Stonemouth

It might be her, I think. It could be her. She kind of walks like her. No long hair, unless they’re wearing a close-fitting hat. I’m still going up and down this gentle sine-wave of a path, taking the summit route along the line of miniature dunes. I screw my eyes up, trying to see the dark figure better. If I was my dad I’d have a pair of binoculars with me.

I wonder if the iPhone’s up to working like a telescope, and pull it out and try, but in the end the digital zoom is no better than what I can see already.

She’s almost level with me now, maybe a couple of hundred metres away. She’s squatting down in front of a twisted-looking lump of tree, and I can see just enough detail to realise from the way she’s positioned and the general shape of the blob she makes that she’s pointing a biggish camera at the washed-away trunk. She shifts, taking more photos from a variety of angles, all from a squatting position; for a couple she lies right down on the sand.

I’m so busy watching her — it’s definitely a girl, as definitely as you can tell the Bounty Hunter is a girl in the night-time scene in Jabba’s palace in Jedi — that I miss a step and half fall down the sea-face of one of the small dunes, ploughing through sand until my foot catches on some grass and I have to extemporise a jump down onto the sand to avoid going head over heels. Bit of a heavy landing, but nothing damaged. When I look back at the dark figure in the distance she’s standing again, facing me, I think. From the way her arms are set … she’s looking at me through her camera.

I don’t know what else to do, so I smile, make a show of dusting myself down.

She waves. She puts the camera down, the long lens hanging by her side, and I think I hear her shout something. Jeez, is it her?

We start walking towards each other. My heart’s in my mouth. My knees feel weak. Fuck me, what next, am I going to fucking swoon? Just the adrenalin from the near-fall, I tell myself. Pull yourself together, Gilmour.

Definitely a girl. Walks a lot like Ellie: right height, or maybe a little smaller? Was she ever into photography? I don’t recall her being, but that means nothing; in five years Ellie could have been through a dozen new interests, all enthused over, almost mastered — or mistressed — and then dropped for the next challenge. My mode, my expectations, change every few seconds, like the consistency of the sand beneath my feet: now firm, now quaking, uncertain. She’s wearing dark skinny trousers or even thick tights; big, bulky, darkred hiking jacket. A bunnet on her head like a dark beanie. But it’s getting warm now as the haze thins. Somebody who feels the cold? Pale face.

When I can make out her face, I’m briefly even more confused. It is and isn’t Ellie. If she’d just take that hat off, let me see her hair. Her hair was always spectacular, definitive. Though she might have cut it all off now, for all I know. She stops about fifteen metres away, holds up one hand to stop me and brings the camera up to focus. I stand, realising who she is as she manipulates the big grey lens. It’s one of those lenses that’s so big that when you put the whole caboodle on a tripod you attach the lens to the tripod mount with the camera hanging off it, not the other way round.

‘Hey there, stranger,’ she says.

The voice confirms. It’s Grier. She walks like Ellie and she has similar build to her big sister, though she’s a little less tall. I stand there in that flat wilderness of sand, giving her a closed-mouth smile, crossing my arms, hoping she can’t read my disappointment.

‘Cam on, larve, give us a smoyle,’ she says in a very fair approximation of a certain type of London accent.

I give her a smile. Are we okay? I honestly don’t know. I’ve seen Grier exactly once since the night I had to leave Stonemouth hidden inside a giant yellow oil pipe, riding a freight like some Midwestern hobo, and that one meeting was slightly weird. I’ve had a few also slightly odd emails and texts from her over the years — sparse, sporadic, funny but slightly mad — and I really don’t know where I am with her. The Hey there, stranger sounded amiable enough, but Grier was always a great mimic, always quoting lines from film and TV, and adopting different accents.

She takes her photograph — actually about half a dozen photographs, as the camera click-click-clicks quietly away, for over a second — then puts the camera down, hanging from her right hand. ‘There,’ she says, in her normal voice. ‘Didn’t hurt, did it?’

She’s smiling. I grin properly, not for the camera. I swear her camera arm starts to jerk up towards me, then falls back almost before the motion begins. ‘How you doing, Grier?’

‘How you doin?’ she says in a drawled, Joey voice. She’s walking towards me, covering any awkwardness by checking the screen of the camera, then putting it down again and raising her face to mine as we meet for a big hug, jackets making slidey noises against each other.