, trying to cover herself up. She needn’t have bothered, all I saw was a greenish white glow. I grabbed for her feet, she kicked out, I came up, pretended she’d hit me in the face, she swam up to me all concerned then I splashed her. It was fun. When we got tired of that we thought about going back. And then she realized. How are we supposed to get out? I pointed to some rocks and laughed when I saw her realize we would have to climb them naked and walk all the way round to fetch our clothes.