I hold out the card – my hand is steady, even as I feel I should be trembling. Without looking away from my face, he takes the card and puts it back into his pocket.
‘Thank you,’ he says.
My pulse skips and the heat spreads even further, a steady pulsing flame licking over my skin, down to my fingertips. I want to say something to him, but I can’t think of a single word, so I watch him walk away, until he disappears behind the gates of the camp, until his brown uniform blends with all the other men’s.
Con’s eyes are on me. There is stillness between us. A gull caws.
‘Thank you for diving in for me,’ I say.
‘Let’s go back to the bothy,’ she says, and turns her back. My skirts slap against my legs and each step feels colder than the last.
That night, the air is raw and the wind whips through the hole in the bothy roof. Next to me, Con’s breathing is steady, regular, peaceful. I ease myself from the bed and slip out of the door, like a ghost. The grass crisps beneath my bare feet and the chill is instant, numbing: I won’t be able to stand here for long.
On the breast of the opposite hill, the huts cast cut-out shadows against the night sky. Dimly, I can make out a faint orange glow from the fires inside. It looks almost cosy from here, like something in a fairytale. All such folktales end in death, but I can’t imagine how this particular story might finish. It feels new, something that has never been told so far north: the hundreds of men brought as prisoners to an ill-fated island during wartime. And somewhere, in one of those huts, the broad-shouldered man with the card.
I remember the weight of his body in the water. I remember the heat of his cheek against mine as I swam.
The next morning, Con and I take the rods down to catch mackerel.
Our feet lead us in the direction of the camp, even though we haven’t discussed it. What will the men be doing today? When will they start work on the barriers – and how? We know ships will be bringing in some of the supplies, but the men will need to dig the rock from the islands, somehow.
At the town-hall meeting, someone had mentioned explosives. A quarry.
The barbed wire around the camp glitters in the early-morning sun. A whistle rings out, then the sound of boots thudding. A shout, quickly smothered. My heart hammers in my chest. So close to the camp, the sounds seem spiked with violence.
I stop, unable to make myself go any closer to the wire.
Con stops, too, and we sit in the long grasses near the huts. It’s possible to remain unseen, if you’re still enough. Some of the prisoners walk to the square of dirt in the centre of the yard, where one of the guards shouts orders at them – the wind whips away his words, but the anger of his tone carries, and the Italian men stare down at their boots, their shoulders hunched.
‘They must feel so far from home,’ I say.
Con nods.
Another whistle sounds and the men flinch to attention, then turn to go into the large central hut. For food, I suppose.
What would have to happen to men so that they react to a whistle like that? Like weary dogs, wary of the constant threats of fist and boot.
There is another shout from further down the hill, on the shore. A dozen people, most of them dressed in civilian clothes, are pulling a boat up onto the beach.
‘They must be from Kirkwall,’ I say, waiting for Con to protest against yet more men arriving on our island, but she says nothing and we watch the group walking up the hill – men and women both, I see now. Some are carrying baskets and boxes, and some of the men are dressed in the dark uniform of the guards. They are too far away for us to make out their faces or hear their conversation but, still, there is something fascinating and horrifying about seeing them moving towards the camp. It is like watching a show – the sort of performance that used to be played by travelling companies on the Kirkwall streets in the summer, where the actors put on plays by Shakespeare. We’d liked The Tempest best. Magic and secrets and the sea. The actors had their entrances and exits and some held weapons, and you knew that, at any moment, everything might change. As children, we’d cheered at love and death alike.
Over the coming days, we go back to the camp again and again to watch the men: their daily routine of walking down to dig gravel or rocks out of the new quarry on the shore. I search for his face among them. His eyes had been serious, but warm. He had smiled at me – or perhaps I had imagined that. Each time I try to picture him, his face blurs in my mind until I can’t remember exactly how he’d looked. If I close my eyes, I can still feel the scratch of his stubble against my hand as I’d held him in the water.
The Italians unload equipment from the ship: a lorry, a digger, a drum for cement. Each noisy machine that rolls off the boat brings new sound and activity to the island. And even during the night, our peace is shattered. The light from the camp obliterates the stars, and the shouts of men – in pain, despair or joy, we never know – pull us awake.
And at night, while Con sleeps, I fiddle with the twisted radio aerial until I pick up stray words, fizzing through the darkness: invasion . . . utmost violence . . . death toll.
One morning, about a week after the
