Free Bringing the Summer by Julia Green Page A

is lying on the pillow: Ted Hughes, Selected Poems , and a thin slip of paper marks page 59. A shiver runs down my spine; I don’t know why. I pick up the towel and go back down to the bathroom for a shower.
    I make myself wait till I’m actually in bed, under the white duvet, before I open the book. I read the poem about the pike, first, then one about an otter, and a fox. The poems are full of darkness, and sounds, and something disturbing that I can’t quite fathom.
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    I find a message from Mum on my phone. She’s got mine, she hopes I’m having a good time, she’ll see me tomorrow. And there’s one from Miranda: How’s it going???? Tell all!!
    I text her back: We had a bike accident! Gabes broke his foot. I’m staying over, in his sister’s room, and then I turn off my phone because I don’t want to speak to anyone right now. Even the tiny clicking sounds of texting sound loud in the deep silence of this ancient, solid house.
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    I dream of St Ailla. The colours are as bright as a Pre-Raphaelite painting. In the dream, I’m walking across the sandbar at high tide: it’s a neap tide so there’s a strip of sand a metre or so wide at the top of the bar. If it were a spring tide, the sea would cover it completely, and the water would be rushing and swirling and eddying in dangerous currents. But no: I can walk right the way across to the next island without getting wet feet. At the far end of the bar I scramble over big stones and stinky seaweed, on to the short turf path that runs between tall bracken, up to the top of Gara. The island is uninhabited except by birds: black-backed gulls wheel over it, calling incessantly, and dive-bombing you if you come too close to their nesting places on the rocks. I cross to the other side, in the lee of the wind, and sit for a while against the huge lichen-covered boulders at the edge of the cliff. Oystercatchers with their bright orange legs and black-and-white plumage make their piping song and fly off as I walk down to their beach. The sun’s prickly hot on my skin. I strip off, walk out into the water and begin to swim. Ahead, there’s nothing but blue sea, on and on to the line of the horizon where the dark blue meets the paler blue of sky. I am utterly at peace, swimming into the wild blue.
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    I wake up, the dream vivid in my head, full of that sense of peace, and purposefulness. In the dream there was no uncertainty, no muddled feelings. I lie in the darkness for ages, and then I switch on the bedside light, get out of bed to find my notebook and a pen, and begin to draw. I’m drawing from the dream, and from the memory of the real place, vividly alive for me. But I’m drawing as if I am an observer, watching myself in the scene: a series of sketches like a storyboard, or a cartoon strip. I draw fast, instinctively, without stopping to think. The drawings retrace my journey across the island, but at the top of the cliff I stop and there’s something else there, something I didn’t see the first time: a dead bird, a patch of soft feathers around the torn corpse of a brown speckled hawk, its ribcage stripped open to reveal the red raw inside. The girl changes, too. She isn’t me, I realise after a while. She has short dark hair, and she looks the way I imagine little Bridie from the photograph might have looked when she was older: about eighteen or nineteen.
    I check the time. It’s three o’clock, the dead time of the night, the time when people who are dying actually die, when the life force is at its lowest ebb. I switch off the light, and I drift in the darkness, back towards sleep, until it’s properly morning and the house begins to wake.

Ten
    Beth offers to give me a lift home. Neither Gabes nor Theo are up, but I’ve had breakfast and helped Maddie let the hens out, and played with the babies all before ten o’clock, and I’m ready to go.
    She drives slowly