She moved through the tall grass and mud without watching her step, until she was close enough for the crowd to notice her. Lisa stood by the fire, staring into it like a doctor looking at an x-ray. Steve sat on a wooden box full of brown bottles a short distance away. A wet slurp drew her attention to a man next to her sucking something out of a shell. The smell like a urinal full of harbor foam told her it was raw sea urchin.
She spotted Zoe off to the left, glancing around over the top of a beer glass. Emma circled the fire to the right, hoping to put it between them. A muffled sound over her shoulder made her turn.
“What?”
“I said, Em!” David’s face was dark and unfamiliar. “Jesus, did something happen to your ears?”
“Sorry…” She started to give an excuse, then gave up.
“Where have you been all afternoon?”
The station. “The station.”
“I’m sure the fish and the seals will sleep soundly in their beds. Now for God’s sake have a drink.” A hard object materialized in her hand. It was a glass, with a small amount of some black liquid at the bottom. She tried to hold it up to the light.
“It’s just beer.”
Emma cut a smile into her face, hoping he would go away. It worked. She looked around at the faces. In the flickering light they were now bright and warm, now hidden and carved by deep shadows. In the anonymous dark it took her a long time to recognize Darren throwing what looked like dried brush and bits of abused furniture into the bonfire.
The night wind carried the smell of sheep shit and ozone down the slope. Closer to the fire the smell became smoky, with resinous burning grass mixed in. Whenever someone stumbled around her, putting a hand on her shoulder to steady themselves, the only smell was alcohol. Against the wind barreling down the mountain, no sound from the village could reach them. There was only the crunch and crackle of the fire and the wheezing laughter of drunks.
David was with Lisa now, illustrating some story with his hands. Over his shoulder two women in faded denim jackets threw empty bottles into the fire.
A man who smelled like sheep sweat and soap asked her something about what it was like to be a police officer on a small island. Or something along those lines.
The man reminded her of the people she met at parties in London. It took all of Emma’s willpower to introduce herself to David’s old friends, or colleagues of colleagues. Most people say they hate small talk, but that was never the problem for her. Small talk was a Godsend compared to what came later. Nobody judged you for having no emotional investment in whether or not it would rain tomorrow.
The problem came when they started digging. They always expected to find a nugget of something salacious and personal, and it was her job to provide it to them. Guarded answers elicited blank looks of disappointment from those like David who could detect an ingenuine response from a mile away. From the rest she got bored, polite smiles.
Emma knew the truth. Trying to open up to people carried with it the danger that it might work. And after she exposed herself, then what? The untroubled minds of the world insist that nice people will always accept you, the real, unvarnished you, just the way you are. Given a comprehensive rundown of her life, Emma knew that people could not do this. More importantly, they should not. Anyone who said otherwise was a fool.
The sound of conversation turned into a buzz. Not the sound of a noisy cafeteria, or a foreign language, but white noise. The words blended into each other, then began to fade until it was a ringing in her ears. She knew that if she tried, she could hear the words again. But the effort was like pulling a large sofa up a flight of stairs. Twice some people around her shouted “Hoyo!” in unison. She turned and listened the second time but could find no obvious reasoning behind it.
Behind the man talking at her, she could see Zoe looking at her from the other side of the crowd. Zoe made no expression but did not look away.
Emma turned and walked the other way, putting the fire between them again. She didn’t check if the man had still been talking to her when she left him. David was watching her. His eyes followed where she had been looking and stopped on Zoe. He may have looked concerned. It was hard to tell when his whole face was cast in high relief. She might have seen the line of his eyebrows lift, but it could have been a trick of the light.
Zoe finished her drink and floated around the edge of the crowd. She walked down the hill toward the village without looking back.
Emma discovered she had been holding her breath. With Zoe gone her mind ran through her options. Run away. Drop everything and run. No, that wouldn’t work. She knew getting away from Zoe was the easy part. Or whoever that woman was. But she couldn’t escape the trap she had made for herself. Her jailer would never let her go.
“I know that look.”
Emma turned. Steve was standing behind to her, away from the fire, which made his face warm and orange.
“What?”
“I said, I know that look. I saw it on Ned’s face more than once.”
“What kind of face is it?”
“Scared. Like you’re waiting by the phone for bad news.”
“You saw all that on Ned’s face, did you?” Emma was glad her own eyes would be too dark to read.
“It was worse. He was poorly for a long time. Then… You know the rest.”
“Why didn’t you
