‘How do you know about that?’
‘I go there sometimes. Just to be alone. You’d not have to be scared about people seeing us together if we were to meet there.’
*
It was late afternoon the day I set off to keep my tryst with Kirsty. I made solitary tracks in sand left wet by the receding tide as I followed the curve of Traigh Mhor north, glancing a little nervously across the machair in case someone was watching. But I might have been the last person on earth. There was not a soul to be seen. I had for company only the sound of the sea breaking on the shore and the gulls that wheeled around the rocks.
At the far side of the beach I climbed up through the cemetery, head and foot stones poking up through the long grass, and I trod carefully, aware that my ancestors lay here and that one day I would join them. I stopped and glanced out over the ocean to see the sun starting its slow descent towards the horizon, edging distant clouds with gold and sending shards of light skimming across the surface of the water. What a view it was from eternity that I would share with the folk who had inhabited this land for all the centuries before me.
The standing stones cast long shadows over the machair. Some of them were more than twice my height. Thirteen primary stones that formed a central circle, with a long approach avenue of stones to the north, and shorter arms to the south, east and west.
A movement caught my eye, and I saw a furl of skirt in the wind, half hidden by one of the taller stones, before Kirsty appeared, turning around the edge of it to stand looking down the slope as I climbed towards her. As I approached I saw that the colour was high on her face. Her skirts and cape streamed out behind her, along with her hair, and she folded her arms and leaned against the grain of the gneiss.
‘Did they teach you about the stones at school?’ she asked when I reached her, a little out of breath.
‘Only that they’re about four thousand years old and nobody knows who put them there.’
‘My tutor says if we were able to look down on them from above they would form the rough shape of a Celtic cross.’
I shrugged. ‘So?’
‘Simon, they were put here more than two thousand years before Christ was born.’
I saw her point and nodded sagely, as if the thought had occurred to me long ago. ‘Yes, of course.’
She smiled and ran the flat of her hand down the stone that she was leaning against. ‘I love the texture of the stones,’ she said. ‘They have grain running through them like wood.’ She tipped her head back and looked up towards the top of it. ‘I wonder how they moved them. They must be terribly heavy.’ She grinned then and extended her hand towards me. ‘Come on.’ I hesitated for only a moment, before grasping it, feeling it small and warm in mine. She pulled me away from the stones, and we went running down the slope together, almost out of control, laughing with exhilaration before coming to a halt where the elements had eaten away at the machair and loose, peaty earth crumbled down into a rocky hollow.
She let go of my hand and jumped down into it. I followed suit and landed beside her. Beach grass grew in tussocks and clumps, binding the loose earth and pushing up between cracks in the rock. The wind blew overhead but the air here was quite still, and there was a wonderful sense of shelter and tranquillity. No one could see us, except perhaps from a boat out at sea.
Kirsty arranged her skirts to sit down in the grass and patted the place beside her. I saw her ankle-length black boots and a flash of white calf. I knew she was younger than me, and yet she seemed possessed of so much more confidence. I did as I was bid and sat down next to her, self-conscious again, and a little scared by strange, unaccustomed feelings.
She said, ‘Sometimes I look out and wonder if on a clear day it might be possible to see America.’ She laughed. ‘Which is daft, I know. It’s far too far away. But it makes me think about all those folk who set off in boats not knowing what, if anything, lay at the end of their voyage.’
I loved to hear her talk like this, and I watched the light in her eyes as she looked out over the ocean.
‘I wonder what it’s like,’ she said.
‘America?’
She nodded.
I laughed. ‘We’ll never know.’
‘Probably not,’ she agreed. ‘But we shouldn’t limit our horizons to only what we can see. My father always says if you believe in something you can make it happen. And he should know. Everything we have, and are, is because of him. His vision.’
I gazed at her, filled for the first time with curiosity about her father and mother, the life she led, so different from mine. ‘How did your father get rich?’