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.
25
REFUGE
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.