Total pages in book: 153
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
We go down the path together, not hurrying, but almost.
Rosey is in the water.
Only to the ankles though, her boots on the rocks behind her, trousers rolled, standing in the shallows where the spit runs out, the camera hanging dead weight at her side. She’s staring out across the bay at nothing, absolutely still, stiller than the young ever stand, and the late light is going to pewter and rose all around her and the loch is flat as glass to the far shore.
“Rosey.” Iris’s voice. “You’ll freeze. You all right?”
She doesn’t startle. She turns, and her face is…well, it’s not frightened. It’s rather lit. Wide open under all the dark paint, the look of someone who’s been shown something.
“Yes. I think so. It was the weirdest thing.” She looks back out at the water. “There was a horse. Swimming. Right across the bay…I watched it for ages, it was huge, and then it just—” she lifts her hand, lets it fall, “—went under. It never came up. I waited and it never came up. Look, you can still see the ripples where it went.”
And you can. God help us, you can, out in the middle distance, on water with no wind to stir it, a wide ring spreading slow and patient from a center where nothing now is, the way water folds over something that has gone down deliberately.
And hopefully means to stay down.
Iris’s hand finds mine with cold fingers. The grip says everything, her face says nothing at all.
“A sea lion, most likely,” Iris says, in the mild voice she keeps for police and tourists. “Big bulls this time of year. They come into the bay after the salmon farms, the mussel beds. They’ll look enormous in low light. Come on out of that water, you mad child, your mother will have me extradited. There’s tea on, and Alasdair’s whisky, and you can show us the photos.”
“I got two frames,” Rosey says, wading toward us, her eyes still going back over her shoulder. “At least I think I did. The light was—” and then she’s up on the rocks pulling her boots on and talking shutter speeds. She’s twenty-six and luminous and entirely unaware of what she is, which is a Galloway woman, ankle-deep in this particular water, who looked at something older than God and felt it look back.
They start up the path ahead of me, dark head and silver, Iris’s arm through her niece’s, their voices mingling. I stand a moment where the rocks meet the water and look out at the bay.
The ripples have nearly closed. The water lies down, smooths, goes back to keeping its own counsel, the way I remember it doing from the inside. Somewhere below the painted pewter and the rose, in the cold dark fathoms where the bottom’s never been found, something is settling itself into the deep with its long patience, the way you settle into bed for sleep.
So. The loch’s let a room again.