Chapter Four
The coach door opens and we file out onto a viewing point carved into the mountainside. I understand immediately why Gabe has brought us here.
Below, a forest spreads out in every direction, dark green and dense and endless, making you suddenly aware of how small a coach of fifty people actually is.
And beyond it, sitting low on the horizon with the sovereign confidence that comes from doing this every single day, the sun is descending.
Slowly. Orange deepening to a red, bleeding out along the edges into a colour closer to violet.
I walk to the edge of the viewing point, away from the cluster of people already arranging themselves around Gabe's photography team; a young man with a camera and the practised smile of someone who has taken ten thousand versions of this same photograph.
I rest my hands on the barrier and look out. The view is extraordinary, enough to make whatever worries you had on the way up here feel slightly beside the point.
“I could take one of you.”
Beside me, Emma appears with the same quiet ease with which she seems to do everything, looking out at the same view.
The suggestion lands somewhere between kind and mortifying. The idea of standing and arranging myself in front of Emma, of being looked at through a lens that she is holding. Heat that has nothing to do with the last of the sun rushes through me.
“No, thank you,” I say.
She accepts this without comment, which I appreciate. “Would you take some of me?” She's already holding out her phone.
Emma steps beyond the barrier, faces the setting sun and doesn't pose so much as simply stands there — shoulders relaxed, chin slightly lifted, the undercut sharp against the blurred colours behind her.
She doesn't say how do I look or is this okay or any of the things people say when someone is pointing a camera at them. She just looks out at the view.
I take several photos. More than is strictly necessary.
“Thank you,” she says, stepping back to the barrier beside me. I hand the phone back without looking at the screen and we both look out. The sun continues its descent, layers of colour dissolving into each other, the forest below becoming slowly, softly dark.
Neither of us speaks.
I am aware of the precise distance between us. The inch or so of cooling air between her arm and mine. I don't move closer. I don't move away.
The red at the horizon thins to a line. Then less than a line. The violet above it deepens and spreads, the sky turning a shade of navy so deep it feels almost indecent, like looking at something private. Somewhere in the forest below, a bird makes a single sound and then thinks better of it.
Behind us, Gabe claps his hands together once.
He is already moving, arms wide, the practised showman of it.
“Ladies and gentlemen — Mount Teide.” He gestures behind him where a volcano rises against the sky, massive and completely still, a darkness against darkness that has its own particular weight and shape.
“The highest peak in all of Spain. Three thousand seven hundred and fifteen metres above sea level. And tonight — yours.”
I look at the volcano. It looks back at me with the complete indifference of something two hundred thousand years old.
It does look like the volcanoes I've seen in films — the silhouette of it, the way it sits.
I had forgotten, in my anticipation of the sky, that the world beneath it might also have something to offer.
“We've had a lovely dinner together. Seen the incredible sunset. Now my team will set up the telescopes,” Gabe continues, “and in approximately forty minutes, when the sky is much darker, we begin. Until then”— he gestures at the landscape broadly, generously, as though he personally arranged it —“please, enjoy.”
Forty minutes.
I glance around. The ground is uneven and the temperature is dropping with decisiveness.
A short distance away, a low stone wall runs along the edge of the viewing area — not high, not especially comfortable looking, but horizontal and solid, and not the floor.
I make for it immediately, reach into my bag as I sit, and take out my cardigan.
It’s a heavy Aran knit that my neighbour Brigid produces in great quantities between lambing seasons and presses on anyone within reach.
Layers were suggested as a necessity, and the excursion literature was correct.
I take out my romance novel, too. It has a woman on the cover with her eyes closed and head tilted back, and within its pages, it is full of characters committed to exploring every possible position with each other.
I open it to my page. The light up here is failing fast and the print is hard to make out.
I reach back into my bag for my reading torch, clip it to the spine, and angle the beam to its narrowest setting.
I am aware, without looking up, of where Emma is.
She has wandered a little way from the group, towards the edge of the darkness, where the landscape falls away and the lights of the distant coast are just visible, spilling far below.
