Read Online This Northern Sky by Julia Green - Free Book Online Page B

the rope under a stone.
    Piers hands me a bucket. ‘See here?’ He rakes the sand at the edge of the water and bends down to scoop up a handful of cream-coloured shells. ‘This is what we are looking for. Choose the bigger ones.’
    So. Cockles turn out to be these ordinary-looking shells, creamy white and honey coloured, only they are still alive, with the two halves tight together. Bivalves , Piers calls them. There are hundreds of them, slightly buried under the sand.
    We set to work, scooping them up in handfuls and dropping them in the buckets of sea water to keep them fresh.
    ‘Delicious cooked with leeks and garlic and white wine,’ Piers says.
    I still can’t imagine eating them.
    Isla is quicker than me. She doesn’t seem to get backache from the bending and scooping like I do. I have to keep stretching my back out, to ease my spine. After a while I’ve had enough. My hands are numb.
    ‘Why don’t you go and explore the island for a bit?’ Thea suggests. ‘Collecting cockles is back-breaking if you’re not used to it. And seeing as it’s your first time on Collay, you should have a look round. We’ll have some tea later. We brought cake.’
    I walk slowly up the beach. My feet squelch with every step. I pull off my boots and socks and walk barefoot instead. The sand is white, sparkling in the sunlight with fragments of silvery crystal. I abandon my wet boots, spread my socks over flat rocks at the top of the beach and walk on.
    It’s like a miniature version of our island: a fringe of beaches, short grass studded with little flowers, a carpet of pink and white and yellow. Bees. Flocks of small brown birds. Sheep. No roads though, and no houses except ruined ones: tumbledown stones covered with nettles and taller grass and other weeds. I climb to the top of the island, sit on an outcrop of rock. From here I can see down to the beach, and the small figures of the others, bending, scooping, the shells clattering against each other in the bucket. They look as if they are working in a kind of rhythm. They could be from any time at all. Like centuries back. I screw up my eyes to see better against the brightness. Finn and Isla work side by side, slowly moving along through the shallow water, slightly apart from Piers and Thea. I wonder what they are talking about. If they are talking. I try not to mind how close they look.
    The misty, milky sky seems to cut Collay off totally: you can’t see the other islands at all. I close my eyes, listen to the birds and the sea and the bees humming all around. It’s bliss to feel warm sun on my face and arms after so many days of rain. Voices drift up.
    When I next look, Thea’s getting things out of a basket on the rocks near my boots. I make my way slowly back down to join them for tea and cake.
     
    ‘We should start back, soon,’ Finn says.
    ‘Why are the houses all ruined?’ I say. ‘What happened?’
    ‘Same as on lots of the other islands,’ Finn says. ‘Too harsh living out here in the winter, cut off for days and weeks even. Too small to grow enough food for a family to be self-sufficient.’
    ‘It would be amazing to stay overnight though,’ Piers says. ‘We should come over and camp when the others get here.’
    ‘Are the sheep wild?’ I ask.
    Isla smiles. ‘No. They’re brought over by boat in the early summer, and collected in the autumn: they spend the winter back on the inhabited isles.’
    I try to imagine it: ferrying sheep in a small boat across the water. Like why ?
    ‘The grazing here is particularly good,’ Isla explains, as if she knows what I’m thinking. ‘Crofters have grazing rights on lots of the uninhabited islands. But most don’t bother these days.’
    Finn watches her as she talks.
    Her face is pink from the sun. Her hair’s coming undone from where she’s looped it up with a slide; golden-red tendrils curling round her neck. She is really pretty, but in her own way, nothing like the girls back home. No make-up.