It wasn’t just the cottage’s solitude that attracted me, but it was the way it was exposed, utterly at the mercy of the elements. Perched on an outcrop of rock, across the bay from St. Ives, it is the only building in sight. There is no shelter, no valley to break the ferocious Atlantic wind. When the rain lashes at the windows, when the sea winds refuse to let up, the house shudders, and it feels like it is crumbling into the sea.
As soon as I am in the door, I pour a large glass of vodka. Then I go to my office upstairs, sit at my desk and stare through the dormer window that looks out across the bay. I log in to my profiles on OKCupid and Heavenly Sinful to see if I have any messages. There is one, from “Samantha,” a woman I was messaging a few weeks ago.
Hiya, you disappeared. Still interested in meeting?
I look at her pictures, skipping through the tedium of patent shoes and discarded umbrellas and plane wings and hearts on cappuccinos, and there is one of her on holiday somewhere, and I am reminded that she is pretty, a slight, mousy brunette.
I thought it was you who disappeared! And yeah would love to meet...
I connect the camera and start downloading the Tintagel images. When the download is finished, I flick through the photos, happy to see they are well-aligned and won’t need much retouching. I load them into the rendering program I have written, and the software starts stitching the images together, the pixels fusing like healing skin.
You can never predict the light. Some days, when I am out with the camera, you think it is just right, but then the shots all end up looking grainy or overexposed. Today, however, it is perfect. The sea shimmers, the grass on the cliffs is as green and tight as snooker cushions. In the distance, I can see the faint outline of the moon.
When the program finishes processing the panorama, and when the images are joined together like a miniature Bayeux Tapestry, I encase the final image in a layer of code, so that people can zoom in and out and spin around. When all that is finished, I upload the image to my website, We Own the Sky.
I am surprised that the website has been popular. It started as a hobby, something to break up my afternoons. But the link was quickly shared on amateur photography forums. People wrote to ask me about my technique, the equipment that I used. The website was mentioned in a Guardian piece on panoramic photography. “Simplistic and beautiful,” the writer wrote and I felt a rare swell of pride.
People ask me sometimes, in the comments, in the emails they send: “What does We Own the Sky mean?”
“Is it a reference to something?” And the truth is, I don’t know what to tell them. Because ever since I left London, those words have been bouncing around in my head, and I have no idea why.
When I am out for a walk on the dunes, or sitting at my desk looking out to sea, I whisper those words to myself—“we own the sky, we own the sky.” I wake to the sound of them, and before I fall asleep I can hear those four words, as if they were a mantra or a prayer that was drummed into me as a child.
The image has now finished uploading and I look out of the window, drinking my vodka, waiting for the ping. It takes a little longer than normal. Ten minutes instead of the usual five. And then there it is. A comment—always the first comment—by the same user every time.
swan09
Beautiful. Keep up the good work.
The comments are always like that—“Beautiful.”
“Lovely.”
“Take care of yourself”—and always so soon after the image has been posted I assume that the user has set up some kind of alert.
The night is closing in and, before bed, I pour myself another vodka. I can feel the pull of sleep, the anesthetic effects of the alcohol, and I want to hasten it, bring it even closer.
Sometimes, I like to think it is Jack who is commenting on the photos. I know that he will recognize them, because they are all places he has been, views he has seen with his own eyes. Box Hill, the London Eye, a lookout point on the South Downs. And now, Tintagel.
Just to be sure that he remembers, that he doesn’t forget the places we have been, I leave him messages, paragraphs of text hidden in the code, invisible to browsers, readable only to the programmer’s eye—and, I hope, to his. It is, I suppose, the things I would say to him if I could. The things I would say if she hadn’t taken him away.
tintagel
do you remember, Jack, when we got back to the parking lot and you had fallen in the brambles and done yourself an injury. both hands, daddy, both hands, little red welts on your palms. so i kissed your fingers to take the owies away and you wrapped your arms around me, carefully planting two kisses on my neck. i remember, i can never forget. your kisses, like secret whispers. the gingerbread freckles on your face. your eyes, warm like the shallow end.
Part Two
1
“You don’t look like a computer scientist,” she said.
A little tipsy, I had started talking to her at the bar in a student pub in Cambridge. It was in that postexam, preresults purgatory, a lazy, sun-kissed time, squeezing out the last of our student days.
“Because I don’t have a briefcase and a Lord of the Rings T-shirt?”
She smiled, not cruelly, but knowingly, as if this was the type of joke she had heard about herself. As she turned back to the bar to try to get a drink, I stole a glance at her. She was petite with black hair neatly
