They were meant to be worn.

13

There were lights all over the village. Not electric lights but candles, the flames dancing in old jam-jars on the porches or on saucers in the front gardens. Small, grounded stars. Some of the houses had placed a log horizontally above their front door. On one house nearer the road, I saw it more clearly. A silver birch bough.

The bonfire had already been lit. It was outside the village, up a side road and in a sloping field overlooking the loch. Traces of music doodled on the darkening sky – a fiddle, other indefinable instruments. People were clumped around in groups of four or five, their talk and laughter bubbling, standing near but not too near it, the way crowds do at the scene of an accident.

I climbed the short hill, my shoulders already hurting. The sun was lowering, the sky broad orange and grimy pink, clouds laddering like a pair of cheap tights. My head felt chlorinated, swilling with the kamikaze cocktail I’d downed before I left.

The bonfire was a criss-cross of crates and planks. One by one, people would advance and add their own offering. Logs, long thin branches, a couple of picture frames – someone dragged a chair with the spindles coming away and chucked it on. A muted cheer as the wood took.

Faces began to bleed into familiarity. Haimie, the landlord at the hotel bar, standing next to a barrel of beer on a wonky plastic table, shooing away the younger kids as if they were pigeons. Gray, the accordion player, was next to him, arms on belly, wearing massive sunglasses and a red cowboy hat. The little boy from the swings, his face painted in amber and white stripes, ran round and round the fire, his own determinedly dizzy ritual.

Fraser was further up the field, playing tunes with two guys on guitars. Becca stood next to them, hands jammed in the pockets of her trench coat. Finn and his pool mates were in a huddle nearby, beatboxing ineptly while Fraser told them to fuck off, his chin still gripping his fiddle.

You could never sum up a sunset like this in pithy paint swatch names. It was all the colours you’d ever known and all the ones you’d never dreamt of, swiped across the sky, bleaching as it rose, thickening at the horizon.

‘I’ve got wings, too.’

The little girl with the pale blonde hair was standing next to me in a raincoat with insects printed on it. Small wings were strapped to her back, the elastic crossing over her chest. White, synthetic gauze stretched over plastic frames.

I touched the fluffy edge of one. ‘They’re lovely. Did you make them?’

‘Jeannie did.’ Her voice was small, scurrying. I could see Jeannie Robertson on the other side of the fire, her fingernails glowing a deep sea blue. A man – Fraser’s dad, maybe – was next to her, smoking, a camera slung round his neck. ‘She helped me. Did she help you make yours?’