‘Exeter.’
‘That’s a good one, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘I suppose so.’
‘I didn’t go,’ Hannah says. ‘No one in my family went to uni,’ she coughs, ‘except for my sister, Alice.’
I don’t know what to say to that. I don’t really know anyone who didn’t go to uni. Even Mum went to acting school.
‘Alice was always the clever one,’ Hannah goes on. ‘I used to be the wild one, if you can believe it. We both went to this crummy school but Alice came out of there with amazing grades.’ She taps ash from her cigarette. ‘Sorry, I know I’m banging on. She’s on my mind a lot at the moment.’
Her face has changed, I notice. But I don’t feel like I can ask her about it, seeing as we’re total strangers.
‘Anyway,’ Hannah says. ‘You like Exeter?’
‘I’m not there any more,’ I say. ‘I dropped out.’ I don’t know what made me say it. It would have been so much easier to play along, pretend I was still there. But I suddenly felt like I didn’t want to lie to her.
Hannah frowns. ‘Oh yeah? You weren’t enjoying it then?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘I guess … I had this boyfriend. And he broke up with me.’ Wow, that sounds pathetic.
‘He must have been a real shit,’ Hannah says, ‘if you left uni because of him.’
When I think about everything that happened in the last year my mind goes hot, and blank, and I can’t think about it properly or sort it all out in my head. None of it makes sense, especially now, trying to piece it all together. I can’t explain it, I think, without telling her everything. So I shrug and say, ‘Well, I guess he was my first proper boyfriend.’
Proper as in more than someone to hook up with at house parties. But I don’t say this to Hannah.
‘And you loved him,’ she says.
She doesn’t say it like a question, so I don’t feel I have to answer. All the same, I nod my head. ‘Yeah,’ I say. My voice comes out very small and cracked. I didn’t believe in love at first sight until I saw Callum, across the bar at Fresher’s Week, this boy with black curls and beautiful blue eyes. He gave me a sort of slow smile and it was like I knew him. Like we had always meant to come together, to find each other.
Callum said he loved me first. I was too scared of making an arse of myself. But eventually I felt like I had to say it too, like it was bursting out of me. When he broke up with me, he told me that he would love me forever. But that’s total crap. If you love someone, really, you don’t do anything to hurt them.
‘I didn’t leave just because he broke up with me,’ I say, quickly. ‘It was …’ I take a big drag on my cigarette. My hand’s trembling. ‘I guess if Callum hadn’t broken up with me, none of the rest would have happened.’
‘None of the rest?’ Hannah asks. She’s sitting forward, interested.
I don’t answer. I’m trying to think of a way to go on, but I can’t find the right words. She doesn’t push me. So there’s a long silence, both of us sitting there and smoking.
Then: ‘Shit!’ Hannah says. ‘Is it me or has it got quite a lot darker while we’ve been sitting here?’
‘I think the sun’s started to set,’ I say. We can’t see it from here as we’re not facing in the right direction, but you can make out the pink glow in the sky.
‘Oh dear,’ Hannah says. ‘We should probably make our way back to the Folly. Charlie hates being late for anything. He’s such a teacher. I reckon I can hide for another ten minutes but—’ She’s stubbing out her cigarette now.
‘You go,’ I say. ‘It’s fine. It’s not important.’
She squints at me. ‘It kind of sounded like it was.’
‘No,’ I say. ‘Honestly.’
I can’t believe how close I came to telling her about it all. I haven’t told anyone the other stuff. Not even any of my mates. It’s a relief, really. If I’d told her, there’d be no taking it back. It would be out there in the world: what I’ve done.
Seven o’clock. The table is laid for dinner in the dining room. Freddy’s got supper covered, which means it’s a free half hour. I decide to pay a visit to the graveyard. The flowers need refreshing and tomorrow we’ll be run off our feet.
When I step outside the sun is just beginning to go down, spilling fire upon the water. It tinges pink the mist that has begun to gather over the bog, that shields its secrets. This is my favourite hour.
The ushers are sitting up on the battlements: I hear their voices floating down as I leave the Folly – louder and slightly more slurred than earlier, the work of the Guinness, I’ll bet.
‘Got to send them off with a bang.’
‘Yeah, we should do something. Would only be traditional …’
I’m half tempted to stay and listen, to check they aren’t plotting mayhem on my watch. But it sounds harmless. And I’ve only got this brief window of time to myself.
The island looks at its most starkly beautiful this evening, lit up by the glow of the dying sun. But perhaps it will never seem quite so beautiful to me as I remember from those trips we took here when I was a child. The four of us, my family, here to stay for the summer holidays. Nowhere on earth could possibly live up to those halcyon days. But that’s nostalgia for you, the tyranny of those memories of childhood that feel so golden, so perfect.
There is a whispering in the graveyard when I get there, the beginnings of a breeze stirring between the stones. A harbinger of tomorrow’s weather, maybe. Sometimes, when the wind is really up, it seems to carry from here the echoes of women from centuries past performing the caoineadh, their keening for the dead.
The graves here are unusually close together, because true dry land is in short supply on the island. Even then, at the outer edges the bog has begun to nibble away at it, swallowing several of the graves until only the top few inches remain. Some of the stones have moved closer still, leaning in toward one another as though sharing a secret. The names, the ones that remain visible, are common to Connemara: Joyce, Foley, Kelly, Conneely.
It’s a strange thing when you consider that the dead on this island far outnumber the living, even now that some of the guests have arrived. Tomorrow will redress the balance.
There is a great deal of local superstition about the island. When Freddy and I bought the Folly a year or so ago, there was no other bidder. The islanders were always mistrusted, seen as a species apart.
I know the mainlanders view Freddy and me as outsiders. Me the townie ‘Jackeen’ from Dublin and Freddy the Englishman, a couple who don’t know better, who have probably bitten off more than we can chew. Who don’t know about Inis an Amplóra’s dark history, its ghosts. Actually, I know this place better than they think. It is more familiar to me in some ways than any other place I have known in my life. And I’m not worried about it being haunted. I have my own ghosts. I carry them with me wherever I go.
‘I miss you,’ I say, as I crouch down. The stone stares back at me, blank and mute. I touch it with my fingertips. It is rough, cold, unyielding – so far from the warmth of a cheek, or the soft, springy hair that I recall so vividly. ‘But I hope you’d be proud of me.’ I feel it as I do every time I crouch here: the