An Island of Our Own

  “Do you think they’re tourists?” I whispered to Jonathan. “Or do they live here?”

  “Those two are engineers,” said Jonathan, pointing. “Look. It says so on the back of their boiler suits.”

  “I think they live here,” said Davy. “And – and – they come to Kirkwall to do their shopping.”

  The next ferry was much smaller than the one from Aberdeen. It had a blue nose, which opened up to let the cars on.

  Davy was delighted. “It’s a shark boat!” he said. “It’s got jaws! It’s going to eat us!”

  It took about five minutes to explore the ferry. There was a narrow car deck, a Passenger Saloon, which was a grand name for a square little room with fake-wood walls, and old-fashioned brown seats. There was a cafeteria in the very bottom of the boat. There was a map of the Orkney Islands on the wall, and Davy and I spent ten minutes reading all the names out loud to each other. Notster, Quoyburray, Keelylang Hill, Point o’ the Scurroes, The Ool, Sneuk Head, Hill of Miffia, Tongue of Gangsta, Mucklegersty, Suckquoy.

  “It’s like somewhere in a story!” I said.

  “Everywhere’s somewhere in a story,” said Kate, which was almost the same as what Jonathan had said about stones. But I knew what I meant.

  We ended up on the Passenger Deck, which was basically an outdoor corridor with benches on it. It was sunny, but windy. The sky was pale blue and full of puffy white-and-grey clouds. We stood and looked out as the ferry chugged past alongside the island. Orkney mostly seemed to be empty and made of fields and low, bumpy up-and-down hills in green and purple and yellow and brown. There were sheep in the fields, and little houses nestled in the folds of the hills. The sea was a dark navy blue and always moving, all the time, in busy little wavelets. Below the sun, it sparkled, a great patch of white light, and round the edges of the sun stain, the tips of the waves glittered and danced with light. The whole ocean looked happy to be alive.

  It took about an hour and a half to get to Westray. It looked just like Orkney did, only greener and flatter and, if anything, more empty. The further we got from London, the emptier and more end-of-the-world-y things became. Soon there would be just bare rocks and sea and woolly mammoths.

  “Welcome,” said Kate, as the ferry chugged up to the dock, “to the Sands of Woo.”

  “Seriously?” I said.

  Kate showed me her phone. Sands of Woo.

  “Woo!” said Jonathan.

  Gran’s friends Derek and Shirley were waiting for us on the jetty. Derek waved when he saw us land. “Shall we go?” he said. “Our boat leaves from the other side of the island, but they said they’d wait.”

  Derek and Shirley were both old, but not massively so. Wrinkly but not decrepit. They lived on the actual island where Auntie Irene had hidden the treasure, which was tiny. It didn’t have a proper ferry on Sundays, just the boat that took the minister across – he’d already done one sermon on Westray that morning, and now he was going to Papa Westray to do one that afternoon. This boat didn’t have a car deck – Shirley had had to borrow a car from a friend on Westray to take us across the island and anyway, the jetty on Papa Westray wasn’t designed for cars. If you wanted to bring your car to Papa Westray, you had to take it across on the big weekday ferry, and have it winched ashore by a crane.

  It was rather wonderful, going across in the little boat. The wind blew my hair back against my cheeks and into my face. The boat went up and down, and the waves slapped against the side with an achuu, achuu, achuu noise.

  “Look!” said the man driving the boat. “Do you see that there? Dolphins.”

  “Dolphins!” said Davy. “They’re my favourite thing!”

  He looked astonished, and delighted, like the dolphins had been put in the water by the universe for the sole purpose of making him happy. Perhaps they had.

  Papa Westray, the little island, looked exactly like an island in a storybook. The sort the Swallows and Amazons would camp on, or George Kirrin would own, or pirates would bury their treasure on, and then go to fight in other wars and leave it there to be discovered.

