“Here it is.” I stopped still.
Gully stood a few feet away from me, looking out to the sea. “I think she was coming down here to watch the storm. It was a low tide.”
“Maybe you’re right. Is the arch down there?” I’d seen photos of the archway, made with driftwood, surrounding an old gate carved with mystical symbols that were that mystical no one knew what they actually meant.
“It’s a steep walk down and worse up.” He looked at me, appraising almost. “How fit are you?”
“Pretty fit. You won’t have to carry me.” I liked the idea of him carrying me.
He raised an eyebrow and looked questioningly at me. “We’ll see. You okay?”
He wasn’t asking about the walk. “I’m fine. This place is part of my life, just like it’s yours.”
There was just a nod, an acknowledgement, then we started the drop down. The steps were uneven, haphazardly put in as they were needed rather than with a plan, which meant I spent more time concentrating on how not to slip rather than the view, which was mainly hidden with bracken and evergreens.
The descent smoothed out as we reached the bottom, the path widening and becoming a slope down to the beach, the view opening up.
The tide was out, stretches of empty sand lay out in front of us, a cove surrounded with high cliff faces, another jetty of rock jutting out into the sea.
But before that there was a fence, roughly made to separate the path from the beach, partially patched up with bushes and trees, and in the middle of that was the arch way and the gate.
Ivy had climbed all over it, weaving its way over the wood, the green of its leaves one of the only colours other than the pale greys and sand.
“This is it. This is Ivy’s Arch?” Tears weren’t going to be stopped.
“It is. I thought I should bring you here first so you didn’t have to keep anticipating what it’d be like when you see it.” He leaned against the wood, running his fingers over the gate where it was carved. “The gate isn’t the original. The original hasn’t been here for decades, I suppose. When the gate starts looking a bit knackered, someone makes a new one and replaces it so the original design’s never lost.”
“It’s pretty. It’s more than pretty.” I saw the clumps of rocks that I recognised from a photo Gully sent a couple of years ago of him and his brothers sitting on them, playing guitars and laughing. There’d been other pictures, ones that included his sisters-in-law and then his niece and nephew. A family.
“I know why you like it here.”
Gully nodded, smiling, but the smile was pale.
“I know why Ivy liked it here. I think you might be right. She would’ve come here to watch the storm. I can imagine it being spectacular.”
“It is. You’re further away from it rolling across the Strait than the lighthouse, so you get a different view.” He stepped closer to me. “It took me awhile to not hate this place after she died. But I chose to find peace with it.”
“I understand that. This place will be here long after us – any of us.” I unpacked my camera. “Time to make a record of how it looked today. Smile.”
I knew I still had tears on my cheeks but I chose to ignore them and started to take photos, mainly of Gully as he tried (badly) to cartwheel across the sand, then flipping forwards towards the lapping tide. He looked like a boy trying to impress a girl but who knew he couldn’t quite do it right, so was relying on cute more than anything.
For the next half an hour we laughed and walked in the sand, losing our shoes and socks and heading for the cold water of the sea, waving at a fishing boat that sailed past and ignored us.
I felt like a child for the first time in years, in a place that was now safe, where there was a history of laughter and tears and everything in between. The suitcase packed full of stars and wishes and dreams seemed to start unpacking itself and the heaviness left my shoulders.
I even tried to cartwheel on the sand too.
We grabbed lunch back at Gully’s, taking an hour or so for him to write a few more words and for me to look through this morning’s photographs. Some of them I’d use on my social media, some would end up being for sale on my website. The light in all of them was what made the picture, that as well as the man who was in several.
Gully’s smile or the way the camera caught his features when he was focused on something else made the photos, even though I knew I wasn’t unbiassed. Even at Ivy’s Arch, which felt like a moment for both of us, there was something electric in the photos.
Maybe those photos elicit memories of day that would somehow be important. Maybe I already knew it would be. The twee signs in homes or on classroom walls –today is the first day of the rest of your life –felt like they had a bolder meaning today.
I showered and changed before we set off into Puffin Bay, now early afternoon so the light was beginning to fade. We walked from the house to the centre of the town, small stone or cladded houses becoming closer together the nearer we walked to the centre. We passed the lifeboat station and the museum next door, and the monument to Romy’s husband who’d lost his life on a rescue a few years before nearby. The coastal path was easier to walk along, the view across a tide that was high, lapping against the rocks that descended into the sea. Tomorrow I’d see more, when the tide was back out and the sand exposed.
Thane’s lighthouse was already bright as it flashed across the Strait, warning sailors of the rocks that lay close to the surface of the water, hidden saboteurs.
“I’m nervous about meeting your family.” The words came from nowhere. “I’m worried they’re going to find it strange me being here.”
