Her friends kept their distance until later, when the crowds disappeared back to their lodges and summer houses, and the children left were older, preferring to gather away from the adults with glasses of spiked juice and low voices that they tried to keep away from the wind.
We sat around the fire, marshmallows being toasted, some without success. Anders told stories from the last long trip out into the pacific where he’d been studying something scientific and totally out of my understanding. Catrin added in details, ending his sentences like they were an old married couple who had known each other longer than just a few intense months.
The sky was a dark navy, wisps of white cloud meandering across it. The gulls were still calling, just overheard over the music, although they had quietened, getting ready for just before dawn when they would follow the boats out to sea for breakfast.
Anya sat next to me, listening to the stories more than she spoke. I knew before February, she’d have talked as much as Catrin, almost as much as Catrin. Anders had only threatened to gag her once tonight, although her response was to remind him how that had gone wrong last time.
No one asked for details.
“Did you sit round like this as teenagers?” I spoke just to her, the conversation having moved on to riling someone about his lack of luck with women.
She turned, our legs touching. This was just us now, alone in our bubble under a dark denim sky.
“Yes. We had one summer before university when we were out here pretty much every night. Sometimes there were a dozen of us, sometimes just two. But we always knew where to find each other. No one went far. I was the only one who really left the island.” Her eyes stayed on mine.
“Do you want to come back?”
Her fingers played with the grains of sand. “Sometimes. Now I’m here I don’t want to leave. But then I think that’s because it’s safe and I don’t want to be the type of person who lives in fear. If I don’t go back, then I lose.”
I wanted to touch her, to pull her into my chest like I had before and lend her whatever strength I didn’t have for myself. “You don’t lose. Whatever you choose, you don’t lose, Anya.”
“How? I’ve left my class weeks early after all of them have undergone a trauma so huge it’s scarred their lives. I should be the one to look after them and I can’t, because as my head teacher put it, I’m in no fit state.” Anxiety was loaded in her words.
“Sometimes you have to put yourself first. Get yourself in a place where you can be what others need. How are your pupils doing?” One of her hands rested on her knee and I wondered how it would feel held in mine.
“Better than you’d think. We brought in counsellors and took advice on how to address it with them. He’s still missed, but they don’t fully understand what happened that night, and what they do understand varies from child to child. Kids are resilient. Especially at that age.”
Someone had let a few fireworks off near to the cliffs, a crackle splitting the night, colour scattering across the sky. I waited until she’d stopped watching the show to carry on, wanting her to see a shard of beauty in the dark.
“Who told them about the boy’s death?” I knew the answer.
“Me. The head offered and she would’ve done it, but it needed to be me. They trust me. And they’re my class. Except now they’re not.” I heard sadness and saw her glow dim.
“Who’s looking after them for you?”
“Adele. She’s just come back off maternity leave. She’s great.” Her eyes focused on me again.
I gave her a nod. “You’ve done what you needed to for them. Let them move on.”
“Do I move on? Do I forget what happened?”
Lights. A thud. Screams. The shriek of metal on metal and then an eternal circle.
“No. But you learn to accept that it happened.”
“Which is harder than it sounds.”
“Isn’t it always?”
We became lost in the fire, more beers passed around, the dregs of the punch and a joint. Our legs stayed pressed together and I ignored the raised eyebrows of Catrin, or the raised eyebrow as she was too wasted to raise both together.
“Will you walk me home?” she said.
The party had started to evaporate, the morning beginning to loom.
“Sure.”
We said little, the whispered kisses of the couples we were leaving on the beach simply part of the seagulls’ chorus. The tide was coming in, rippling over the cool sand. It never stopped.
