Kitta was not on Ma’s bed. Not in the netting shed. On the boatie shore? No.

I checked with Unty Jinna, calm as I could be. She hadn’t seen her.

I staggered up to the sheddie on the braes and she wasn’t there, either, and then higher up to the scaur. And when I sheltered my eyes with my hands, looked down to the sea, I thought there was a speck of something, a long way distant.

But it canna be Kitta. In a winter storm, in water that will be a briny melt of ice. It canna be her. Our Kitta canna be in the sea.

But I have a bad feeling, the worst feeling, and it makes me run, run, and the closer I get to the speck of something that canna be Kitta, the harder the panic thumps in me. Because it is her. Kitta, floundering in the sea, up past her knees, and her back is to me, her back is to me, she is wading away from the shore, ever further away.

Kitta! I scream. KI –TTA!

She pauses at the sound of my voice, then moves again.

Come back! I am screaming louder, weeping. Kitta! Come back!

What is she doing? But I know what she’s doing. And she canna … she canna …

She stops. She turns slowly. A girl-shaped sea creature, slippery and sleek and bound in human clothes. She is half gone from me, half gone.

I am running down to the sea. Please, Kitta, PLEASE!

She drags herself towards me. Stops again.

Come on, Kitta, come to me! It’s all right, just come to me!

Another step, and then another, steps against her will.

By the time I reach the place where the sea is tossing itself onto the shingle, she is close enough for me to see that her skirt is hiked up, tucked into her drawers. That blood is streaking the inside of her thighs. That she has hardly strength to stand.

My mind is mush. I canna put together what I am seeing, canna make sense of it. So much blood, dark as roses.

Kitta is shaking violently. The sound of her teeth is louder than the waves. You will die, I think, die if I don’t get to you, bring you in, make you warm. My feet go to move but then stop. I canna rush into the water that lies between us.

The sea is tossing it forward, rolling it back, forward and back in the pale green shallows, the bloody mess of a barely human thing. A skull, a face, a soft wrinkled hide yet to fill with fat and flesh. Born too soon, misborn, from a mother herself barely human. Barely alive. A mother half sea creature and half girl.

18

Nothing. There’s a blank in my memory, lambsie.