  It sat low and rocky and green in the navy-dark sea. There were cliffs, and a beach, and a few small buildings and houses, and further in the distance, sheep in grassy fields. The water around the shore was turquoise, and the sand of the beach was pale cream. There were little birds hopping on the stones and fluttering around the bay, and honestly, if this wasn’t heaven, I didn’t think it could really be far from it.

  Derek and Shirley lived in a stone house near the middle of the island. Jonathan showed Shirley his print-out map with the place where Auntie Irene had taken her photograph marked. It wasn’t far from their house. Nowhere was very far from their house. It was a very small island. Three and a half miles square. For such a small place, though, it seemed to have a lot of things on it. A school, a youth hostel, a shop, a guest house, several churches, a nature reserve and a museum.

  “It’s about twenty minutes’ walk away,” said Shirley. “You can go after lunch.”

  Lunch was delicious – crabs caught that morning by fishermen on Westray. Derek and Shirley listened politely while I told them all about Auntie Irene and our quest. They knew a bit about it from talking to Gran, but not the details. They didn’t get all excited about it, like Kate and Sizwe did, which I sort of liked. They were more like, Oh, OK, that’s a totally reasonable way to get some money, which was more like how the people at the Maker Space had reacted. I thought Shirley and Derek would probably like the Maker Space.

  The plan was to stay the night with them, and then get a sleeper train back to London the next evening. That evening someone on the island was having a sixtieth-birthday party, and apparently everyone on the island was invited, which Shirley and Derek said totally included us.

  “We can celebrate finding the treasure!” I said. I waited for Jonathan to tell me there wasn’t going to be any treasure. But he just carried on eating his crab.

  We set out for the beach after lunch. The island was green and brown and mostly divided into little fields – some with neat grass and animals grazing, some all wild and unkempt, with weeds and old farm equipment and tangle. There were sheep, and cows (but not Highland cows, ordinary ones), drystone walls all heavy with lichen, and country lanes. It was very windy – the wind kept blowing my hair into my eyes. Jonathan carried the metal detector, and Kate walked beside him. I walked with a bounce and a hop and a skip. Davy pottered about at the side of the road – running ahead to see what was around the next bend, lingering to peer at the flowers in the ditches. He sang to himself as he ran about, one of Mum’s happy songs:

  K-K-K-K-K-Katy,

  B-B-Beautiful Katy.

  You’re the only g-g-g-girl that I adore.

  When the m-m-m-moon shines,

  Over the cowshed,

  I’ll be waiting at the d-d-d-dairy door.

  Songs. They’re another thing that went when Mum died. Jonathan doesn’t sing any more. Well, why not? I thought, and I started singing too:

  O, when the saints go marching in,

  O, when the saints…

  To my surprise, when I finished the verse, Jonathan joined in:

  Swing low, sweet chariot,

  Coming for to carry me home…

  “Swing low…” sang Kate, and Davy waved his bit of stick about to conduct us.

  A band of angels, coming after me,

  Coming for to carry me home.

  This train is bound for glory…

  A cow, poking its head over the wall, watched us with a placid expression, like nothing we could do would ever surprise it. I blew it a kiss.

  And then we were standing on the grass, looking down on the beach.

  “Is this it?” said Kate.

  “I guess so,” said Jonathan.

  We looked at the photograph in the album. Then we looked at the bea
ch again. It was hard to be sure.

  “Well,” said Kate. “At least it’s not definitely wrong. Does that thing work?”

  So then Davy and I showed her how to work the metal detector, and she detected her belt buckle, and her house keys.

  “Where shall we look?” I said. “It could be anywhere!”

  “It couldn’t,” said Jonathan. “It won’t be under those rocks, will it?” He was right. The rocks looked like they went down all the way to the bottom of the sea. “So let’s start with the bit that’s in the photograph, and move out if we have to.”

  So we did.

  We let Davy work the metal detector. He moved it all along the grass, and then back. A couple of times it started beeping, and we all got excited, but the first time we just found a fifty-pence piece and the second time we found a bent spoon.

