‘Shame.’ He clapped a hand suddenly on his neck and looked at his palm, then went for my hand. I whipped it back, but he just took my glass and held it up.

‘Another?’

I watched his back as he went inside, whistling an unrecognisable tune full of air.

I know the ways of the wind. The air. I am part of its song.

The wind has strong arms that lift me up above the hills, and I travel over water bright as new pennies. I fly and I fly.

Once I was a girl who grew up here, in a house overlooking the loch. A girl who walked, feet scudding against leaf-mulch, who danced, who dreamed of leaving this place. Who fell in love with a boy.

Now the feathers come in and out. I am one single feather, a fine comb. I am many feathers, burrowing into my own snowdrift. When the days are at their lightest, I am almost myself again. The girl I once was.

But whatever I am, I’m always waiting. Waiting for you to hear my song on the wind.

As the light grows longer in another summer, I finally see a way that it can be done.

One day, you will know I’m here. One day, my love, you will join me.

2

An ear-splitting sound in my head, a girl’s scream mixed with a brass band, then somehow my long breath was louder than any of it. The pillow felt damp. That wine had left bruising colours on the inside of my skull, just above my eyebrows. I lay looking at the single orchid flower, small pale petals veined with purplish threads underneath three bigger, pure-white ones.

At first, I thought that the windows were fogged up with condensation and wiped them with the curtain lining, but it made no difference. A mist was hanging so close that you couldn’t see the end of the garden.

I wandered through the house, imagining it closed off from the world. A soggy biodome. No one would be able to see me if I couldn’t see out.

‘Polly.’ Lottie was stock still at the kitchen door in her dressing gown, one arm wrapped round herself.

There was a deer in the garden. A smallish one I think, Ugg boot-coloured, with a white shock of tail quiffed upwards, standing right in the middle of the lawn. In the mist it looked porous, a pointillist painting. A tremor went through a back leg and its ear twitched, slowly and perfectly, like the Queen waving.

My shoulder was touching Lottie’s. Neither of us budged. The deer brought its neck down and nibbled at the grass, each tiny movement graceful, almost lazy. I didn’t know how those anorexic ankles could hold all that deer up. At ballet classes when I was six, I would try to stand en pointe, clinging onto the pole for dear life, my legs a blur. I wondered what it would feel like to touch it, just on the rump there, the short, dense fur under my palm.