She stands with her hands in her pockets, looking out.
From here, the dark sky behind her and the lights below make her look like something from a painting I can't quite place.
I focus on my book.
The French man's wife — small, pleasant, now wrapped in a light jacket — has found her way to where Emma stands. Their voices carry faintly.
“— getting cold now, I think — need to stay warm.”
“Good idea,” Emma says, her voice light.
“My husband, he loves all of this. The stars, the planets, all of it.” A small, affectionate exhale of breath. “Me, I don't really understand the appeal. It's very dark and very cold and they all look the same.”
Emma laughs. “Give it time. And isn't it quite romantic? Being up here, and him knowing all the stars.”
The woman laughs properly, the sound of someone who has been married long enough to find the word romantic applied to her husband genuinely funny. “Romantic.” She says it like she's turning it over. “Oui. Maybe.”
A few minutes pass. I read the same paragraph three times and retain nothing from it. Something about a plumber helping the protagonist with her shower. The protagonist really likes watching the plumber with her tools.
The French woman says goodbye and moves back towards her husband.
A shift in the air beside me. The faint addition of someone sitting down on stone.
Close enough that the sleeve of her hoodie — green, oversized, looking considerably warm — is a centimetre from my arm.
Emma looks out at the landscape, pulls it a little tighter around herself, and says absolutely nothing.
The two women in my novel are in a bedroom now; the shower must be fixed, and I have completely lost the thread of whatever brought them there. I should keep this for later.
The silence between us has gone on long enough that breaking it feels like a decision. “Is this where the solo travellers sit?” I ask, without looking up from my book.
“Seems like it.”
I turn a page I haven't read. “I didn't tell you my name earlier, when you introduced yourself at dinner.”
“I know.”
“It’s Cathleen.”
“I know,” Emma says again. “Gabe called the register on the bus.” She tugs her sleeves down over her hands, hugging the hoodie around herself against the cold, then bumps her shoulder gently into mine. “I wondered how long it would take you to circle back to it.”
I turn another page I haven't read.
The cold has settled in properly now, working its way into the gaps: the open neck of my top, the skin of my ankles, the thin linen of my skirt utterly inadequate against the stone wall beneath me. I pull my cardigan tighter.
“I wanted to sit by you,” Emma says. She's looking out at the landscape, not at me, her voice conversational, as though she's remarked on the temperature.
I close my book on my finger. “Because you're travelling alone too.”
She turns her head and looks at me directly. “No, Cathleen. Not because of that.”
My name in her mouth is a small, specific shock. I open my book again.
She tilts her head slightly and looks at the cover. At the woman with her eyes closed and her head tilted back. I resist the urge to angle it away from her.
“Sapphic romance,” Emma says, with a smile in her tone.
I look at her. “Sorry?”
“The book. It's sapphic romance. I’ve read that one.”
“I know what the book is. I don't know that word — sapphic.”
Emma considers this without any trace of condescension. “It's just an inclusive way of saying it. Women who love women. Not only lesbians. All of it. The whole spectrum.”
My eyes go back to the cover. The woman with her eyes closed. “Sapphic,” I say, trying the shape of it. I knew this book centred on two women, that’s why I picked it, but it doesn’t say ‘sapphic’ on it anywhere.
“After Sappho. The Greek poet.”
“I know who Sappho is,” I say, which is almost entirely false.
A small silence. Below us, the lights of the coast are very still.
“I picked it up in a bookshop,” I say, which is true but not the whole truth.
The whole truth is that I found myself standing in front of a small independent shop in the city on my way to the airport, went in telling myself I needed something for the flight, stood in front of a display for longer than was strictly necessary, picked up the first book in this series, put it back, walked to the door, came back, and bought the first two books in the series along with a novel about the French resistance so they wouldn't be the only things on the receipt.
“I haven’t read anything like this before but I've had time to think on this holiday.
Time I don't normally have at home. Time to think into things.” I stop. Look at the page. “That's all.”
Emma doesn't push it. She looks out at the landscape and lets the sentence end where it ends, which is a considerable relief.