  Then we moved further out. Into the longer, tussocky grass. We moved the detector all through the grass, getting further and further out. We found a lump of rock with veins of iron running through it. We found a beer can, and a rusty-looking piece of railing.

  We went back and forth, all the way through the field, and then back to the bit of beach in the photograph for a second time, in case we’d maybe missed a spot by accident. Then we went to the next beach along, and the beach after that. We found a piece of wood with rusty nails in it, and a lump of concrete with the bottom of a fence post still wedged into it. We found a pound coin, and a penny, and a toy horse, and a key with a plastic fob, and something that looked like it might once have belonged to a handbag.

  And then we were done. And the briefcase wasn’t there.

  DONE

  “Perhaps you got the coordinates wrong,” said Kate.

  “Perhaps you ought to keep your nose out of things that aren’t your business,” said Jonathan.

  Kate looked a bit surprised, and a bit hurt.

  Jonathan rubbed his hand across his face. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m just … well. Sorry.”

  “We didn’t get them wrong,” I said. “I checked them, and so did Jonathan, and so did Jen. It’s supposed to be here. And it isn’t.”

  Davy began to cry. Jonathan and I glanced at each other.

  “Aw, Davy, don’t,” said Jonathan.

  Kate bent down and put her arm around him.

  “It’s OK, sweetheart,” she said. “Come on. Everything will be all right, I promise.”

  Davy made a messy, wet, mumbling noise, which sounded something like Sebastian-my-rabbit-rent-Irene-Mum. I knew how he felt. People saying everything will be all right when it obviously won’t be is one of my worst things.

  “Davy’s right, Kate,” I said. “I know you’re trying to be helpful and everything, but it’s not your rabbit. Or your brother who never has enough money to pay the rent.”

  “I know—” Kate began, but all of a sudden, I couldn’t bear it. I started walking back across the field as fast as I could. If I don’t have to talk to anyone, I thought, I won’t cry. I won’t cry. I won’t.

  HEARTH AND STONE

  Kate caught up with me at the gate. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I am, really. You’re quite right, I should have a sign on my head that says WARNING: TRIES TOO HARD TO BE NICE, AND THEN SAYS STUPID THINGS.”

  “That’s a bit long for a sign,” I said, and the tears I wasn’t crying only slightly blurred my voice.

  “See?” said Kate. “Even my apologies don’t make sense.” She smiled at me hopefully. “Listen,” she said. “I want to go and buy some postcards. Then I’d like to show you something. It’s one of my favourite things in the whole world.”

  I half shrugged. I didn’t want to go and see stuff. I wanted to go back to Derek and Shirley’s and hide in my room and read about the end of the world. But I didn’t want to seem ungrateful. Kate had been lovely, and when people are lovely, you have to let them go and see their favourite thing in the world, even if you’d rather not.

  We went back to the little island shop, which was tacked onto the youth hostel. The shop sold food, and loads of other things, like wool, and cards with lifeboats on them, and books, and things that people on the island had made, like jewellery and socks. Kate bought postcards, and carrot cake, and I bought postcards for Gran and Grandad, and Jo, and Jen, and Sizwe, and Neema, and Keith.

  Then we went back down the road, towards the ferry. There was a farm with red doors and a red wagon wheel against the wall and a sign saying MUSEUM. We went and had a poke around. The museum was in a barn, and was full of old-looking bits of stuff – milk churns, and old clothes, and a cup with a moustache-holder to stop your moustache falling into your tea. We looked around for a bit, then we went back out and down a track marked ANCIENT MONUMENT.

  “What is it?” said Davy, but Kate wouldn’t say.

  “It’s Stonehenge,” said Jonathan. “The other one’s just a fake. It’s a three-million-year-old spaceship. It’s the one true cross!”

