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The road narrows again as we reach a cluster of buildings with a sign saying ‘Lighthouse Cottages’. The tarmac is crumbling in places, or barely visible beneath weeds and muddy puddles. We weave along the track, avoiding the potholes, heading towards the dunes. More ruins are just visible in the fields, poking up through the breeze-riffled grass. They could be gravestones or the remnants of ancient dwellings.
‘I don’t think there is another house,’ says Evie, as the dunes get nearer. ‘We must have missed it.’
At that moment a bus rumbles over a rise, taking up the entire track. I’m so surprised to meet another vehicle that I almost steer us straight into a hedge. At the last moment, I hammer the brakes and the bus driver does the same, skidding sideways and putting one front wheel into a ditch.
Both of us get out. He examines the sunken wheel and I apologise, even though it’s nobody’s fault. The bus is full of people, who I assume are sightseers coming back from the lighthouse, although nobody gets off.
‘It’s not stuck,’ says the driver, who gets back behind the wheel and reverses. I do the same, pulling over at the next farm gate, allowing him room to pass.
‘I’ve seen that bus before,’ says Evie. ‘At a factory in town.’
‘What factory?’
She tells me about Polaris Pelagic, sounding out the name, one syllable at a time.
‘It must be a fishing company,’ I say. ‘Pelagic means living in the open sea.’
The family I met on my first morning in St Claire told me that Willie Radford owned a fish processing plant, one of the town’s biggest employers.
‘Polaris means North Star, doesn’t it?’ says Evie.
‘How do you know that?’
‘A friend taught me about stars. He knew all the names of the constellations. Ursa Major. Cassiopeia. Cepheus. The Big Dipper. Orion’s Belt. He said that shooting stars aren’t stars at all, but meteors falling through the darkness.’
The bus edges past us, inches from my mirror. I catch a glimpse of the passengers, some leaning against the windows, as though trying to sleep. Others make eye contact. Unsmiling. Uninterested.
Steering back onto the track, I look for a place to turn around. At the next break in the hedge, there is an open gate and fresh tyre tracks. I turn off and we splash through puddles, crossing a narrow bridge with no safety rails.
Cresting a small rise, the nose of the Fiat dips and offers a sudden view across open grassland and sandhills. Caravans and tents are clustered beside a grove of trees that mark the line of a water course. At first glance it could be the camping area at the fringes of a music festival, but the sound stages and food stalls are missing. These tents are crude. Some are little more than sheets of tarpaulin, strung over branches and held down at the edges by pegs and rocks. Campfires are smouldering and women are hanging washing or carrying water from a tank. Children chase after a lame dog who wags a limp tail and lopes ahead of them.
‘Are they gypsies?’ asks Evie.
‘I don’t think you can call them that.’
‘What do we call them?’
‘Travellers. Roma. Itinerants.’
‘My best friend Mina was Romany,’ she says. ‘I met her on my first day at school and we sat together. Mina’s father drove a horse and cart and collected scrap metal and had a horse called Mother Teresa. That’s the name of a famous nun who was born in Albania. I learned about her at school.’
Evie stops talking and notices that I’m smiling.
‘What?’ she asks, self-consciously. ‘Did I say something wrong?’
‘No.’
‘Why the stupid grin?’
‘You just told me more about your childhood in one breath than you’ve told me in a year of living together.’
‘So?’
‘It’s good.’
One of the children notices our car and raises the alarm. Suddenly, the occupants of the camp begin scattering through the hedges and towards the sandhills or into the scrubby trees. Women are picking up toddlers and babies, pulling veils over their faces, leaving their belongings behind.
‘They’re frightened of us,’ says Evie.