  What it was, was… well… There was a wire fence, and inside the fence there were what looked like two little houses, very neatly made of stone and joined by a small passage. Only, someone had forgotten to put on the roof, and the outside of the walls had been packed with earth, so the houses looked rather as though they’d been dug out of a hill. Each house had a low door with a stone on top – we had to duck down to get inside, even Davy.

  But inside the house, it was nice. There were shelves, or possibly small seats built into the walls. You could sit in the wall and look out of the door at the sea, and hear the noise of the waves against the shore, and watch the little birds wheeling in the sky.

  There was a tourist sign, like the ones you get in National Trust places. It read:

  KNAP OF HOWAR ORKNEY’S OLDEST KNOWN FARMSTEAD

  The farmstead at Knap of Howar is one of the oldest standing buildings in northern Europe. Inhabited between 3600 BC and 3100 BC, it originally lay well back from the seashore in a grassy area behind the sand dunes. Changes in the sea level over the centuries have swept away the sand which had buried the ruins.

  Although this is the oldest known settlement in Orkney, it was probably just one of a large number of single-family farms scattered across the Orkney landscape. The farmers grew crops of wheat and barley and raised cattle and sheep. Their diet was supplemented by fishing and gathering shellfish. In many respects their lifestyle was similar to that of most of Orkney’s population until modern times.

  Next to the words was a picture of a stone hut with a thatched roof, built on a beach, with an ancient family doing ancient-family things like waving arrows around and mending fishing nets, dressed in what looked like thoroughly inadequate clothes for a Scottish island. But perhaps it was warmer then.

  “It’s over five thousand years old,” said Kate. She was grinning. “It’s three thousand years older than Jesus! It’s older than Homer! And the Romans! And everything in London! And it’s right there!”

  I tried to imagine what the people who’d lived here would have been like. Had there been kids? What did they wear? What did they do all day?

  “Are we going to eat that cake?” said Kate.

  The grass was soft and kind of springy. The cake was home-made carrot cake made by someone who lived on the island, and Jonathan had bought a big bottle of lemonade too. It did make me feel a bit better.

  “You know what?” said Davy. “Everyone who lived in that house is dead.”

  There was a pause. Then we all started to laugh.

  “What? What’s so funny! They are!”

  “Imagine if something you made was still here in five thousand years,” said Kate.

  Davy liked that idea. “I could make something and bury it somewhere where nobody would find it for years and years and years, I’d write MADE BY DAVY KENNET on it, and then in the future they’d dig it up and I’d be famous!”

  I’m not so sure humans are going to
exist in five thousand years. Surely by then we’ll have used up all the oil and all the coal, and probably all the whales and dolphins, and we’ll all have died of pollution, or starvation, or overheating, or all three, and the icebergs will melt, and this little house will be flooded over and gone, and there’ll be nobody left to remember the people who lived there, and nobody left to remember Davy and Jonathan and Kate and me.

  I said all this, and Kate said, “Maybe. Or maybe we’ll find a way to solve our problems. Maybe you will. Maybe by then we’ll be living on Alpha Centauri. Maybe they’ll pack up this house and put it on the moon!”

  Maybe. I dunno. I dunno what’s going to happen to humanity. I don’t even know what’s going to happen to us.

  I wondered what Mum would have said if she was here. If she was alive, we wouldn’t be sitting in this little house in Orkney. Which would be sad, because Orkney was awesome, although my mum was even more awesome. If Mum was here, she’d be trying to cheer us up. She’d be reminding us that life is brief and our everyday problems are meaningless when compared with the great sweep of time, or something. Which is all very well, but our everyday problems aren’t meaningless. Bad things don’t stop being bad just because there are good things in the world too.

  The carrot cake was good, though. And the house was brilliant. I wished we could stay here for ever and never go home. No, I didn’t wish that. If we didn’t go home there’d be no one to save Sebastian. Not that I exactly saw how we were going to save him now, but I wasn’t quite ready to give up hope yet. Kennets don’t give up on family members, ever, even if those family members are rabbits.

  NOTHING

  “It isn’t there,” I said.